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Intelligent Brains Take Longer to Solve Difficult Problems

379 points by phnofive 3y ago

bhaney 3y ago
> In personalized brain simulations of the 650 participants Uh huh
anacrolix 3y ago
Well that's a relief.
mynegation 3y ago
Not even in mice.
onlypositive 3y ago
I must be really smart, I'm still working on some of the problems my math teacher gave me.
- tarxvf 3y ago
  Not to brag, but some problems I haven't even started yet.
- taneq 3y ago
  "You know how Einstein got bad grades? Well mine are even worse!" - Calvin
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  We were given a problem involving the movements of a chess knight over a weird non-chess board to try to reach a particular point from a particular start in 4th grade. At the time I ran it backward and believed this showed it to be unsolvable. But I also believed the teacher would not give us an unsolvable problem without somehow indicating that it couldn't be solved (as doing so would violate the implied rules of the classroom). One student solved it in class, but the rest of us weren't told what the solution was. I tried solving it a bit in high school but still couldn't come up with a solution. I really hope there is a solution that I couldn't find, and not that we were expected to discover that there is no solution. I expect that problems in the real world may not have a solution, but if you're going to pull that sort of thing in a 4th grade classroom (even a gifted one) I expect some setup so that the kids know this is a possibility.
honeybadger1 3y ago
I knew all this time that I was procrastinating for a good reason.
brink 3y ago
Intelligence isn't a factor of just speed, but open-mindedness. A willingness to look at something from every angle and solve with a unique solution. This is my big gripe with the intellectual crowd - because they want to be smart solely for being smart's sake, so they'll sacrifice the due diligence it takes to correctly solve a problem in order to "get further" and appear smarter, and it misleads a lot of people on what true intelligence is.
- SamBam 3y ago
  I'm not sure what group specifically you're referring to derisively as the "intellectual crowd." I'm guessing that this is different from the "intelligent crowd," but I certainly regard the college professors and such I know as an intellectual crowd, and they are absolutely open-minded, would take their time solving problems, and would consider other opinions. (Not all of them, of course, but in general they are at least as intellectually-curious and open as anyone else I know.)
  - ShamelessC 3y ago
    There is a certain type of person that clearly gets a sort of intrinsic pleasure from being correct. This leads to a lot of wasted time as this goal only serves to help one “win” in a competitive, social environment. As such, they often miss the forest for the trees. I gather you may not know any of these types yourself but they’re certainly abundant here on HN, dismissing Dropbox as easily replicated with rsync and other such sentiments.
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      A good example of an "intellectual crowd" are the Linux neckbeards who deride users for daring to ask how things are done and not liking the Holy And Divine Terminal(tm). A good example of an "intelligent crowd" are the Windows wizards who will helpfully advise how something is done so the user can get on with their day.
      - michaelmrose 3y ago
PretzelPirate 3y ago
Whenever I have to solve a really hard problem, I always have at least two mediocre solutions before I come up with a really good one. That doesn't work well in interviews, especially with how terrible most interviewers at time management. I sometimes get 10 minutes for a system design problem because the interviewer was expected to get signals on my non-technical competencies as well as system design. This is never enough time to ask clarifying questions, diagram things, and get a good solution out unless it's similar to a problem I've already solved. It's often OK to not solve the problem as long as you give an interviewer insight into how you think, but some interviewers expect a miracle.
- ta988 3y ago
  Yep and they get to hire people that were hinted about the answers or just went through a list of exercises of the kind. It starts to show when they have to design from scratch.
- deepGem 3y ago
  I often think it's a lot better to do an overall interview over a full day than to do disjointed rounds of 4-5 interviews over a few months. Some advantages - Interviewer and the interviewee are at ease. There is no rush to solve a problem. - You can easily spend 90 minutes to 2 hours on System design, Spend 2-3 hours coding and another 2 hours in behaviour/leadership what not. - The interviews can be progressive, meaning you don't make it through the first 2 hours - good bye. - This can be done remotely as well as in person. Of course, in person would be better, hosting expenses etc. End of the day, decision is made and you can verbally convey an offer/reject. This calls for a lot of discipline and commitment from the companies and their interview panel, I mean so be it. Dedicate 1 month for hiring and be done, at least for senior positions. Just like you allocate time for your projects, allocate dedicated time for interviewing every 6 months, every quarter whatever.
  - the_mar 3y ago
    Wait how do you think hiring is done right now? What do you mean “dedicate a month to hiring”? Once you are senior enough at a company you end up having to interview multiple people a week, plus all the other meetings, scheduling a full day interview, where someone can actually hang out with you for 2 hours is going to require advance notice. And not many candidates want to wait for a month+ for their interviews.
tekla 3y ago
Damn, how do I ask my professor to give me extra time because I'm too damn smart for the exam?
DanHulton 3y ago
...but come up with better results, buried deep within the article. Not shocking.
- alpaca128 3y ago
  It's already mentioned in the first paragraph: > needed more time to solve challenging tasks but made fewer errors
2h 3y ago
when tackling a large problem, in the beginning I find it hard to concentrate because I dont know "the best way", but even from the beginning I can understand that you could handle it about 99 different ways. I want to chase down nearly all of them so I can decide the best one, but sometimes its better to just get something crappy done 100%, then you can go back and iterate. otherwise you might get stuck on side quests forever: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zViYpS3BIqY https://youtube.com/watch?v=zViYpS3BIqY
nnurmanov 3y ago
Intelligent people have wider knowledge, they can see the problem from different angles, different edge cases. It takes time. On the other there is The Dunning–Kruger effect where less intelligent people jump to results too quick.
- postalrat 3y ago
  Intelligence and knowledge are two different things.
  - alpaca128 3y ago
    For IQ tests both are helpful.
  - maximus-decimus 3y ago
    One of the factors of IQ is long term memory though so they're not orthogonal either.
    - postalrat 3y ago
      A person could have incredible memory and still lack knowledge.
      - maximus-decimus 3y ago
        yes but they can't have knowledge and no memory.
mannyv 3y ago
So is the corollary to this "less intelligent brains take less time to come up with solutions that don't work?"
- jibalt 3y ago
  No, this is about solving problems ... that is, getting correct solutions.
  - red75prime 3y ago
    "Therefore, taking decisions on higher-level problems must be held out until evidence from sub-problems was integrated to not prematurely jump to a conclusion." Lower response time indicates jump to the conclusion that happened to be correct. The percentage of correctly solved higher-level problems was predictably lower for people with lower g-factor.
esperent 3y ago
The title should be "high IQ" not "intelligent". Those get equated far to often, while real intelligence is far more than just solving logic puzzles (even if that's an important part of of it).
- kzrdude 3y ago
