What the brains of people with excellent general knowledge look like

The brains of people with excellent general knowledge are particularly efficiently wired. This was shown by neuroscientists at Ruhr-Universität Bochum and Humboldt-Universität Zu Berlin using magnetic resonance imaging. “Although we can precisely measure the general knowledge of people and this wealth of knowledge is very important for an individual’s journey through life, we currently know little about the links between general knowledge and the characteristics of the brain,” says Dr. Erhan Genç from the Department of Biopsychology in Bochum. The team describes the results in the European Journal of Personality on 28 July 2019.

Brain images and knowledge test

The researchers examined the brains of 324 men and women with a special form of magnetic resonance imaging called diffusion tensor imaging. This makes it possible to reconstruct the pathways of nerve fibers and thus gain an insight into the structural network properties of the brain. By means of mathematical algorithms, the researchers assigned an individual value to the brain of each participant, which reflected the efficiency of his or her structural fiber network.

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