Gee’s Reviews > The Neuroscience of Intelligence > Status Update

Adolescents from more affluent families tend to be brighter because their parents are brighter, not because they enjoy better family environments

Higher income allows upward mobility, especially the ability to move from poor environments to better ones. This often includes better schools and more resources to foster children’s development so that children now have many advantages. If the children have high intelligence and greater academic and economic success, it could be concluded that higher parental intelligence was the key factor driving this chain of eve

Efficient information flow, through whichever subnetworks are relevant for an individual, was hypothesized to relate to high g, and subnetworks of the PFIT were hypothesized to relate to a person’s pattern of mental ability strengths and weaknesses.

Very rapid sequential images can show regional blood flow as a function of hemoglobin determinations and blood flow is an indirect measure of neuron activity. The more a brain area is active, the more blood flows to it. It is functional MRI (fMRI) that has been used widely in cognitive neuroscience to show brain activity during specific cognitive tasks.

Intelligence test scores are related to brain glucose metabolism. This helps validate that the test scores were not meaningless numbers representing a statistical artifact. In fact, as neuroimaging studies of intelligence continue to increase, old criticisms about intelligence test scores having no meaning are less and less meaningful, if they were ever meaningful at all

men and women were equally matched on SAT-Math score, and they solved the same problems during the scan equally well. Their brains, however, showed apparently different patterns of activity.

Brain activity assessed with PET during Raven’s Test. Red and yellow show greatest activity in units of glucose metabolic rate. The person with the highest test score shows lower brain activity during the test, consistent with brain efficiency related to intelligence