  There are many ways to be smart, and I try to be grateful about the ways in which I'm smart and then appreciate others in the ways they are smarter than me. It's very hard to be smart in everything, in my experience. From how to be funny, likeable, handle tough social situations, decision making about life plans, handling stress, and different challenges in engineering work - from simple tasks to project planning. For a very long time, I just have not been smart enough to go to sleep in time. (Metacognition related "intelligence"?)
motohagiography 3y ago
This is an issue for clever people on the LSAT, where there is a technique to solving the problems that takes practice, and when you do a course on it, the thing STEM people tend to have to unlearn is solving the problem as a class of problem instead of just recognizing which question form it is and grinding through it fastest. The other trick is to recognize which ones are designed as a time suck. When I saw my first set of logical reasoning practice questions I thought, "ah, a state machine," while the other students had already put down their pencils. Abstraction solves a lot of hard problems, but it is also costly.
- greentext 3y ago
  How does one master this? I haven't taken a test in years, but the number of abstractions my mind would cycle through was a major disadvantage on timed tests.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Exams are designed to make bulk assessment easier. Ideally you would give students a day to do what is in a 2 hour exam and access to internet and papers - but making that work would be very expensive to avoid cheating. At work you get stuff done rather than answer questions in a obscenely short amount of time
- ylee 3y ago
  >Abstraction solves a lot of hard problems, but it is also costly. This may explain what happened to me. Of the various standardized tests that I have taken in life (SAT in 8th grade, SHSAT, PSAT, SAT, ACT, LSAT, GMAT), the LSAT is the only one that I did not score in the 99th percentile on, and its logic games section was my weakest. I have never had any test prep training of any kind other than taking old exams; if I had taken an LSAT class perhaps I might have approached the section differently.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
  Very good points. I think this is why I loved mathematics in high school, or specifically my mathematics teacher. Because he seemed to recognise this in me and instead gave me more abstract things to work on. I really struggle with geometric proofs for some reason, they just don't mesh with my brain. I'm all about symbolic stuff. He actually ended up teaching me some calculus so I could grok trig identities, even though we were still in the precalc year. And let me use it on the tests to prove stuff that would have been expected to be proved geometrically. The other big gripe I have with the way kids are tested is the way people are locked out of life because they're only good at one or two subjects to the extent they fail some of the others. Congratulations, you have failed at school because you, a teenager, can't meet our minimum requirements for being able to write inane, shallow analysis of 19th century poetry, can't run n meters in less than m minutes, and have failed to learn German. Good luck pursing your prolific talents with no high school diploma kthxbye.
g9yuayon 3y ago
> Intelligent Brains Take Longer to Solve Difficult Problems I find such summary ambiguous. Difficult for who? Isn't it very common that a difficult problem for me is a piece of cake for thee, like the PDE that Bezos couldn't solve for hours yet his classmate could solve in a matter of seconds? In 1697 Jean Bernoulli challenged the mathematicians and scientists in Europe to solve the brachistochrone problem. Bernoulli was particularly proud of his solution after working on it for weeks. Yet Newton, who was 55 years old at that time and hadn't worked on science or math for years, worked out a brilliant solution overnight and submitted the solution anonymously. Reading the solution, Bernoulli famously said "I I recognize the lion by his paw". Not only did Newton solve the problem, he also invented the Calculus of Variations.
- sq1020 3y ago
  Cosine! Haha I love that Jeff Bezos story.
- jibalt 3y ago
  >I find such summary ambiguous. Difficult for who? This is spelled out in the article ... difficulty is relative among problems, with increasingly difficult problems within the same problem space.
- someweirdperson 3y ago
  > I find such summary ambiguous. Difficult for who? What is "solve"? The example given was finding a route on a map. Is any route a valid solution, or only the best one? Does the time differ for finding a route of the same quality, or does it differ only for how long it takes until the brain is satisfied with the solution?
quickthrower2 3y ago
Makes sense: the IQ tests train you to think quick but double check to be sure. To do well at them (unless genius) requires meta stuff like how much time to give to a question, how much to check the answer, and so on. Time is limited.
keyle 3y ago
Let's have a gigantic popup in the face of people the first time they visit the website. And talk about intelligence.
- jholman 3y ago
  In their defence, it was a better popup than most. More legible, with less malicious defaults.
bob1029 3y ago
Solving difficult problems well typically involves some form of root cause analysis. A novice looking at a broken thing may decide to simply replace it and move on with the day. You can mindlessly replace widgets very rapidly. A master looking at the same might be more inclined to ask "why" a few times and set up some additional calls with the customer. I don't think this really has anything to do with "intelligence" as much as it does patience.
- jibalt 3y ago
  The article (did anyone here read it?) explains in some detail how it has to do with intelligence.
brianjlogan 3y ago
This isn't a particularly shocking result but it's great to see validation of a theoretical model put to practice using computing. So they were able to match a similar result in their model of intelligence and mental computation time between the real and simulated participants. Fascinating..what a time to be alive!
killjoywashere 3y ago
The most common guidance in medical board exams: don't think too hard.
themerone 3y ago
I can write code a lot faster when I am extremely sleep deprived. I've always assumed it's because I'm allocating zero brainpower to anything else.
beebmam 3y ago
Wouldn't this imply, at least a little bit, that the current definition of IQ is a poor metric?
- mo_42 3y ago
  Not a psychologist here. I guess you want to say that it’s a poor metric for intelligence. Not so sure. IQ is measured in standardized tests. Participants should have the same amount of time to answer the questions. If intelligent people take longer to reach the correct answers than non-intelligent, then, it seems paradox. The idea could be to prolong the test. So we better see who reaches the correct answers without much time pressure (but still with the same amount). Or go even further and ask really difficult questions without any limit. These would probably also measure the ability to concentrate, or motivation to continue, … which might not be what you want for an IQ test. However, if your question would be true, designers of IQ test could fix them in light of this research: they plan for enough time so that even the most intelligent have time to answer the questions. It’s of course a problem to find a couple of really intelligent people if your test is flawed in the first place.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- leonidasv 3y ago
  I don't think so, the subjects with higher intelligence were determined by their previous IQ score.
- alpaca128 3y ago
  IQ tests have problems of varying difficulty and as the article mentions easier problems are solved faster. So on average the time limit should not be a problem.
- sandstrom 3y ago
  The timespan here is mostly seconds, so e.g. a "intelligent brain" might take 2 seconds instead of 1 second to solve the problem. A standard IQ test take an hour or so to administrate.
nomilk 3y ago
