Artificial Intelligence Can Now Predict Your IQ From Brain Scans

[Take It In Blood]

Newly developed artificial intelligence system can tell how smart a person is just by looking at a scan of the individual's brain.

Researchers from California Institute of Technology, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and the University of Salerno in the US show that their new computing tool can predict a person's intelligence from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of their resting state brain activity.

Functional MRI develops a map of brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow to specific brain regions.

In other words, an individual's intelligence can be gleaned from patterns of activity in their brain when they are not doing or thinking about anything in particular.

"We found if we just have people lie in the scanner and do nothing while we measure the pattern of activity in their brain, we can use the data to predict their intelligence," said Ralph Adolphs from Caltech.

full article can be found here

Artificial Intelligence Can Now Predict Your IQ From Brain Scans - nexpected - Reporting Future Science & Technology

 

[Orbital-Fetus]

didn't read the article but this shyt sounds crazy suspect.

 

[Koichos]

Neuroimaging intelligence testing has been a capability for quite some time now, albeit presumably with substandard precision.

 

[Wiles]

Sounds like bullshyt

 

[Secure Da Bag]

Neuroimaging intelligence testing has been a capability for quite some time now, albeit presumably with substandard precision.

So the best it could do is tell you is the lowest your IQ could be, but not what it actually is.

 

[BaggerofTea]

Makes sense.

The brain structure and blood flow patters of humans has been researched for some time now in neuroscience.

All you have to do is program an ai to recognize those patterns in real time via medium like an MRI to do the imaging and feed it to the software.

Makes sense. A step in the right direction

 

[Let A Fro Be A Fro]

This is Phrenology 2.0

 

[Mowgli]

Do geniuses across different cultures have the same brain activity?

 

[Koichos]

Makes sense.

The brain structure and blood flow patters of humans has been researched for some time now in neuroscience.

All you have to do is program an ai to recognize those patterns in real time via medium like an MRI to do the imaging and feed it to the software.

Makes sense. A step in the right direction

Recent analyses have been utilizing diffusion-weighted MR imaging as a means to provide new insights into the neuroanatomical correlates of intelligence.



Article: (Ruhr-University Bochum, 2018)

The researchers analysed the brains of 259 men and women using neurite orientation dispersion and density imaging. This method enabled them to measure the amount of dendrites in the cerebral cortex, i.e. extensions of nerve cells that are used by the cells to communicate with each other. In addition, all participants completed an IQ test. Subsequently, the researchers associated the gathered data with each other and found out: the more intelligent a person, the fewer dendrites there are in their cerebral cortex.

Using an independent, publicly accessible database, which had been compiled for the Human Connectome Project, the team confirmed these results in a second sample of around 500 individuals.

The new findings provide an explanation of conflicting results gathered in intelligence research to date. For one, it had been previously ascertained that intelligent people tend to have larger brains. "The assumption has been that larger brains contain more neurons and, consequently, possess more computational power," says Erhan Genç. However, other studies had shown that -- despite their comparatively high number of neurons -- the brains of intelligent people demonstrated less neuronal activity during an IQ test than the brains of less intelligent individuals.

"Intelligent brains possess lean, yet efficient neuronal connections," concludes Erhan Genç. "Thus, they boast high mental performance at low neuronal activity."

Study: (Genç et al., 2018)

Previous research has demonstrated that individuals with higher intelligence are more likely to have larger gray matter volume in brain areas predominantly located in parieto-frontal regions. These findings were usually interpreted to mean that individuals with more cortical brain volume possess more neurons and thus exhibit more computational capacity during reasoning. In addition, neuroimaging studies have shown that intelligent individuals, despite their larger brains, tend to exhibit lower rates of brain activity during reasoning. However, the microstructural architecture underlying both observations remains unclear. By combining advanced multi-shell diffusion tensor imaging with a culture-fair matrix-reasoning test, we found that higher intelligence in healthy individuals is related to lower values of dendritic density and arborization. These results suggest that the neuronal circuitry associated with higher intelligence is organized in a sparse and efficient manner, fostering more directed information processing and less cortical activity during reasoning.

The primary goal of this study was to investigate the relationship between intelligence and neuroanatomical correlates on both macroscopic and microscopic levels. To this end, we examined volume estimates of the whole-brain as well as single brain regions and utilized an advanced diffusion MRI technique to analyze the architecture of dendrites and axons.

Our data as well as data provided by the Human Connectome Project revealed an expected positive association between cortical volume and intelligence, corrected for age, sex, and collinearity. It is a well-established and consistent observation that cognitive abilities are related to brain volume, especially the volume of the cerebral cortex. The biological explanation for this structure–function relationship is usually derived from the fact that individuals with more cortical volume possess a higher number of neurons and thus more computational power to engage in logic reasoning (Fig. 4). However, the major aim of our study was to investigate the microstructural architecture of the cortex by closely analyzing the diffusion characteristics of dendrites and axons.

