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Smarter people's brains have better wiring that helps with flow of information
Daily Mail ^ | 2 December 2017 | Daniel Roth

Posted on 12/02/2017 10:55:38 AM PST by mairdie

The researchers, who examined the brains of 199 females and 110 males, found that individuals with better wiring of the anterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex - two areas of the brain associated with the cognitive processing of task-relevant information - demonstrated better cognitive function.

The university defined intelligence as the 'general mental capability that involves the ability to reason, to think abstractly, and to learn quickly from experiences,' and consulted graph theoretical network analysis methods to draw their conclusions.

'The different topological embedding of these regions into the brain network could make it easier for smarter persons to differentiate between important and irrelevant information— which would be advantageous for many cognitive challenges,' Ulrike Basten, the lead researcher for Goethe University study, argued.

The anatomy of an individual's brain also played a role in higher intelligence, which helped increase the capacity of an individual to focus and avoid distraction.

(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...


TOPICS: Health/Medicine
KEYWORDS: brain; intelligence; iq; networkanalysis
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To: taterjay

YES! I’ll bet an IQ test would give better results, too. Democrats rate their intelligence by their attachment to their political positions. The more a Republican diverges from Democratic talking points, the lower the estimate his IQ.


21 posted on 12/02/2017 11:57:11 AM PST by mairdie
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To: mairdie

My daughter needs to be in a study. She has a terrible brain injury from 6 weeks old illness, but she has overcome so much.

She has a 3.9 GPA in statistics in her junior year of college.

I would love to know how her brain did it. Grant it there was lots of work between the 2 of us to rehabilitate her, but she’’s doing much better than lots of kids her age. (Plus she’s conservative.)


22 posted on 12/02/2017 12:02:25 PM PST by luckystarmom
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To: luckystarmom

Bless you for the work you’ve done. All the love it’s possible to send to your daughter. What a triumph!


23 posted on 12/02/2017 12:05:05 PM PST by mairdie
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To: mairdie

The stuff that is hard changed the brains wiring. Studying logic, practicing rotating objects three dimensionally, mathematics, abstract thinking like classical philosophy, sophistry and politics, and even day to day social interaction with people with diverse personalities would be a good start I should think.


24 posted on 12/02/2017 12:10:30 PM PST by Crucial
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To: Crucial

Have you been following the latest articles on keeping the mind active as a way to delay Alzheimer’s? I collect wherever I can and pass them on to friends. Things are so much more hopeful today than they were when Reagan was diagnosed. Not there yet, but there’s hope.


25 posted on 12/02/2017 12:15:16 PM PST by mairdie
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To: mairdie

Indeed it might. The problem that I have with the college research funding is they don’t research things with practical value that our capitalistic system tends to miss. For instance herbal medicines would be a great area to research, big Pharma has. No Desire to do so because there’s no money in it you can’t Patent natural substances. But there are many natural substances that have a history of fighting cancer. 0 research.

The students are interested and creating papers that will advance their careers not in discovering anything. So we find things that’s fit the halls of Academia, not the streets of America where all the money is extracted from to pay for all these very expensive studies.


26 posted on 12/02/2017 12:18:06 PM PST by American in Israel (A wise man's heart directs him to the right, but the foolish mans heart directs him toward the left.)
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To: mairdie

That’s what I’d like to know. My daughter didn’t talk until she was 5 and then didn’t read until 4th/5th grade.

We just kept on working on speech and reading for years.

Her speech still isn’t great, but it hasn’t hampered her academically. She even got an A in public speaking in college.

I remember teachers wanting to dumb down things like spelling with her. She got mad because even though she wasn’t good at sounding out words, she was excellent at memorizing words. She always got 100% on spelling.

I remember during some testing when she was little, the tester kept on asking her the color of blocks. She couldn’t talk.

I was furious. I told him she knew all her colors, and I proceeded to ask her to hand me the different colored blocks. She got them all correct.

The main reason I didn’t home school was that I did feel like she needed to be away from me to work on her speech. I still don’t know if that was the coerect decision.