That is the most egregious cookie popup I've seen. The worst part is it's not immediately obvious what an indifferent user has to click on quickly get rid of it, necessitating reading and thinking. https://imgur.com/a/YbRlUSB https://imgur.com/a/YbRlUSB
- bruce343434 3y ago
  > it's not immediately obvious what an indifferent user has to click on quickly The charitable interpretation is that the irony here was intentional
- SuperCuber 3y ago
  Are you complaining about the lack of dark patterns that push you to accept all cookies? When that cookie banner opened for me, I thought "finally, one of the moral ones" because all the non essential cookies are turned off by default, and you have two options with the same visual weight to either accept or reject the others.
- crtified 3y ago
  It popped up, I said Wow. THEN I stopped, and thought: "Hey, waait a minute! Is the article trolling me with a 'difficult problem' here? which I will now proceed to take a long time to 'solve'? because I'm 'intelligent'? well, screw you, troll - I can solve this quickly!", and so, I hastily clicked on something in order to make the popup go away. Thus proving that I'm not intelligent. I win.
  - notahacker 3y ago
    The popup does actually feel like a good illustration of the basic phenomena. Average person says "oh look, a cookie popup" and clicks through, possibly choosing randomly between "confirm" and "select all". (People with lower familiarity with cookie popups or the language might get completely stuck) HNer isn't at all intimidated by the wall of text and knows exactly what it mean but reads every word to check they haven't snuck any particularly egregious privacy violations and goes down the rabbit hole of evaluating the likely implications of blocking 'necessary' cookies and the virtues of doing that via the cookie popup or browser plugin before making their selection...
globalnode 3y ago
Something about the fact that it was a simulation rather than a methodical study of real humans kinda makes me not really value the results.
tremere 3y ago
In my view, we need to stop putting all notions of intelligence on a pedestal. In my opinion, it interferes with productive science. It's useful to know that mentally rotating an object is a task that allows you to sort people by IQ, roughly. It's less useful to have studies that say "aww it's okay if you take long to solve hard problems, it's actually a sign of intelligence." It just creates cope.
DiscourseFan 3y ago
I wouldn't think someone who took calc for engineers would be able to work through a problem concerning group theory very easily if they were just being introduced to the topic--but they could probably solve some calculus problems (relatively) quickly since they are more used to doing them. All I'm saying is I think it has more to do with familiarity of material than "intellect." Intelligence to me is being able to rapidly comprehend and assimilate new systems of logic and signification as they are approached. Biology is going to have different rules from Set Theory which is going to have different rules than Political Science. Someone might note that these things are all interrelated: which they are, of course. But I think intelligence here would be noticing the contradictions that appear when they are set in relation, not simply trying to understand how they all stand together in some grand, unified fashion; nor (on the other hand), making humble claims (like formalism) which are not truly held by anyone.
arisAlexis 3y ago
Feynman botched the Mensa IQ test. My hypothesis is either he did it as prank or he just thought about another million possibilities for each item that others couldn't even imagine.
- PartiallyTyped 3y ago
  Either way, integrating many different paths from multiple directions to reach a solution (hah!) is something intelligent people are more likely going to do which takes a lot of time and requires building abstractions.
- red75prime 3y ago
  Mensa? Feynman reportedly said that his high school IQ was 125 during his "Address to Far Rockaway High School" (1). I can find nothing about him taking Mensa tests. 1: https://collections.archives.caltech.edu/repositories/2/accessions/2626 https://collections.archives.caltech.edu/repositories/2/acce... Can someone verify that?
  - arisAlexis 3y ago
    Sorry that was a school test and he was probably bored and latercjoked he couldn't join mensa obviously
winternewt 3y ago
This seems to conflict with how IQ tests are issued. They're always pretty restricted in time, and I suspect they're designed so that someone with 100 IQ is not supposed to get through all of the questions. Not to claim I'm some super intelligent guy but I always felt like IQ tests fail to measure the kind of cognitive tasks that I'm good at, which is to hold a problem in my mind for a long time (in my line of work that's often days or weeks) and then come up with a novel solution.
- sandstrom 3y ago
  The timespan in this study seems to be mere seconds. A typical IQ test (WAIS) takes roughly an hour to administrate.
nsbk 3y ago
Now it all makes sense
StrangeATractor 3y ago
I must be smarter than all of you, I never solve any difficult problems.
arkadiytehgraet 3y ago
If both more intelligent and less intelligent brains were able to solve the problem, can we really say that it was a difficult problem?
jack_riminton 3y ago
Came for commenters justifying their own intelligence, comments did not disappoint
- interfixus 3y ago
  And great fun how the inevitably interminable top thread without hesitation locks on to the subject of ... job interviews.
  - jack_riminton 3y ago
    Also a sign of the times. It used to be people showing off about how many job offers they received
k__ 3y ago
Title should have been "People with lower IQ jump to conclusions" If you don't think about edge cases, you get "solutions" faster. That's why we have so much technical debt.
- ranting-moth 3y ago
  This is quite true. It's awful to have a person on a team that produces code at an quadruple industrial speed. Then the part of the team that actually cares about the project will have to sort that out later (or, worse, live with it and pay the debt with accumulating interest). Maintaining/fixing/managing the code that the star developer produces is very ungrateful work.
  - BlargMcLarg 3y ago
    That's a binary take if I've ever heard one. The quadruple speed also means products hit the test groups sooner and one can iterate on it faster. Nothing in the story implies the 'star developer' is done once the code hits production, but that's the assumption made. Meanwhile, the 'part of the team that actually cares' may as well be paralyzing themselves through overanalyzing what-ifs without gathering enough information, with the most extreme cases bike-shedding weeks worth of development time. Surely a group of people who deem themselves 'intelligent' can broaden their perspectives a little?
    - k__ 3y ago
      "Hitting the test groups sooner" always sounds nice in theory. But more often than not "people are done after their code hits production".
      - BlargMcLarg 3y ago
        That's not an excuse when the same thing happens the other way around: "Let's have discussions until 2 weeks before the deadline for something that needs 2 weeks of development time!" "..wait, why are we having performance issues? Why did we not think of this one case that's occurring every 5 seconds?" People are very eager to take article's example and use it to slam individuals they have a vendetta against, while looking away from the other extreme which has the exact same problem. Going too fast is a problem. So is going too slow and LARPing as a clairvoyant, getting close to a deadline and then business forces you to get disciplined and deliver something not battle-tested.
kanodiaayush 3y ago
Clickbait worked. You're not really saying that the less intelligent brains solve these problems less accurately.
andy_ppp 3y ago
I must be infinitely smart then?
sylware 3y ago
Common sense: it is expected that higher planes of reasoning have more complex neural connectomes, then takes more time.
tpoacher 3y ago
Aesop's fable of the cat and the fox comes to mind.
spacephysics 3y ago
Any number times 7 takes forever for me to do. Now I know it’s because I’m actually a super genius.