Schematic depiction of differences between low-IQ and high-IQ individuals with regard to brain volume, neurite density, and arborization of dendritic trees within the cortex. High-IQ individuals are likely to possess more cortical volume than low-IQ individuals, which is indicated by differently sized brains (left side) and differently sized panels showing exemplary magnifications of neuron and neurite microstructure (right side). The difference in cortical volume is highlighted by the shadow around the upper brain. Due to their larger cortices, it is conceivable that high-IQ individuals benefit from the processing power of additional neurons, which are marked by the dotted line in the lower panel. The cerebral cortex of high-IQ individuals is characterized by a low degree of neurite density and orientation dispersion, which is indicated by smaller and less ramified dendritic trees in the respective panel. Intellectual performance is likely to benefit from this kind of microstructural architecture since restricting synaptic connections to an efficient minimum facilitates the differentiation of signals from noise while saving network and energy resources. Neurons and neurites are depicted in black and gray to create a sense of depth. Please note, this depiction does not correspond to the actual magnitude of effect sizes reported in the study. For the purpose of an easier visual understanding, differences in both macrostructural and microstructural brain properties are highly accentuated.

We found that specific microstructural properties were associated with intelligence, especially in cortical regions included in the P-FIT network. Cortical gray matter is largely composed of the neuropil, namely, dendrites, axons, and glial cell processes. These structures restrict the movement of water molecules and are modeled as sticks in the NODDI model, from which markers, resembling neurite density and neurite orientation dispersion, can be computed ... Our results indicate that neurite density and neurite orientation dispersion within the cortex are both negatively associated with intelligence. At first glance, this finding might appear counterintuitive to the central working hypothesis of differential neuroscience, which usually finds that “bigger is better” (i.e., more neuronal mass is associated with higher ability levels). However, our results conform well to findings on the mechanisms of maturation-induced and learning-induced synaptic plasticity. Brain maturation is associated with a sharp increase of synapse number, followed by a massive activity-dependent synaptic pruning that reduces synaptic density by half, thereby enabling the establishment of typical mature cortical microarchitecture ... In the original PET study of neural efficiency, researchers examined two samples of low-IQ individuals, including patients suffering from Down’s syndrome and another form of mental retardation, as well as a control group of individuals with average intelligence. They found that both low-IQ groups exhibited higher rates of cortical glucose metabolism compared to the healthy control participants while working on Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices. They attributed their observations to a failure of neural pruning in the brains of low-IQ individuals.

Nevertheless, there is some evidence from healthy subjects to support the idea that interindividual differences in intelligence are associated with different levels of cortical activation during reasoning. For example, early EEG studies showed that high-IQ individuals, when working on an elementary cognitive task, display an event-related desynchronization (ERD) limited to cortical areas required for the task. In contrast, low-IQ individuals were characterized by an ERD that was spread across a wide range of cortical areas. We hypothesize that this evidence of unfocused cortical activity was associated with redundant neuronal circuits in the form of expendable dendrites in the cortex ... Taken together, the results of the present study contribute to our understanding of human intelligence differences in two ways. First, our findings confirm an important observation from previous research, namely, that bigger brains with a higher number of neurons are associated with higher intelligence. Second, we demonstrate that higher intelligence is associated with cortical mantles with sparsely and well-organized dendritic arbor, thereby increasing processing speed and network efficiency. Importantly, the findings obtained from our experimental sample were confirmed by the analysis of an independent validation sample from the Human Connectome Project.

 

[BoBurnz]

The concept of IQ is already mostly pseudoscience and bullshyt based off guesswork and fringe neurology.

 

[DrBanneker]

Interesting and I will try to read the paper in detail later but just to throw it out there, a biological basis for IQ (or any other trait) does not tell us how much of the contribution in any individual (much less a population) is due to genetics vs. environment. Both can cause biological changes.

If you had two identical (monozygotic) twins, and one was exposed to lead early in life, they would have a reduced IQ and biological changes due to the neurological damage to their brain. The IQ difference, would be heavily environmental (not entirely if environment influenced gene expression plays a role, but this is mediate gene environment interaction despite them having the same genes).

Likewise if a kid was born with a gene that causes a higher likelihood of mental retardation (there are many such genes) and they have a low IQ like the lead affected twin, they would also have biological changes to their brain heavily driven by genetics.

Both brains could look similar under fMRI though.

Unless someone though anything that comes out of our brains is wholly divorced from biology, this shouldn't shatter anyone's reality. It also doesn't provide much comfort to race realists like they will claim.

Also, before evaluating fMRI studies uncritically, I suggest you read Six Problems for Causal Inference from fMRI