Until now, the IQ was the most common and widespread system for assessing a person’s intelligence. This series of tests has divided the scientific community between those who thought that the human brain is too complex to measure intelligence as a value and those who consider that this system is useful for specific cases such as the prediction of academic performance . A new study could change this and provide us with a more reliable system.
The team of researchers from Caltech , Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and the University of Salerno has developed a new device capable of ‘measuring’ a person’s intelligence by viewing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of your brain activity at rest. Based on the changes in blood flow in certain brain areas, it allows us to deduce the patterns of brain activity without the need to be doing any type of mathematical problem, language test or riddle.
“People can lie on the scanner doing nothing while we use brain activity pattern data to predict their intelligence ,” says Ralph Adolphs , Ph.D. in psychology, neuroscience and biology and leader of the study. To test its machine learning algorithm, information collected in the Human Connectome Project (HCP) was used , which seeks to improve understanding of connections in the human brain. Adolphs and her team collected brain scans and IQ scores from 900 individuals who had participated in the HCP.
A team of researchers from Caltech, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and the University of Salerno has developed a new device capable of ‘measuring’ a person’s intelligence by viewing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of your brain activity at rest. Based on the changes in blood flow in certain brain areas, it allows us to deduce the patterns of brain activity without the need to be doing any type of mathematical problem, language test or riddle.
“People can lie on the scanner doing nothing while we use brain activity pattern data to predict their intelligence,” says Ralph Adolphs, Ph.D. in psychology, neuroscience and biology and leader of the study. To test its machine learning algorithm, information collected in the Human Connectome Project (HCP) was used, which seeks to improve understanding of connections in the human brain. Adolphs and her team collected brain scans and IQ scores from 900 individuals who had participated in the HCP.
Research results
After processing the data, the team’s algorithm was able to predict the intelligence of a statistically significant number of the 900 subjects chosen. Despite the first positive results Julien Dubois , a participant in the research, points out that the scanner makes “a crude and noisy measure of what is really going on in the brain and a lot of useful information is discarded .” According to Dubois, the information collected only makes it possible to measure 20% of the variation in the intelligence of the subjects, so it is still far from reaching the results of other systems such as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale .
The study is part of an attempt to design a diagnostic machine that can provide a lot of information from a person’s mind through a brain scan. Adolphs and his colleagues say they would like to see the day when an MRI scan can be used to diagnose certain conditions such as autism , schizophrenia or anxiety just like they are normally used to find tumors, aneurysms or kidney problems.
After processing the data, the team’s algorithm was able to predict the intelligence of a statistically significant number of the 900 subjects chosen. Despite the first positive results Julien Dubois, a participant in the research, points out that the scanner makes “a crude and noisy measure of what is really going on in the brain and a lot of useful information is discarded.” According to Dubois, the information collected only makes it possible to measure 20% of the variation in the intelligence of the subjects, so it is still far from reaching the results of other systems such as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale.
The study is part of an attempt to design a diagnostic machine that can provide a lot of information from a person’s mind through a brain scan. Adolphs and his colleagues say they would like to see the day when an MRI scan can be used to diagnose certain conditions such as autism, schizophrenia or anxiety just like they are normally used to find tumors, aneurysms or kidney problems.
Intelligence was chosen as one of the first testing grounds for technology because it is very stable over time. A person’s IQ usually doesn’t vary much over periods of weeks, months, or years. Researchers have also conducted a parallel study using the same method and approach but with the intention of predicting a subject’s personality through an MRI image. This has been even more difficult to achieve than predicting intelligence.
The Adolphs and Dubois team continues to work alongside researchers from other fields to achieve their goals. “Functional MRI has not lived up to its promise as a diagnostic tool, but we and many others are working to change that ,” says Dubois. “The possibility of large databases being used by scientists around the world is making it possible .”
Reference: Julien C Dubois & Ralph Adolphs. ‘A distributed brain network predicts general intelligence from resting-state human neuroimaging data’, 2018. DOI: 10.1101 / 257865