riccardomc 3y ago
It's amusing how in many accounts in the comments the authors assume they're endowed with an intelligent brain...
- pessimizer 3y ago
  It's about IQ, not "Intelligent Brains" which is editorial about the validity of IQ sneaking into the headline. It's not hard to know your IQ, there are tests.
  - maximus-decimus 3y ago
    Or anybody who went to school and saw how well they learn compared to the average student should have an idea. IQ was originally meant as the predictor of how fast you learn after all.
- ilyt 3y ago
  Don't you know ? The sheer fact you're posting on HN and not say Reddit means you're in top 20%! /s
  - sysstemlord 3y ago
    People should differentiate between introvert, knowledgeable, and intelligent. I most likely qualify for the first two but I wouldn't even begin to guess on how to know whether I'm in the third league.
    - davidjones332 3y ago
      [dead]
- dagaci 3y ago
  If the article is true I would assume that the most highly intelligent reader would have a great deal of difficulty commenting on the subject in a reasonable about of time, and would most likely end up short circuiting the effort in favour of doing something else …
engineer_22 3y ago
The conclusions of this study are based on simulated brains. The headline may therefore be misleading.
nu11ptr 3y ago
This is interesting, but not surprising when you think about it. My whole career I've noticed there are always people who think as soon as a problem is mentioned, it needs an instant solution - and they are quick to volunteer one. Others say "Hold on a moment, let's back up and start from the beginning". They are calm and methodical and careful to withhold their conclusion until all data is gathered, and have removed the impossibilities from the possible solution set. They usually are the ones to solve the problem in the end I've noticed.
nonethewiser 3y ago
More fuel for the Dunning-Krueger effect. (This is not to say its false)
codethief 3y ago
> To simulate the mechanisms of the human brain, Ritter and her team use digital data from brain scans like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as well as mathematical models based on theoretical knowledge about biological processes. This initially results in a “general” human brain model. The scientists then refine this model using data from individual people, thus creating “personalized brain models.” […] “We can reproduce the activity of individual brains very efficiently,” says Ritter. “We found out in the process that these in silico brains behave differently from one another – and in the same way as their biological counterparts. Our virtual avatars match the intellectual performance and reaction times of their biological analogues.” Huh, I hadn't heard of this before. Does anyone know more about how exactly those "in silico" brains work and how they compare to their real-world counterparts? I mean, the article makes it sound as if the researchers fully understood how the brain works and had managed to create a faithful digital copy, which I find difficult to believe. EDIT: The original paper says > To study neuronal processing in silico we created BNMs [brain network models] for the 650 subjects using a tuning algorithm that fits each participant’s simulated FC with their empirical FC (Figs. 2 and 3). The BNMs use coupled neural mass models to simulate the electric, synaptic, firing, and hemodynamic (fMRI) activity of a 379-nodes whole-brain network. Each node consists of one excitatory and one inhibitory population that mutually and recurrently interact. To simulate long-range white matter coupling, the neural masses were connected by each participant’s SC, which were estimated by dwMRI tractography. Importantly, we added feedforward inhibition to increase biological realism Sounds like they used small neural networks for simulation and adjusted the weights between the neurons to what they saw in participants' MRI measurements.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
codethief 3y ago
* and the solution they come up with is correct more often. The article title refers to something that's been long known even in pop science since Daniel Kahnemann's "Thinking Fast and Slow". In fact, the original paper[0] even cites Daniel Kahnemann's work: > Simulation results indicate that decision-making speed is traded with accuracy, resembling influential theories from the fields of economy and psychology on fast and slow thinking. Kahnemann's work might be summarized (very roughly) as follows: "System 1" often quickly suggests an intuitive (and frequently wrong) answer, whereas "System 2" is the part that does the slower, more rational, and conscious thinking. "Intelligent" people tend to be those who control their System 1 and thus their urge for intuitive answers more effectively. And indeed this is what the article says, too: > Resting-state functional MRI scans showed that slower solvers had higher average functional connectivity, or temporal synchrony, between their brain regions. In personalized brain simulations of the 650 participants, the researchers could determine that brains with reduced functional connectivity 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 more challenging tasks, you have to store previous progress in working memory while you explore other solution paths and then integrate these into each other. This gathering of evidence for a particular solution may sometimes takes longer, but it also leads to better results. However, if I understand correctly, the thing about the research here that's actually novel is that they now have a better understanding of the neural processes underlying System 1 vs. System 2 ("we identified a mechanistic link between functional connectivity, intelligence, processing speed and brain synchrony for trading accuracy with speed in dependence of excitation-inhibition balance") and that they in fact simulated the brain digitally, see my other comment. [0]: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-38626-y https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-38626-y
VoodooJuJu 3y ago
Oh no wonder I'm so slow - I'm just too gosh darn intelligent!
booleandilemma 3y ago
I don't think we know what intelligence is or if it even exists as we conceive it.
felipelalli 3y ago
I feel
javajosh 3y ago
Good heavens, for 10 years after college I was having "aha" moments about physics and math. Looking back I don't see how it could have been any other way, and it's crazy to think you can recapitulate 300 years of science in 4 years into the brain of an 18-year-old. But we act like that's what we're doing. Maybe that's what phd programs and postdocs are really for, not so much learning more but letting what you did learn actually soak in.
Weryj 3y ago
What role could meditation play in modifying this waiting period to refine the output?
swayvil 3y ago
A smart guy creates 1, 2.. 10... solutions. Iterating and rehashing and rebuilding. That's how you explore the space. You can't expect a good solution before you've fully explored the space.
indus 3y ago
Interesting how much we know almost nothing about human brains. 1. Dunning Kruger in 1999 on overconfidence when unskilled. 2. Selection bias in favor of “quick thinkers” 3. Compounding effect of selection bias in capitalism—-often survivorship in decision making theories.
mrangle 3y ago
The article uses strange language to couch the results. Making an error isn't solving a problem at all. It should read that higher IQ leads to more reliable problem solving. Which would be less click-baity, admittedly. I understand why researchers would make the time variable the focus, but it isn't the story. Who would you want to be your airline pilot: the person who solves 70% of problems quicker or who solves close to 100% of the problems slower? The ability to error check has a time cost but also is of infinite value for any position of consequence.
egberts1 3y ago
Thats why insurance companies mandate aptitude test for law enforcement: liability is higher with "smarter" cops.
ganesh7 3y ago
I knew it. I take longer because I have an intelligent brain.
lobocinza 3y ago
See bossman that's why my deliveries are always late. /s

