Science News

What is intelligence? The principle way that we measure intelligence, the IQ test, remains popular and convenient. Yet most psychologists agree that it only tells half the story... at most.

 

Horizon takes seven people who are some of the highest flyers in their field - a musical prodigy, a quantum physicist, an artist, a dramatist, an RAF fighter pilot, a chess grandmaster and a Wall Street trader. Each is put through a series of tests to discover who is the most intelligent?

Fascinating documentary (Video)

Via Maggie Rouman, Natalie Stewart

The largest brain study of its kind had found a gene linked to intelligence.

 

Who would have thought getting two C's would make such a difference............

 

'The variant occurs on HMGA2 where there is just a single change in the permutation of the four 'letters' of the genetic code.

 

DNA, the blueprint for life, comprises four basic chemicals called A (for adenine), C (cytosine), T (thymine) and G (guanine), strung together in different combinations along a double helix.

 

In this case, the researchers found that people with a double 'C' and no 'T' in a specific section of the HMGA2 gene had bigger brains on average.

 

"It is a strange result, you wouldn't think that something as simple as one small change in the genetic code could explain differences in intelligence worldwide," says Thompson, a neurologist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

 

Via Janet Devlin