Yale University Human Brain Study: Scan your intelligence with magnetic resonance

Release date: 2016-12-13

What do you think you were born to do? What skills, instruments, sports or disciplines are you good at? This may be related to how your brain works, everyone has their own areas of expertise, and the units responsible for handling various tasks are located throughout the brain. Now, scientists are gradually unveiling the mechanism of brain operation.

Today, neuroscientists can already judge a person's intelligence by scanning a person's brain, as written in science fiction. Not only that, but after a long time they can scan to tell you what you are good at and lack of ability. Researchers at Yale University are doing research in this area. They interpret the level of intelligence as abstract reasoning, or the level of fluid intelligence (the ability to solve new problems and abstract thinking). Fluid intelligence has always been considered an indicator of academic performance. However, this abstract way of thinking is difficult to train, and past intelligence tests often ignore it. This research has been published in Nature Neuroscience.

The study used data from a total of 126 subjects using a portion of the Human Connectome Project data. Scientists use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the experimenter's brain, and through new analytical methods, researchers can accurately predict how they perform when they are tasked. The Human Brain Connected Group Project is a research project designed to map all connected maps in the human brain. The purpose is to explore the ways in which the various parts of the brain are connected and the effects of connections on intelligence and emotion. In Yale University's research, scientists evaluate memory, intelligence, athletic ability, and abstract thinking through a series of different tests.

The researchers divided the brain into 268 different regions and mapped the connectivity of these partitions. The researchers looked at the connectivity, activity, and how the connections affected the brain regions at both ends of the wiring. The study found that each person's brain has different internal connections and is unique as a human fingerprint. Researchers can identify each subject by fMRI scan with a 99% correct rate. Through brain scans, researchers can also find out if the subject is taking the test task in the lab seriously.

One of the authors of the study, Emily Finn, a Ph.D. student at Yale University, said, "The more frequent the communication between the various regions of the brain, the faster you can process information and make inferences." In most cases, fluids Intelligence and brain connectivity between the frontal and parietal lobe. The greater the connectivity between the two regions, the higher the score for the test task in the experiment. These areas are also the brain regions that humans have recently evolved. They are used to handle advanced features such as memory and language, which are the reasons why humans are the smartest species in the world.

Axon nerve fibers in the brain, source: CFCF

Researchers at Yale University believe that by further researching the way the human brain is connected, they will find new ways to treat mental illness. Patients with schizophrenia usually differ. By finding the uniqueness of each patient, psychiatrists can use this to target treatment. Understanding how a patient's brain works can help us understand the cause of the disease and how the patient responds to various potential treatments. But this further exploration of the human brain may spawn some applications that we don't want to see.

"In the future, your child may undergo brain scans when they enter school," said paper co-author Todd Constable. "The results of the analysis will then be used to determine whether a person can perform a particular job. The brain scan may tell others if the person has the ability to self-control, or what kind of environment the person needs to be able to learn effectively." The school's curriculum changes every student every day. At the end of the day, the SAT (American College Entrance Examination) will even disappear, and a brain scan will do.

Peter Bandettini is the Director of Functional Imaging at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). In an interview, he said that with the development of science and technology, new ethical issues will emerge. Brain scans may one day be used by employers to determine which candidates have sufficient abilities or traits. Are they diligent, hardworking, and scanning can make them Know all the personalities of a person. UC Irvine scientist Richard Haier predicts that prison guards use brain scans to predict which prisoners are more violent.

This research will also allow us to learn how to enhance human intelligence. But we need to know that human research on our own intelligence is still in its infancy. Of course, scientists at Yale University have pointed out the way forward.

Some people are worried that such technologies will suffer from abuses such as the Minority Report. Laura Cabrera, a neuroethicist at Michigan State University, has expressed concern about Wired magazine: Insurers may refuse brain scans in the future to insure people who are addicted to drugs or risk-prone. The result of the analysis is simply to say that this person has a high risk and does not mean that dangerous things are about to happen. Without proper supervision and principles, we will soon see “neurological discrimination” in financial institutions and schools. In order to prevent this from happening, mandatory laws must be introduced.

At present, this study still has limitations. For example, we can only see the connections that appear in real time, but we don't know how these connections have changed over time. Fluid intelligence is just one of several different test models. On the road to exploring the human brain's operating mechanism, we are just getting started, but there is already a dawn in the front.

The following are related papers:

Paper: Functional connectome fingerprinting: identifying individuals using patterns of brain connectivity

Abstract: Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is often used to analyze various types of data from subjects. From these images, we found that brain functional tissues differ from one to another. We have established a new and stable way to distinguish individuals. Using the information of each person's brain connection in the Human Connectome Project data as a “fingerprint”, we can accurately identify each person's identity in a large amount of data. Distinguishing recognition is accurate in both resting and active states of the subject, and we demonstrate that the distribution of connections used to distinguish individuals is inherent and can be identified regardless of the brain's state of activity during the scan. Each person's specific connectivity pattern is distributed throughout the brain and is most prominent in the frontal network. In addition, we demonstrate that the study connection can be used to predict the level of fluid intelligence: the brain network used to identify identity can also be used to predict this person's cognitive ability. The experimental results show that by analyzing the connectivity of the brain in fMRI, it is possible to judge the subject's reasoning ability.

Original link: http://bigthink.com/philip-perry/yale-neuroscientists-can-now-determine-human-intelligence-through-brain-scans

Source: Heart of the machine

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