379 points by phnofive 3y ago

bhaney 3y ago

> In personalized brain simulations of the 650 participants Uh huh

anacrolix 3y ago

Well that's a relief.

mynegation 3y ago

Not even in mice.

onlypositive 3y ago

I must be really smart, I'm still working on some of the problems my math teacher gave me.

tarxvf 3y ago
Not to brag, but some problems I haven't even started yet.
taneq 3y ago
"You know how Einstein got bad grades? Well mine are even worse!" - Calvin
anonymouskimmer 3y ago
We were given a problem involving the movements of a chess knight over a weird non-chess board to try to reach a particular point from a particular start in 4th grade. At the time I ran it backward and believed this showed it to be unsolvable. But I also believed the teacher would not give us an unsolvable problem without somehow indicating that it couldn't be solved (as doing so would violate the implied rules of the classroom). One student solved it in class, but the rest of us weren't told what the solution was. I tried solving it a bit in high school but still couldn't come up with a solution. I really hope there is a solution that I couldn't find, and not that we were expected to discover that there is no solution. I expect that problems in the real world may not have a solution, but if you're going to pull that sort of thing in a 4th grade classroom (even a gifted one) I expect some setup so that the kids know this is a possibility.

honeybadger1 3y ago

I knew all this time that I was procrastinating for a good reason.

brink 3y ago

Intelligence isn't a factor of just speed, but open-mindedness. A willingness to look at something from every angle and solve with a unique solution. This is my big gripe with the intellectual crowd - because they want to be smart solely for being smart's sake, so they'll sacrifice the due diligence it takes to correctly solve a problem in order to "get further" and appear smarter, and it misleads a lot of people on what true intelligence is.

SamBam 3y ago
I'm not sure what group specifically you're referring to derisively as the "intellectual crowd." I'm guessing that this is different from the "intelligent crowd," but I certainly regard the college professors and such I know as an intellectual crowd, and they are absolutely open-minded, would take their time solving problems, and would consider other opinions. (Not all of them, of course, but in general they are at least as intellectually-curious and open as anyone else I know.)
- ShamelessC 3y ago
  There is a certain type of person that clearly gets a sort of intrinsic pleasure from being correct. This leads to a lot of wasted time as this goal only serves to help one “win” in a competitive, social environment. As such, they often miss the forest for the trees. I gather you may not know any of these types yourself but they’re certainly abundant here on HN, dismissing Dropbox as easily replicated with rsync and other such sentiments.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    A good example of an "intellectual crowd" are the Linux neckbeards who deride users for daring to ask how things are done and not liking the Holy And Divine Terminal(tm). A good example of an "intelligent crowd" are the Windows wizards who will helpfully advise how something is done so the user can get on with their day.
    - michaelmrose 3y ago

PretzelPirate 3y ago

Whenever I have to solve a really hard problem, I always have at least two mediocre solutions before I come up with a really good one. That doesn't work well in interviews, especially with how terrible most interviewers at time management. I sometimes get 10 minutes for a system design problem because the interviewer was expected to get signals on my non-technical competencies as well as system design. This is never enough time to ask clarifying questions, diagram things, and get a good solution out unless it's similar to a problem I've already solved. It's often OK to not solve the problem as long as you give an interviewer insight into how you think, but some interviewers expect a miracle.

ta988 3y ago
Yep and they get to hire people that were hinted about the answers or just went through a list of exercises of the kind. It starts to show when they have to design from scratch.
deepGem 3y ago
I often think it's a lot better to do an overall interview over a full day than to do disjointed rounds of 4-5 interviews over a few months. Some advantages - Interviewer and the interviewee are at ease. There is no rush to solve a problem. - You can easily spend 90 minutes to 2 hours on System design, Spend 2-3 hours coding and another 2 hours in behaviour/leadership what not. - The interviews can be progressive, meaning you don't make it through the first 2 hours - good bye. - This can be done remotely as well as in person. Of course, in person would be better, hosting expenses etc. End of the day, decision is made and you can verbally convey an offer/reject. This calls for a lot of discipline and commitment from the companies and their interview panel, I mean so be it. Dedicate 1 month for hiring and be done, at least for senior positions. Just like you allocate time for your projects, allocate dedicated time for interviewing every 6 months, every quarter whatever.
- the_mar 3y ago
  Wait how do you think hiring is done right now? What do you mean “dedicate a month to hiring”? Once you are senior enough at a company you end up having to interview multiple people a week, plus all the other meetings, scheduling a full day interview, where someone can actually hang out with you for 2 hours is going to require advance notice. And not many candidates want to wait for a month+ for their interviews.

tekla 3y ago

Damn, how do I ask my professor to give me extra time because I'm too damn smart for the exam?

DanHulton 3y ago

...but come up with better results, buried deep within the article. Not shocking.

alpaca128 3y ago
It's already mentioned in the first paragraph: > needed more time to solve challenging tasks but made fewer errors

2h 3y ago

when tackling a large problem, in the beginning I find it hard to concentrate because I dont know "the best way", but even from the beginning I can understand that you could handle it about 99 different ways. I want to chase down nearly all of them so I can decide the best one, but sometimes its better to just get something crappy done 100%, then you can go back and iterate. otherwise you might get stuck on side quests forever: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zViYpS3BIqY https://youtube.com/watch?v=zViYpS3BIqY

nnurmanov 3y ago

Intelligent people have wider knowledge, they can see the problem from different angles, different edge cases. It takes time. On the other there is The Dunning–Kruger effect where less intelligent people jump to results too quick.

postalrat 3y ago
Intelligence and knowledge are two different things.
- alpaca128 3y ago
  For IQ tests both are helpful.
- maximus-decimus 3y ago
  One of the factors of IQ is long term memory though so they're not orthogonal either.
  - postalrat 3y ago
    A person could have incredible memory and still lack knowledge.
    - maximus-decimus 3y ago
      yes but they can't have knowledge and no memory.

mannyv 3y ago

So is the corollary to this "less intelligent brains take less time to come up with solutions that don't work?"

jibalt 3y ago
No, this is about solving problems ... that is, getting correct solutions.
- red75prime 3y ago
  "Therefore, taking decisions on higher-level problems must be held out until evidence from sub-problems was integrated to not prematurely jump to a conclusion." Lower response time indicates jump to the conclusion that happened to be correct. The percentage of correctly solved higher-level problems was predictably lower for people with lower g-factor.

esperent 3y ago

The title should be "high IQ" not "intelligent". Those get equated far to often, while real intelligence is far more than just solving logic puzzles (even if that's an important part of of it).

