I’m starting to feel a bit sorry for HBD deniers. Their world is crumbling.
Brain scans from people sitting doing nothing explain 20% of the variation in IQ (hat-tip to Steve Hsu)
Press release:
In a new study, researchers from Caltech, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and the University of Salerno show that their new computing tool can predict a person’s intelligence from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of their resting state brain activity. Functional MRI develops a map of brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow to specific brain regions. In other words, an individual’s intelligence can be gleaned from patterns of activity in their brain when they’re not doing or thinking anything in particular—no math problems, no vocabulary quizzes, no puzzles.
“We found if we just have people lie in the scanner and do nothing while we measure the pattern of activity in their brain, we can use the data to predict their intelligence,” says Ralph Adolphs (PhD ’92), Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Biology, and director and Allen V. C. Davis and Lenabelle Davis Leadership Chair of the Caltech Brain Imaging Center.
To train their algorithm on the complex patterns of activity in the human brain, Adolphs and his team used data collected by the Human Connectome Project (HCP), a scientific endeavor funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that seeks to improve understanding of the many connections in the human brain. Adolphs and his colleagues downloaded the brain scans and intelligence scores from almost 900 individuals who had participated in the HCP, fed these into their algorithm, and set it to work.
After processing the data, the team’s algorithm was able to predict intelligence at statistically significant levels across these 900 subjects, says Julien Dubois (PhD ’13), a postdoctoral fellow at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. But there is a lot of room for improvement, he adds. The scans are coarse and noisy measures of what is actually happening in the brain, and a lot of potentially useful information is still being discarded.
“The information that we derive from the brain measurements can be used to account for about 20 percent of the variance in intelligence we observed in our subjects,” Dubois says. “We are doing very well, but we are still quite far from being able to match the results of hour-long intelligence tests, like the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale,”
Dubois also points out a sort of philosophical conundrum inherent in the work. “Since the algorithm is trained on intelligence scores to begin with, how do we know that the intelligence scores are correct?” The researchers addressed this issue by extracting a more precise estimate of intelligence across 10 different cognitive tasks that the subjects had taken, not only from an IQ test. …
Paper:
A distributed brain network predicts general intelligence from resting-state human neuroimaging data
Individual people differ in their ability to reason, solve problems, think abstractly, plan and learn. A reliable measure of this general ability, also known as intelligence, can be derived from scores across a diverse set of cognitive tasks. There is great interest in understanding the neural underpinnings of individual differences in intelligence, since it is the single best predictor of long-term life success, and since individual differences in a similar broad ability are found across animal species. The most replicated neural correlate of human intelligence to date is total brain volume. However, this coarse morphometric correlate gives no insights into mechanisms; it says little about function. Here we ask whether measurements of the activity of the resting brain (resting-state fMRI) might also carry information about intelligence. We used the final release of the Young Adult Human Connectome Project dataset (N=884 subjects after exclusions), providing a full hour of resting-state fMRI per subject; controlled for gender, age, and brain volume; and derived a reliable estimate of general intelligence from scores on multiple cognitive tasks. Using a cross-validated predictive framework, we predicted 20% of the variance in general intelligence in the sampled population from their resting-state fMRI data. Interestingly, no single anatomical structure or network was responsible or necessary for this prediction, which instead relied on redundant information distributed across the brain.
But what makes this all the more remarkable is that the study controlled for brain size.
As I’ve blogged about before, brain size itself is known to explain 16% of the variation in IQ (perhaps 20% when you control for gender as many studies don’t), and because brain size was controlled, any IQ variation explained by brain size is independent of the 20% variation explained by brain activity.
So does this mean that by scanning both brain size and brain activity, they can explain perhaps 40% of IQ variation (20% + 20%)? If so a composite neurological score consisting of both brain size and brain activity would correlate 0.63 with IQ (the square root of 40% of the variance).
Of course none of this proves IQ is genetic, but what it may prove is that IQ is largely biological.
Or does it?
Here we get into the philosophically tricky distinction between culture and biology. Arthur Jensen has stated that g (general intelligence) appears to be a wholly biological variable, not amenable to psychological manipulation.
But how do we interpret Jensen’s claim when all psychology is ultimately biological. Even if one asserts that IQ tests measure only middle class knowledge, that in itself must leave a neurobiological imprint, as all learning does. If so, machine learning should eventually be able to scan your brain to determine whether you took French class in high school or read Hamlet, should it not?
