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You must unlearn what you have learned. This is a very interesting, counter-intuitive finding. My first reaction was "Oh! Maybe you can kill some dendrites to
by yosito 8y ago
You must unlearn what you have learned.
This is a very interesting, counter-intuitive finding. My first reaction was "Oh! Maybe you can kill some dendrites to make someone smarter". My wishful thinking side wants to say "This is why there's a correlation between drinking a lot and being intelligent". I don't really think that's a valid conclusion to draw from this study, but it was the first thing that popped into my mind. The main reason, beside common sense, that it's probably not a valid conclusion is that there's a correlation between intelligence and fewer dendrites, but that doesn't mean that fewer dendrites causes intelligence. It could be that intelligent people have fewer dendrites because they don't need as many as other people.
Can anyone familiar with the science weigh in on what implications this might have for enhancing people's intelligence?
- ridgeguy 8y agoNot an expert (but a background in neurophysiology). Synaptic pruning (deleting synapses) is an important part of neural development. Here's a ref [1] with a couple of paragraphs (see "Synaptogenesis" and "Synapse Pruning"). Synaptic pruning seems widespread in mammalian neurodevelopment. I wouldn't be surprised to find it's involved in some ultrastructural neural aspects of intelligence. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3722610/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3722610/
- ggggtez 8y agoMy guess is that "smarter" people have trained their brain's neural network to identify patterns with less "watts". Likely, the total power consumption of a brain is more or less stable, due to heating/cooling considerations, so less connections (but more efficient ones) lets them have more compute power.
- Nomentatus 8y agoAgreed. I'd say, a big part of what makes smarter people smarter is encountering more varied problems and environmental conditions that allow more kinds of pruning in more areas. Wild horses are far smarter than domestic ones, for example. Your comment fits with my citation of a cavity-IQ correlation, here.