kzrdude 3y ago
There are many ways to be smart, and I try to be grateful about the ways in which I'm smart and then appreciate others in the ways they are smarter than me. It's very hard to be smart in everything, in my experience. From how to be funny, likeable, handle tough social situations, decision making about life plans, handling stress, and different challenges in engineering work - from simple tasks to project planning. For a very long time, I just have not been smart enough to go to sleep in time. (Metacognition related "intelligence"?)

motohagiography 3y ago

This is an issue for clever people on the LSAT, where there is a technique to solving the problems that takes practice, and when you do a course on it, the thing STEM people tend to have to unlearn is solving the problem as a class of problem instead of just recognizing which question form it is and grinding through it fastest. The other trick is to recognize which ones are designed as a time suck. When I saw my first set of logical reasoning practice questions I thought, "ah, a state machine," while the other students had already put down their pencils. Abstraction solves a lot of hard problems, but it is also costly.

greentext 3y ago
How does one master this? I haven't taken a test in years, but the number of abstractions my mind would cycle through was a major disadvantage on timed tests.
quickthrower2 3y ago
Exams are designed to make bulk assessment easier. Ideally you would give students a day to do what is in a 2 hour exam and access to internet and papers - but making that work would be very expensive to avoid cheating. At work you get stuff done rather than answer questions in a obscenely short amount of time
ylee 3y ago
>Abstraction solves a lot of hard problems, but it is also costly. This may explain what happened to me. Of the various standardized tests that I have taken in life (SAT in 8th grade, SHSAT, PSAT, SAT, ACT, LSAT, GMAT), the LSAT is the only one that I did not score in the 99th percentile on, and its logic games section was my weakest. I have never had any test prep training of any kind other than taking old exams; if I had taken an LSAT class perhaps I might have approached the section differently.
mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
Very good points. I think this is why I loved mathematics in high school, or specifically my mathematics teacher. Because he seemed to recognise this in me and instead gave me more abstract things to work on. I really struggle with geometric proofs for some reason, they just don't mesh with my brain. I'm all about symbolic stuff. He actually ended up teaching me some calculus so I could grok trig identities, even though we were still in the precalc year. And let me use it on the tests to prove stuff that would have been expected to be proved geometrically. The other big gripe I have with the way kids are tested is the way people are locked out of life because they're only good at one or two subjects to the extent they fail some of the others. Congratulations, you have failed at school because you, a teenager, can't meet our minimum requirements for being able to write inane, shallow analysis of 19th century poetry, can't run n meters in less than m minutes, and have failed to learn German. Good luck pursing your prolific talents with no high school diploma kthxbye.

g9yuayon 3y ago

> Intelligent Brains Take Longer to Solve Difficult Problems I find such summary ambiguous. Difficult for who? Isn't it very common that a difficult problem for me is a piece of cake for thee, like the PDE that Bezos couldn't solve for hours yet his classmate could solve in a matter of seconds? In 1697 Jean Bernoulli challenged the mathematicians and scientists in Europe to solve the brachistochrone problem. Bernoulli was particularly proud of his solution after working on it for weeks. Yet Newton, who was 55 years old at that time and hadn't worked on science or math for years, worked out a brilliant solution overnight and submitted the solution anonymously. Reading the solution, Bernoulli famously said "I I recognize the lion by his paw". Not only did Newton solve the problem, he also invented the Calculus of Variations.

sq1020 3y ago
Cosine! Haha I love that Jeff Bezos story.
jibalt 3y ago
>I find such summary ambiguous. Difficult for who? This is spelled out in the article ... difficulty is relative among problems, with increasingly difficult problems within the same problem space.
someweirdperson 3y ago
> I find such summary ambiguous. Difficult for who? What is "solve"? The example given was finding a route on a map. Is any route a valid solution, or only the best one? Does the time differ for finding a route of the same quality, or does it differ only for how long it takes until the brain is satisfied with the solution?

quickthrower2 3y ago

Makes sense: the IQ tests train you to think quick but double check to be sure. To do well at them (unless genius) requires meta stuff like how much time to give to a question, how much to check the answer, and so on. Time is limited.

keyle 3y ago

Let's have a gigantic popup in the face of people the first time they visit the website. And talk about intelligence.

jholman 3y ago
In their defence, it was a better popup than most. More legible, with less malicious defaults.

bob1029 3y ago

Solving difficult problems well typically involves some form of root cause analysis. A novice looking at a broken thing may decide to simply replace it and move on with the day. You can mindlessly replace widgets very rapidly. A master looking at the same might be more inclined to ask "why" a few times and set up some additional calls with the customer. I don't think this really has anything to do with "intelligence" as much as it does patience.

jibalt 3y ago
The article (did anyone here read it?) explains in some detail how it has to do with intelligence.

brianjlogan 3y ago

This isn't a particularly shocking result but it's great to see validation of a theoretical model put to practice using computing. So they were able to match a similar result in their model of intelligence and mental computation time between the real and simulated participants. Fascinating..what a time to be alive!

killjoywashere 3y ago

The most common guidance in medical board exams: don't think too hard.

themerone 3y ago

I can write code a lot faster when I am extremely sleep deprived. I've always assumed it's because I'm allocating zero brainpower to anything else.

beebmam 3y ago

Wouldn't this imply, at least a little bit, that the current definition of IQ is a poor metric?

mo_42 3y ago
Not a psychologist here. I guess you want to say that it’s a poor metric for intelligence. Not so sure. IQ is measured in standardized tests. Participants should have the same amount of time to answer the questions. If intelligent people take longer to reach the correct answers than non-intelligent, then, it seems paradox. The idea could be to prolong the test. So we better see who reaches the correct answers without much time pressure (but still with the same amount). Or go even further and ask really difficult questions without any limit. These would probably also measure the ability to concentrate, or motivation to continue, … which might not be what you want for an IQ test. However, if your question would be true, designers of IQ test could fix them in light of this research: they plan for enough time so that even the most intelligent have time to answer the questions. It’s of course a problem to find a couple of really intelligent people if your test is flawed in the first place.
deleted 3y ago
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leonidasv 3y ago
I don't think so, the subjects with higher intelligence were determined by their previous IQ score.
alpaca128 3y ago
IQ tests have problems of varying difficulty and as the article mentions easier problems are solved faster. So on average the time limit should not be a problem.
sandstrom 3y ago
The timespan here is mostly seconds, so e.g. a "intelligent brain" might take 2 seconds instead of 1 second to solve the problem. A standard IQ test take an hour or so to administrate.

