Neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed aMapthat places in the brain thecognitive habilytiesused by experts to calculate theIQ.
To achieve their goal, they studied the brains of 241 patients who had suffered some type of injury that impaired their abilities, for example due to a tumor or brain trauma. They then compared the location of their brain damage with the results in the four indices of theWechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS): Verbal compression, Perceptual reasoning, Working memory and Processing speed. The first thing we wanted to find out was s
Are there critical brain areas for these four indices, or are they globally distributed throughout the brain without a clear mapping ?, explains Ralph Adolphs, co-author of the study. And the results left no room for doubt: except for processing speed, the rest of the skills depend on very specific areas of the brain. The left frontal cortex is key toverbal comprehension, the left parietal region is essential to obtain good results inmemory, and the right parietal cortex plays an indispensable role in theperception.
In addition to the interest of this new brain map to improve the diagnosis of brain damage, the researchers suggest that in the future it could be used to easily find out theintelligence quotientof a subject using ascannerinstead of the classic intelligence tests.
