What is different about the brain of a smart person?

Her team recently found that in warm-blooded animals, the number of neurons in the cerebral cortex also correlates with longevity.

"Astrocytes" play a big role! According to Elkurano, neurons are not the whole reason why humans have excellent brain power, a cell called "astrocyte" also plays a very important role in human intellectual development, but it must be said that the 16 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex are probably a decisive factor behind our cognitive advantage.

The above explains the difference between human and other animal brains, so why can some people be "smarter" when they are also smart?

Why are some people "smarter"?

If it is not the difference in brain structure and function, how can we explain the difference in intelligence? But to say exactly where the differences lie is a question that needs to be explored in depth.

People with larger brains tend to have higher IQs, but this is not the only factor. To find more reasons, we need to understand the white and gray matter of the brain.

The white matter is composed of many bundles of nerve fibers that act primarily as transmitters of nerve impulses.

Gray matter is a dense concentration of neuronal cell bodies, which are mainly responsible for processing information and performing some basic reflex activities.

The volume and amount of white matter and gray matter in the brain equally affect IQ. Rogier Kievit of the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues found that the volume of frontal gray matter is related to fluid intelligence (fluid intelligence, also known as fluid intelligence, liquid intelligence, refers to the ability to solve new problems); in addition, it is also related to the number of white matter connections between the two halves of the prefrontal lobe of the brain It is also related to the number of white matter connections between the two halves of the prefrontal lobe.

The more gyri, the smarter you are! Another very striking feature of the mammalian brain is that the gray matter has many crepuscular folds on its surface, i.e., depressed sulci and elevated gyrus, referred to as the sulcus. Such a structure brings many advantages, one is that it greatly increases its surface area, and the other is that it allows cells to bind more closely to each other, thus speeding up the exchange of information with each other. It is also true that the number of cortical crepes correlates with the speed of brain thinking and the efficiency of working memory - the more intelligent people have more gyri in their brains.

But this still doesn't tell us exactly where the brain's intelligence comes from, and scientists are on the way to discovering and proposing an explanation - the parietal-frontal integration theory (P-FIT), which suggests that intelligence levels are determined by the efficiency of communication between different brain The P-FIT theory suggests that intelligence levels are determined by the efficiency of communication between different areas of the brain.

The reticular connections between the hotspot areas of the brain are the biological basis for intelligence. Researchers have used brain imaging techniques to look for clues to the connectivity of the brain's hotspot regions. For example, by looking at the activation of various parts of the brain in experiments performing cognitive tasks, Ulrike Basten of Goethe University in Germany and her colleagues found that in the parietal-frontal region of the brain, there is a reticular connection associated with brain intelligence that It connects up to 20 different brain regions.

The study found that people who had a more gray matter or more neural activity in this brain region were smarter.

This does not mean that the brains of smart people are different in physical structure from the brains of ordinary people; the truth is that smart people have a brain that operates efficiently.

We can think of the brain as a high-performance operating chassis, but it needs an on-board computer that can control how energy is delivered, and when resources are allocated, etc., at any given moment," said Emiliano Santarnecchi of Harvard Medical School. "

Santanecki's research found that magnetic stimulation improves the brain's information processing efficiency, thereby enhancing intelligence. He also stressed the importance of brain plasticity, it may be that some people's brains are more plastic and have a greater ability to learn, not to mention that intelligence also has a genetic component.

Is the research over? No, it continues to advance ...... Although we already know that there are hundreds of human genes associated with intelligence, we still have a long way to go to discover the subtle effects of these genes on intelligence.

Finding where intelligence comes from is not a simple task; after all, the human brain is one of the most complex objects known in the universe.

People have long been curious not only about which brains are "smarter," but also about which brain type they belong to - left-brained or right-brained.

It is generally believed that people with left-brained brains are better suited for rational, logical work, while people with right-brained brains are better suited for creative, artistic work.

The long-rumored left-brain or right-brain brain, is it reliable?

Let's see how it came about. ......

As early as the 1960s, researchers discovered that the left and right brains have their division of labor, with some functions performed by the left hemisphere of the brain and others by the right hemisphere of the brain. It was soon theorized that the left hemisphere of our brain specializes in processing information related to logic, reason, and language, while the right hemisphere of the brain is responsible for processing information related to emotions, music, and impulses. This led to a popular claim - that which side of your brain is dominant will determine your personality.

But in fact, the division of labor between the left and right brain is much more subtle than we might think.

First, while the left hemisphere brain is responsible for producing complex language, the right hemisphere brain can contribute to the presentation or understanding of metaphorical and emotional meanings in words.

Second, the generation of creative ideas activates a large number of neuronal cells in both the left and right sides of the brain.

There is no evidence to prove that one side of the brain will dominate. Jeffrey Anderson of Utah University conducted brain scans of 1,000 volunteers performing a variety of different tasks and did not find an overwhelming advantage in using one side of the brain.

Thus, it seems that the left-brain type and right-brain type statements are not accurate.

In fact, in the scientific community, in addition to the left and right half of the brain, there is also the upper and lower half of the brain!

Stephen Kosslyn of Harvard University developed the "Cognitive Mode Theory", which suggests that our cognitive mode depends on whether we use the upper or lower half of our brain.

The upper part of our brain is responsible for forming and executing plans and making corrections when errors are found.

The lower part of the brain is primarily responsible for processing sensory information from the outside, categorizing objects or events, and giving them their distinct meanings.

Each of us uses both the left and right brain all the time, but each of us relies to some extent more on the upper brain or the lower brain system, and this tendency can have some influence on our behavior. For example, people who rely more on the upper brain are better at creative work, but sometimes less effective because they are not as good at making changes to their plans based on the current situation. People who rely more on the lower half of the brain will give more thought to the details of the plan but are not as good at making complex plans.

In contrast to these two views, Anderson believes that our personalities depend more on the various connections in brain regions.

Our personalities may come from the connections between different brain systems and how close those connections are. For example, people who are open to new experiences are more likely to gasp in awe at the sight of a spectacular sunset, and brain scans show that these people have more connections between the areas of the brain that process sensory information and the areas responsible for inner feelings.

Having discovered this phenomenon, we can feed the information from brain scans into a computer to make accurate predictions about people's personality traits.