nomilk 3y ago

That is the most egregious cookie popup I've seen. The worst part is it's not immediately obvious what an indifferent user has to click on quickly get rid of it, necessitating reading and thinking. https://imgur.com/a/YbRlUSB https://imgur.com/a/YbRlUSB

bruce343434 3y ago
> it's not immediately obvious what an indifferent user has to click on quickly The charitable interpretation is that the irony here was intentional
SuperCuber 3y ago
Are you complaining about the lack of dark patterns that push you to accept all cookies? When that cookie banner opened for me, I thought "finally, one of the moral ones" because all the non essential cookies are turned off by default, and you have two options with the same visual weight to either accept or reject the others.
crtified 3y ago
It popped up, I said Wow. THEN I stopped, and thought: "Hey, waait a minute! Is the article trolling me with a 'difficult problem' here? which I will now proceed to take a long time to 'solve'? because I'm 'intelligent'? well, screw you, troll - I can solve this quickly!", and so, I hastily clicked on something in order to make the popup go away. Thus proving that I'm not intelligent. I win.
- notahacker 3y ago
  The popup does actually feel like a good illustration of the basic phenomena. Average person says "oh look, a cookie popup" and clicks through, possibly choosing randomly between "confirm" and "select all". (People with lower familiarity with cookie popups or the language might get completely stuck) HNer isn't at all intimidated by the wall of text and knows exactly what it mean but reads every word to check they haven't snuck any particularly egregious privacy violations and goes down the rabbit hole of evaluating the likely implications of blocking 'necessary' cookies and the virtues of doing that via the cookie popup or browser plugin before making their selection...

globalnode 3y ago

Something about the fact that it was a simulation rather than a methodical study of real humans kinda makes me not really value the results.

tremere 3y ago

In my view, we need to stop putting all notions of intelligence on a pedestal. In my opinion, it interferes with productive science. It's useful to know that mentally rotating an object is a task that allows you to sort people by IQ, roughly. It's less useful to have studies that say "aww it's okay if you take long to solve hard problems, it's actually a sign of intelligence." It just creates cope.

DiscourseFan 3y ago

I wouldn't think someone who took calc for engineers would be able to work through a problem concerning group theory very easily if they were just being introduced to the topic--but they could probably solve some calculus problems (relatively) quickly since they are more used to doing them. All I'm saying is I think it has more to do with familiarity of material than "intellect." Intelligence to me is being able to rapidly comprehend and assimilate new systems of logic and signification as they are approached. Biology is going to have different rules from Set Theory which is going to have different rules than Political Science. Someone might note that these things are all interrelated: which they are, of course. But I think intelligence here would be noticing the contradictions that appear when they are set in relation, not simply trying to understand how they all stand together in some grand, unified fashion; nor (on the other hand), making humble claims (like formalism) which are not truly held by anyone.

arisAlexis 3y ago

Feynman botched the Mensa IQ test. My hypothesis is either he did it as prank or he just thought about another million possibilities for each item that others couldn't even imagine.

PartiallyTyped 3y ago
Either way, integrating many different paths from multiple directions to reach a solution (hah!) is something intelligent people are more likely going to do which takes a lot of time and requires building abstractions.
red75prime 3y ago
Mensa? Feynman reportedly said that his high school IQ was 125 during his "Address to Far Rockaway High School" (1). I can find nothing about him taking Mensa tests. 1: https://collections.archives.caltech.edu/repositories/2/accessions/2626 https://collections.archives.caltech.edu/repositories/2/acce... Can someone verify that?
- arisAlexis 3y ago
  Sorry that was a school test and he was probably bored and latercjoked he couldn't join mensa obviously

winternewt 3y ago

This seems to conflict with how IQ tests are issued. They're always pretty restricted in time, and I suspect they're designed so that someone with 100 IQ is not supposed to get through all of the questions. Not to claim I'm some super intelligent guy but I always felt like IQ tests fail to measure the kind of cognitive tasks that I'm good at, which is to hold a problem in my mind for a long time (in my line of work that's often days or weeks) and then come up with a novel solution.

sandstrom 3y ago
The timespan in this study seems to be mere seconds. A typical IQ test (WAIS) takes roughly an hour to administrate.

nsbk 3y ago

Now it all makes sense

StrangeATractor 3y ago

I must be smarter than all of you, I never solve any difficult problems.

arkadiytehgraet 3y ago

If both more intelligent and less intelligent brains were able to solve the problem, can we really say that it was a difficult problem?

jack_riminton 3y ago

Came for commenters justifying their own intelligence, comments did not disappoint

interfixus 3y ago
And great fun how the inevitably interminable top thread without hesitation locks on to the subject of ... job interviews.
- jack_riminton 3y ago
  Also a sign of the times. It used to be people showing off about how many job offers they received

k__ 3y ago

Title should have been "People with lower IQ jump to conclusions" If you don't think about edge cases, you get "solutions" faster. That's why we have so much technical debt.

ranting-moth 3y ago
This is quite true. It's awful to have a person on a team that produces code at an quadruple industrial speed. Then the part of the team that actually cares about the project will have to sort that out later (or, worse, live with it and pay the debt with accumulating interest). Maintaining/fixing/managing the code that the star developer produces is very ungrateful work.
- BlargMcLarg 3y ago
  That's a binary take if I've ever heard one. The quadruple speed also means products hit the test groups sooner and one can iterate on it faster. Nothing in the story implies the 'star developer' is done once the code hits production, but that's the assumption made. Meanwhile, the 'part of the team that actually cares' may as well be paralyzing themselves through overanalyzing what-ifs without gathering enough information, with the most extreme cases bike-shedding weeks worth of development time. Surely a group of people who deem themselves 'intelligent' can broaden their perspectives a little?
  - k__ 3y ago
    "Hitting the test groups sooner" always sounds nice in theory. But more often than not "people are done after their code hits production".
    - BlargMcLarg 3y ago
      That's not an excuse when the same thing happens the other way around: "Let's have discussions until 2 weeks before the deadline for something that needs 2 weeks of development time!" "..wait, why are we having performance issues? Why did we not think of this one case that's occurring every 5 seconds?" People are very eager to take article's example and use it to slam individuals they have a vendetta against, while looking away from the other extreme which has the exact same problem. Going too fast is a problem. So is going too slow and LARPing as a clairvoyant, getting close to a deadline and then business forces you to get disciplined and deliver something not battle-tested.

kanodiaayush 3y ago

Clickbait worked. You're not really saying that the less intelligent brains solve these problems less accurately.

andy_ppp 3y ago

I must be infinitely smart then?

sylware 3y ago

Common sense: it is expected that higher planes of reasoning have more complex neural connectomes, then takes more time.

tpoacher 3y ago

Aesop's fable of the cat and the fox comes to mind.

