Do intelligent people think faster? Researchers at the BIH and Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, together with a colleague from Barcelona, made the surprising finding that participants with higher intelligence scores were only quicker when tackling simple tasks, while they took longer to solve difficult problems than subjects with lower IQ scores. In personalized brain simulations of the 650 participants, the researchers could determine that brains with reduced synchrony between brain areas literally “jump to conclusions” when making decisions, rather than waiting until upstream brain regions could complete the processing steps needed to solve the problem. In fact, the brain models for higher score participants also needed more time to solve challenging tasks but made fewer errors. The scientists have now published their findings in the journal Nature Communications.
There are 100 billion or so neurons in the human brain. Each one of them is connected to an estimated 1,000 neighboring or distant neurons. This unfathomable network is the key to the brain’s amazing capabilities, but it is also what makes it so difficult to understand how the brain works.
Prof. Petra Ritter, head of the Brain Simulation Section at the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité (BIH) and at the Department of Neurology and Experimental Neurology of Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, simulates the human brain using computers. “We want to understand how the brain’s decision-making processes work and why different people make different decisions,” she says, describing the current project.
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