CANADA: Intelligent people have brains that are wired differently, according to a new Oxford study which suggests ‘smart minds’ are more likely to be happy, well educated and earn more.
A team of scientists led by Oxford University’s Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain studied the connections in the brains of 461 people and compared them with 280 different behavioural and demographic measures that were recorded for the same participants.
They found that variation in brain connectivity and an individual’s traits lay on a single axis – where those with classically positive lifestyles and behaviours had different connections to those with classically negative ones.
The team used data from the Human Connectome Project (HCP). The HCP is pairing up functional MRI scans of 1,200 healthy participants with in-depth data gained from tests and questionnaires. So far, data for 500 subjects have been released to researchers for analysis.
The researchers took the data from 461 of the scans and used it to create an averaged map of the brain’s processes across the participants.
“You can think of it as a population-average map of 200 regions across the brain that are functionally distinct from each other,” said lead author Stephen Smith, from Oxford University.
“Then, we looked at how much all of those regions communicated with each other, in every participant,” he said.
The result is a connectome for every subject – a detailed description of how much those 200 separate brain regions communicate with each other, which can be thought of as a map of the brain’s strongest connections.
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