How the brain’s various networks connect together has been a prominent interest in the neuroscience and psychology community. Different researchers have explored how many things, including intelligence, short-term, and long-term factors, affect functional brain networking. The results may help people understand many reasons why people’s brains differ from one another, and how these differences account for differences in one’s persona.
In “Functional Brain Networks Are Dominated by Stable Group and Individual Factors, Not Cognitive or Daily Variation”, Gratton et al. explore what causes variance in brain networks. Researchers took fMRIs to measure brain activity while participants participated in various activities. There were five circumstances in which the participants were measured using an fMRI. The different circumstances were when the participants were not doing a task, and doing visual, semantic, memory, and motor tasks. Variation of the functional networks varied by each subject, and the variability of the functional networks through different tasks was only found at greater dimensions. The results also showed that throughout different tasks, there were different distributions throughout the brain.
Overall, Gratton et al. found that much of the brain’s networks are organized from more stable factors, not ones that change frequently. The stable factors include genetics, long-term activation throughout certain regions, connections within structures, and more. There was a slight change of the brain’s functional networks during different tasks, and most of this change was distinct for each person. The change per person may show the difference in the amount of connectivity between networks. The anatomy of each person’s brain and its networks were similar, and they likely did not make a difference. Also, variability of a person’s networking throughout different sessions was not significant. Most of the variability of functional networks was between the individual and the task that was completed.
Other research has found that functional networks vary per person. In “Temporal stability of functional brain modules associated with human intelligence”, Hilger et al. found that intelligence accounts for a significant difference in the variation of functional networks per person. The study had 281 adult subjects who were in good health. Participants went through an fMRI to measure how the organization of different networks change over a small period of time.
The study showed that the brain’s networks change over a short period of time, and the amount it varies depends on each person. People with higher intelligence levels had less modularity in the separation of their brain’s networks than people with lower intelligence. However, their average modulation over the same period of time was similar to people with lower levels of intelligence. Other research has suggested that lower levels of modularity may allow information to exchange with fewer restrictions throughout different modules. This may be the cause of the correlation between intelligence and network modularity. Hilger et al. also suggest that higher intelligence may be linked with both higher network flexibility during changes within tasks and higher network stability during tasks. This study helped set the basis for further research on intelligence and the brain’s networking.
Both studies by Gratton et al. and Hilger et al. show that the brain’s networks change throughout different people. While the brain’s anatomy is fairly consistent in different people, how different parts of a person’s brain communicate may be the reason behind differences in brain networks. Gratton et al. showed that brain networks do not change much on different days, and Hilger et al. showed how network modulation is correlated with intelligence. Looking at both studies together may provide a deeper answer to why intelligence does not seem to change much relative to a person’s age group over their lifetime. Maybe as technology advances, in the future humans will be able to increase their intelligence based on certain findings in these studies.
References
Gratton, C., Laumann, T. O., Nielsen, A. N., Greene, D. J., Gordon, E. M., Gilmore, A. W., …
Petersen, S. E. (2018). Functional Brain Networks Are Dominated by Stable Group and
Individual Factors, Not Cognitive or Daily Variation. Neuron, 98(2).
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2018.03.035
Hilger, K., Fukushima, M., Sporns, O., & Fiebach, C. J. (2019). Temporal stability of functional
brain modules associated with human intelligence. Human Brain Mapping, 41(2),
362–372. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.24807
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