spacephysics 3y ago

Any number times 7 takes forever for me to do. Now I know it’s because I’m actually a super genius.

riccardomc 3y ago

It's amusing how in many accounts in the comments the authors assume they're endowed with an intelligent brain...

pessimizer 3y ago
It's about IQ, not "Intelligent Brains" which is editorial about the validity of IQ sneaking into the headline. It's not hard to know your IQ, there are tests.
- maximus-decimus 3y ago
  Or anybody who went to school and saw how well they learn compared to the average student should have an idea. IQ was originally meant as the predictor of how fast you learn after all.
ilyt 3y ago
Don't you know ? The sheer fact you're posting on HN and not say Reddit means you're in top 20%! /s
- sysstemlord 3y ago
  People should differentiate between introvert, knowledgeable, and intelligent. I most likely qualify for the first two but I wouldn't even begin to guess on how to know whether I'm in the third league.
  - davidjones332 3y ago
    [dead]
dagaci 3y ago
If the article is true I would assume that the most highly intelligent reader would have a great deal of difficulty commenting on the subject in a reasonable about of time, and would most likely end up short circuiting the effort in favour of doing something else …

engineer_22 3y ago

The conclusions of this study are based on simulated brains. The headline may therefore be misleading.

nu11ptr 3y ago

This is interesting, but not surprising when you think about it. My whole career I've noticed there are always people who think as soon as a problem is mentioned, it needs an instant solution - and they are quick to volunteer one. Others say "Hold on a moment, let's back up and start from the beginning". They are calm and methodical and careful to withhold their conclusion until all data is gathered, and have removed the impossibilities from the possible solution set. They usually are the ones to solve the problem in the end I've noticed.

nonethewiser 3y ago

More fuel for the Dunning-Krueger effect. (This is not to say its false)

codethief 3y ago

> To simulate the mechanisms of the human brain, Ritter and her team use digital data from brain scans like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as well as mathematical models based on theoretical knowledge about biological processes. This initially results in a “general” human brain model. The scientists then refine this model using data from individual people, thus creating “personalized brain models.” […] “We can reproduce the activity of individual brains very efficiently,” says Ritter. “We found out in the process that these in silico brains behave differently from one another – and in the same way as their biological counterparts. Our virtual avatars match the intellectual performance and reaction times of their biological analogues.” Huh, I hadn't heard of this before. Does anyone know more about how exactly those "in silico" brains work and how they compare to their real-world counterparts? I mean, the article makes it sound as if the researchers fully understood how the brain works and had managed to create a faithful digital copy, which I find difficult to believe. EDIT: The original paper says > To study neuronal processing in silico we created BNMs [brain network models] for the 650 subjects using a tuning algorithm that fits each participant’s simulated FC with their empirical FC (Figs. 2 and 3). The BNMs use coupled neural mass models to simulate the electric, synaptic, firing, and hemodynamic (fMRI) activity of a 379-nodes whole-brain network. Each node consists of one excitatory and one inhibitory population that mutually and recurrently interact. To simulate long-range white matter coupling, the neural masses were connected by each participant’s SC, which were estimated by dwMRI tractography. Importantly, we added feedforward inhibition to increase biological realism Sounds like they used small neural networks for simulation and adjusted the weights between the neurons to what they saw in participants' MRI measurements.

deleted 3y ago

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codethief 3y ago

* and the solution they come up with is correct more often. The article title refers to something that's been long known even in pop science since Daniel Kahnemann's "Thinking Fast and Slow". In fact, the original paper[0] even cites Daniel Kahnemann's work: > Simulation results indicate that decision-making speed is traded with accuracy, resembling influential theories from the fields of economy and psychology on fast and slow thinking. Kahnemann's work might be summarized (very roughly) as follows: "System 1" often quickly suggests an intuitive (and frequently wrong) answer, whereas "System 2" is the part that does the slower, more rational, and conscious thinking. "Intelligent" people tend to be those who control their System 1 and thus their urge for intuitive answers more effectively. And indeed this is what the article says, too: > Resting-state functional MRI scans showed that slower solvers had higher average functional connectivity, or temporal synchrony, between their brain regions. In personalized brain simulations of the 650 participants, the researchers could determine that brains with reduced functional connectivity 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 more challenging tasks, you have to store previous progress in working memory while you explore other solution paths and then integrate these into each other. This gathering of evidence for a particular solution may sometimes takes longer, but it also leads to better results. However, if I understand correctly, the thing about the research here that's actually novel is that they now have a better understanding of the neural processes underlying System 1 vs. System 2 ("we identified a mechanistic link between functional connectivity, intelligence, processing speed and brain synchrony for trading accuracy with speed in dependence of excitation-inhibition balance") and that they in fact simulated the brain digitally, see my other comment. [0]: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-38626-y https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-38626-y

VoodooJuJu 3y ago

Oh no wonder I'm so slow - I'm just too gosh darn intelligent!

booleandilemma 3y ago

I don't think we know what intelligence is or if it even exists as we conceive it.

felipelalli 3y ago

I feel

javajosh 3y ago

Good heavens, for 10 years after college I was having "aha" moments about physics and math. Looking back I don't see how it could have been any other way, and it's crazy to think you can recapitulate 300 years of science in 4 years into the brain of an 18-year-old. But we act like that's what we're doing. Maybe that's what phd programs and postdocs are really for, not so much learning more but letting what you did learn actually soak in.

Weryj 3y ago

What role could meditation play in modifying this waiting period to refine the output?

swayvil 3y ago

A smart guy creates 1, 2.. 10... solutions. Iterating and rehashing and rebuilding. That's how you explore the space. You can't expect a good solution before you've fully explored the space.

indus 3y ago

Interesting how much we know almost nothing about human brains. 1. Dunning Kruger in 1999 on overconfidence when unskilled. 2. Selection bias in favor of “quick thinkers” 3. Compounding effect of selection bias in capitalism—-often survivorship in decision making theories.

mrangle 3y ago

The article uses strange language to couch the results. Making an error isn't solving a problem at all. It should read that higher IQ leads to more reliable problem solving. Which would be less click-baity, admittedly. I understand why researchers would make the time variable the focus, but it isn't the story. Who would you want to be your airline pilot: the person who solves 70% of problems quicker or who solves close to 100% of the problems slower? The ability to error check has a time cost but also is of infinite value for any position of consequence.

egberts1 3y ago

Thats why insurance companies mandate aptitude test for law enforcement: liability is higher with "smarter" cops.

ganesh7 3y ago

I knew it. I take longer because I have an intelligent brain.

lobocinza 3y ago

See bossman that's why my deliveries are always late. /s