"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.
"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.
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...
"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.