flieder's intelligence [6 articles]

Abstract

Neuroscience is contributing to an understanding of the biological bases of human intelligence differences. This work is principally being conducted along two empirical fronts: genetics — quantitative and molecular — and brain imaging. Quantitative genetic studies have established that there are additive genetic contributions to different aspects of cognitive ability — especially general intelligence — and how they change through the lifespan. Molecular genetic studies have yet to identify reliably reproducible contributions from individual genes. Structural and functional brain-imaging studies have ...

Abstract

The human brain is often considered to be the most cognitively capable among mammalian brains and to be much larger than expected for a mammal of our body size. Although the number of neurons is generally assumed to be a determinant of computational power, and despite the widespread quotes that the human brain contains 100 billion neurons and ten times more glial cells, the absolute number of neurons and glial cells in the human brain remains unknown. Here we determine these ...

Abstract

The human brain has often been viewed as outstanding among mammalian brains: the most cognitively able, the largest-than-expected from body size, endowed with an overdeveloped cerebral cortex that represents over 80% of brain mass, and purportedly containing 100 billion neurons and 10x more glial cells. Such uniqueness was seemingly necessary to justify the superior cognitive abilities of humans over larger-brained mammals such as elephants and whales. However, our recent studies using a novel method to determine the cellular composition of the ...

Abstract

Intuitively, higher intelligence might be assumed to correspond to more efficient information transfer in the brain, but no direct evidence has been reported from the perspective of brain networks. In this study, we performed extensive analyses to test the hypothesis that individual differences in intelligence are associated with brain structural organization, and in particular that higher scores on intelligence tests are related to greater global efficiency of the brain anatomical network. We constructed binary and weighted brain anatomical networks in each ...

Abstract

General cognitive ability (g), which refers to what cognitive abilities have in common, is an important target for molecular genetic research because multivariate quantitative genetic analyses have shown that the same set of genes affects diverse cognitive abilities as well as learning disabilities. In this first autosomal genome-wide association scan of g, we used a two-stage quantitative trait locus (QTL) design with pooled DNA to screen more than 500,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) on microarrays, selecting from a sample of 7000 ...