Smart People’s Brains Are Wired Differently
The brains of high-achieving individuals are wired up differently to those of people with fewer intellectual or social abilities according to one of the first studies to find a physical link between what goes in the brain and a person’s overall lifestyle.
An analysis of the “connectivity” between different parts of the brain in hundreds of healthy people found a correlation between how well wired-up some individuals were to their cognitive abilities and general success in life, scientists said.
The researchers found that “positive” abilities, such as good vocabulary, memory, life satisfaction, income and years of education, were linked significantly with a greater connectivity between regions of the brain associated with higher cognition.
This was in contrast to the significantly lower brain connectivity of people who scored high in “negative” traits such a drug abuse, anger, rule-breaking and poor sleep quality, the scientists said.
“We’ve tried to see how we can relate what we see in the brain to the behavioural skills we can measure in different people. In doing this, we hope to able to understand what goes on ‘under the bonnet’ of the brain,” said Professor Stephen Smith of Oxford University, who led the study published in Nature Neuroscience.
The scientists were part of the $30m (£20m) Human Connectome Project funded by the US National Institutes of Health to study the neural pathways of the brain. Connectomes have been likened to taking real-time images of the living circuit diagrams governing the communication of signals from one part of the brain to another.
They compared the “connectomes” of 461 health people taken by real-time brain scanners called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and attempted to see if there were any significant correlations with 280 different behavioural or demographic measures, such as language vocabulary, education and even income.
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