What is a person’s IQ related to? Is the bigger the brain, the smarter it is? American researchers have found that human intelligence is not determined by the function of a certain region of the brain, nor is it related to the volume of the brain, but is determined by the connections between specific parts of the brain. The research results were published in the latest issue of proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Jean grasscher, the lead author of the research paper and a postdoctoral fellow in Humanities and sociology at the California Institute of technology, said that general intelligence actually depends on a special network within the brain, which is composed of gray matter and white matter. Gray matter is the cell body of neurons, while white matter is composed of nerve fibers of neurons, which is the “connecting line” between various functional areas of the brain.
“General intelligence is determined by the connection between the frontal and parietal lobes of the brain,” he was quoted as saying by the us healthy life website on the 26th
Keith young, vice president of the research program of psychiatry and behavioral science at the Health Science Center of Texas Agricultural and Mechanical University School of medicine, said that the results of this study confirmed that “good connections between different parts of the brain are very important for general intelligence”.
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The concept of general intelligence has been controversial since it appeared in 1904. Grasssher said that general intelligence simply means that smart people tend to perform well in different fields.
“People have noticed for a long time that, generally speaking, those who are good at examinations perform well in many aspects. If you are good at mathematics, you are often good at English,” Yang said. “Researchers believe that this represents an overall intelligence level.”
The researchers tested 241 people with brain damage. They first mapped out the location of brain damage, and then tested the patients’ IQ.
“We select patients with brain damage, test their IQ, see which areas they perform well and which areas they don’t, and then we compare the test results with the location of the patient’s brain damage,” glasher said. “In this way, you can find areas related to poor test performance, which means that these areas are important for general intelligence.”
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Paul Saint Berg, director of the center for aging and brain repair at the University of South Florida and a professor of Neurosurgery, said: “this study infers the results on the basis of brain tissue defects. This allows them (researchers) to classify and accurately locate those areas that affect intelligence.”
Yang believes that the results of this study are expected. He said that the brain structure map drawn by the researchers that affects the general level of intelligence “is not surprising to us. The cortical areas involved are the parietal lobe and the frontal lobe. As we thought before, these two parts are important for language and mathematics”.
The results of this study echo those of a previous study. The same group of researchers previously found that brain network connectivity is quite important for working memory. Working memory is the short-term memory that people temporarily store and process information at work.
“In the past, people generally linked general intelligence with working memory. It seems that there is indeed a theoretical basis for that,” glascher said
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