Washington, August 2 (ANI): Scientists may have found factors that distinguish the brains of the exceptionally smart persons from those of average individuals.
As science has long suspected, overall brain size matters somewhat, accounting for about 6.7 percent of individual variation in intelligence.
More recent research pinpointed the brain's lateral prefrontal cortex, a region just behind the temple, as a critical hub for high-level mental processing, with activity levels there predicting another 5 percent of variation in individual intelligence.
Now, new research from Washington University in St. Louis has suggested that another 10 percent of individual differences in intelligence can be explained by the strength of neural pathways connecting the left lateral prefrontal cortex to the rest of the brain.
The findings establish "global brain connectivity" as a new approach for understanding human intelligence.
"Our research shows that connectivity with a particular part of the prefrontal cortex can predict how intelligent someone is," said lead author Michael W. Cole, PhD, a postdoctoral research fellow in cognitive neuroscience at Washington University.
The study is the first to provide compelling evidence that neural connections between the lateral prefrontal cortex and the rest of the brain make a unique and powerful contribution to the cognitive processing underlying human intelligence, said Cole, whose research focuses on discovering the cognitive and neural mechanisms that make human behaviour uniquely flexible and intelligent.
One possible explanation of the findings, the research team suggests, is that the lateral prefrontal region is a "flexible hub" that uses its extensive brain-wide connectivity to monitor and influence other brain regions in a goal-directed manner.
"There is evidence that the lateral prefrontal cortex is the brain region that 'remembers' (maintains) the goals and instructions that help you keep doing what is needed when you're working on a task. So it makes sense that having this region communicating effectively with other regions (the 'perceivers' and 'doers' of the brain) would help you to accomplish tasks intelligently," Cole explained.
While other regions of the brain make their own special contribution to cognitive processing, it is the lateral prefrontal cortex that helps coordinate these processes and maintain focus on the task at hand, in much the same way that the conductor of a symphony monitors and tweaks the real-time performance of an orchestra.
"We're suggesting that the lateral prefrontal cortex functions like a feedback control system that is used often in engineering, that it helps implement cognitive control (which supports fluid intelligence), and that it doesn't do this alone," Cole says.
The findings are based on an analysis of functional magnetic resonance brain images captured as study participants rested passively and also when they were engaged in a series of mentally challenging tasks associated with fluid intelligence, such as indicating whether a currently displayed image was the same as one displayed three images ago.
Results indicate that levels of global brain connectivity with a part of the left lateral prefrontal cortex serve as a strong predictor of both fluid intelligence and cognitive control abilities.
Although much remains to be learned about how these neural connections contribute to fluid intelligence, new models of brain function suggested by this research could have important implications for the future understanding - and perhaps augmentation - of human intelligence.
The findings have been published in the Journal of Neuroscience. (ANI)
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