Intelligence is a fairly subjective topic since there are many types of intelligence such as emotional intelligence. One question that many people have is can you tell if a person is intelligent by looking at their brain? Many scientists have thought about this and come up with a variety of theories on how or if we can measure someone’s intelligence simply by looking at their brain. One hypothesis is that the more grooves one has in their brain, gyri and sulci, the smarter one is since there is more surface area in those peoples brains. Although a good theory, it is not a sure-fire way to determine someone’s intelligence.
To tackle this question researchers at the New York University School of Medicine used fMRI on 892 healthy adults to test weather resting state membrane potentials are connected to intelligence or not.In this study the researchers had the participants undergo fMRI scans which can measure resting state brain potentials indirectly and therefore show how much the brain is firing when not at use. They then tested the participants intelligence using different tests with vocabulary and reasoning questions. After gathering all their data these researching found something interesting. The participants that had higher resting state brain potentials scored better on the vocabulary and reasoning tests than those with lower potentials. They found this to be most observed with the prefrontal cortex, inferior temporal lobes, and the cerebellum. Although this is not a direct observation of intelligence, as I mentioned before that there are many aspects to intelligence than just vocabulary and reasoning, these results do further help the topic of how we can determine ones intelligence.
In a different research article by John Kounios and Mark Beeman the topic at interest was insight problems and how they function and what happens in the brain when one solves them. An insight is also called the “aha” moment. For instance when your friend tells you a joke and you do not get it in the moment, but later on you realize what the joke was. In this article the researchers compared testing state Brian activity to the ability to solve insight problems in some participants. Those that could solve more insight problems were called high insight and those that could not solve many were called low insight. These participants then underwent fMRI scans to measure their resting state brain activity and the results show that resting state brain activity and insight problem solving ability have a correlation. Those that were high insight individuals had greater right hemispheric resting state activity than those that were low insight categorized.
Although the second study was not directly measuring intelligence, the research from the resting state brain activity they performed supports the results that were obtained by the researchers at the New York University School of Medicine. Both of these studies tested resting brain potentials and their correlation to topics associated with intelligence, like the ability to solve an insight problem. I think it is a reasonable conclusion to make that through resting state brain activity we can gain an insight into how intelligent a person is. There are limitations to this conclusion since intelligence itself is not something that can be defined, and since it cannot be fully defined it is hard to measure.
Hopefully in the future we see more research into how resting brain potentials can be used to determine a person’s intelligence. An interesting study would be to use other tests such as simple mathematics or to test the resting state brain activity of people who have had better test results than others.
Saxe, G. N., Calderone, D., & Morales, L. J. (n.d.). Brain entropy and human intelligence: A resting-state fMRI study. Retrieved from https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0191582
Kounios, John, and Mark Beeman. “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Insight.” Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 65, no. 1, 2014, pp. 71–93., doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115154.
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