(July 27, 2015) One
of the big questions intelligence researchers grapple with is just how
differences in intelligence are reflected in the human brain. Researchers at
ETH Zurich have succeeded in studying further details relating to suspected
functional differences in the brains of intelligent people.
The brains of more intelligent people are capable of solving
tasks more efficiently, which is why these people have superior cognitive
faculties, or as Elsbeth Stern, Professor for Research on Learning and
Instruction at ETH Zurich, puts it: “when a more and a less intelligent person
are given the same task, the more intelligent person requires less cortical
activation to solve the task.” Scientists refer to this as the neural
efficiency hypothesis, although it ceased being a hypothesis quite some time
ago and is now accepted by experts as an undisputed fact, with ample evidence
to support it.
While working on her doctoral thesis in Stern's work group,
Daniela Nussbaumer also found evidence of this effect for the first time in a
group of people possessing above-average intelligence for tasks involving what
is referred to as working memory. “We measured the electrical activity in the
brains of university students, enabling us to identify differences in brain
activity between people with slightly above-average and considerably
above-average IQs,” explained Nussbaumer. Past studies conducted to identify
the effect of neural efficiency have generally used groups of people that
exhibit extreme variations in intelligence.