

Intelligence Explained - tokenadult
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/23695/

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tokenadult
"Scientists haven't yet studied white matter enough to know how to improve it
directly, especially in healthy people. But exercise, diet, and mental
activity have all been shown to boost brain health and decrease the risk of
dementia, a disorder that has been linked to white-matter damage. And other
studies have shown that just a few months of practicing a new skill can
enlarge certain parts of the brain, including parts of the frontal cortex
involved in motor planning and parts of the temporal lobes that integrate
visual, auditory, tactile, and internal physiological information. Similar
studies on ways to improve the quality of white matter are under way."

There does need to be a lot more research on this issue. The article is a good
guide to who is doing research on brain structure and IQ, but I think the
title promises more than the article delivers.

After edit: And a while ago, Richard Haier directly disagreed with another
statement in the article just submitted.

[http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126993.300-highspeed...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126993.300-highspeed-
brains-are-in-the-genes.html)

"Just because intelligence is strongly genetic, that doesn't mean it cannot be
improved. 'It's just the opposite,' says Richard Haier, of the University of
California, Irvine, who works with Thompson. 'If it's genetic, it's
biochemical, and we have all kinds of ways of influencing biochemistry.'"

The way to find out how much a characteristic can be changed is to do
experiments. The way to find out how much it may already be changed by
haphazard environmental variance is to look for variance in the characteristic
in genetically sensitive designs. Monozygotic twins can be discordant in IQ,
so there surely is environmental influence on gene expression for IQ.