27 posted on 12/02/2017 12:18:08 PM PST by luckystarmom
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To: mairdie

Some people with high IQs don’t have an ounce of common sense. That can make all the difference in the world as to how “smart” they are.


28 posted on 12/02/2017 12:22:06 PM PST by MamaDearest
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To: American in Israel

Agree with you completely on herbal medicines. People knew in the past what worked and so much has been lost. Good clinical studies should be made based on what is still known and what ancient writings say. And if there’s a way to add a capitalistic motivation, then go for it.

From my years of working for Darpa grants, you made proposals based on where the money was, not on where your own interest was. Remember Kennedy and the space age? Suddenly there was money for space research and everybody ran for it. And successes came out of that money. The company I was with had HAL/S, the computer language for the Space Shuttle.


29 posted on 12/02/2017 12:24:03 PM PST by mairdie
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To: MamaDearest

Oh, passionately agree. If you want a good spouse, common sense over IQ.


30 posted on 12/02/2017 12:26:47 PM PST by mairdie
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To: mairdie

I haven’t read any of that research but I bet learning a foreign language would go a long way towards delaying Alzheimer’s as well.


31 posted on 12/02/2017 12:27:10 PM PST by Crucial
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To: mairdie

It most certainly does.

If economic and social value of a person is mostly determined by the quality of his brain hardware, then social roles and therefore status are largely fixed and predetermined.

It also opens the nature of education - is the function of education really to put stuff into peoples heads, or is it more of a filter to sort out the people according to the quality of their brains?


32 posted on 12/02/2017 12:31:08 PM PST by buwaya
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To: luckystarmom

I took my first masters in education so that I could home school, then never had children. But I have such deep respect for home schoolers. Every decision you make has pluses and minuses. All you can do is cross your fingers that the pluses outweigh the minuses, and it sounds like YOU DID IT! You thought through how to approach your daughter’s problem and you fought for her. She couldn’t have asked for a better parent. Don’t worry about the past. The future is the only important thing and you’re there 100 percent.


33 posted on 12/02/2017 12:33:22 PM PST by mairdie
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To: Crucial

You could write the research. That’s EXACTLY what it says!


34 posted on 12/02/2017 12:33:51 PM PST by mairdie
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To: buwaya

I was educated when the nurture/nature arguments were big. U of Chicago desperately wanted it to be nurture so they could affect the child and blew off nature. I see things as in the middle.

I always hated the way they sorted us. In high school, they broke the 200 girls into 6 groups and named us M-A-R-I-O-N. What you studied was completely dependent upon what group they put you in. I was an M, so wasn’t allowed to take typing, which I knew would be fundamental to me, so I had to do that in summer school every year. My husband had his IQ estimated at over 230 as a child. Quiz Kid and 64K Question. Some advantages, like being able to take college French in grammar school and not having any school on Fridays so he could go for “educational opportunities.” But he lost so much in sticking out.

To me, education should be about stuffing people’s heads. It’s their responsibility after that to use the information to find their path and their peace and their happiness.


35 posted on 12/02/2017 12:46:11 PM PST by mairdie
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To: mairdie

That is a pretty low correlation on those graphs.

I wonder what the results would be if they subdivided the various parts of the IQ test and saw if any one of them was more highly correlated to their brain measurements.

36 posted on 12/02/2017 12:58:06 PM PST by KarlInOhio (The Whig Party died when it fled the great fight of its century. Ditto for the Republicans now.)
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To: mairdie
helps with flow of information

Beer helps lubricate the pathways for synapsis

37 posted on 12/02/2017 1:05:29 PM PST by Hot Tabasco (My cat is not fat, she is just big boned........)
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To: Hot Tabasco

Funny!


38 posted on 12/02/2017 1:22:46 PM PST by mairdie
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To: KarlInOhio
For all those years of working with an academic statistician, I'm ghastly at statistics. But you make a fascinating point.
39 posted on 12/02/2017 1:24:10 PM PST by mairdie
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To: KarlInOhio
Sigh. And also obviously ghastly at html.

For all those years of working with an academic statistician, I'm ghastly at statistics. But you make a fascinating point.
40 posted on 12/02/2017 1:25:33 PM PST by mairdie
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