So if culture itself affects brain physiology, what does it even mean for g to not be amenable to psychological manipulation? I think it means variation in g must be caused by biological variation (genes, nutrition etc) and not by cultural variation. Overall brain size is probably not much influenced by culture (except for in extreme pathological cases) but I don’t know about brain activity.
Pumpkin Person 
My theory is that (g) is the cooperation of the front and back brain working together. The macro connectivity (white matter) would reflect the variance in (g). Macro connectivity would be genetically influenced. Front and back would be executive function and perception. Of course, mental stimulation increases development of (g)
not only may the conditional expectation be non-linear, but even if it is the linear the least squares method of estimating it is inappropriate unless the conditional variance is the same at all values of the predictor variable.
see “constant variance” under “assumptions”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_regression#Assumptions
Off-topic
But one of the strategies low math IQ people use is to become experts on all the ways that math might hypothetically be inappropriate
[redacted by pp, july 13, 2018]
SAT takers are not a random sample. thus…
1. spearman’s rho is close to meaningless.
2. what did you say? ah yes! 31% of SAT test taker scored at or above 134.
the deal is people are very bad at estimating their IQs because they are surrounded by people with IQs similar to themselves.
dumb people will tend to overestimate and smart people underestimate.
SAT takers are not a sample. At the high end, they are 100% of Americans capable of scoring high on the SAT (Harvard is a sample of high SAT people). So if all Americans (including high school dropouts) took both the SAT and the Raven, and we expressed all their scores as normalized Z scores relative to the complete U.S. distribution for their age and placed it on one huge scatter plot, the degree to which high SAT people regress to the U.S. mean on the Raven would be a proxy for the slope of the regression line, which assuming a bivariate normal distribution equals the correlation (in the total U.S. population)
31% of the high SAT people may have scored 134+ on the Raven, but the median was still just 120 (before correcting for old norms). Though I agree it’s a bit anomalous that so many should have scored 134+ given the 120 median.
The regression doesn’t imply to keep the sd identical. It would make sense that sd grows because you mix people who succeeded because they were bright and others because of an infinity of other reasons (preparation, taking the test x times etc). So having 31%!of 134 instead of 17% is not anomalous .
…but even if it is
thelinear the least…“But how do we interpret Jensen’s claim when all psychology is ultimately biological”
Psychology doesn’t reduce to biology. (Psychology also isn’t applied chemistry; reductionism is false).
“”Even if one asserts that IQ tests measure only middle class knowledge, that in itself must leave a neurobiological imprint, as all learning does.”
Test-taking is an action.
“If so, machine learning should eventually be able to scan your brain to determine whether you took French class in high school or read Hamlet, should it not?”
Nope.
Bad try at rebutting my argument.
“I think it means variation in g must be caused by biological variation (genes”
If ‘g’ is a mental ability, then genes underdetermine ‘g’.
rr your “argument” is just a religious assertion (biology can’t cause psychology) and whatever conclusions fall naturally from that.
It’s creationism.
The human mind could not have evolved under your paradigm.
As Carl Sagon said:
“The beauty of a thing is not the atoms, but the way those atoms art put together.”
RR thinks you can divorce the thing from its atoms.
He believes you can have psychology without the biology. Things without atoms.
“The human mind could not have evolved under your paradigm”
That’s the point. The mind cannot be selected because it is not physical. That’s also a point the “Creationist” Nagle makes in his book Mind and Cosmos.
The mind cannot be naturally selected because there are no psychophysical laws.
So when are you joining the priesthood?
Biology cannot be reduced to psychology because there are no psychophysical laws. It’s also applied chemistry.
Antireductionism isn’t “religious”. Saying the mental isn’t reducible to the physical (a form of antireductionism) doesn’t mean that one is “religious” of making “religious arguments”.
Yes it does.
The mental is irreducible to the physical.
Prove it
Davidson’s argument against psychological and psychophysical laws.
The Kripke-Wittgenstein rule-following argument.
http://wab.uib.no/agora/tools/alws/collection-8-issue-1-article-43.annotate
Reductionism and naturalism are false. Those arguments ( and many more) refute psychophysical reductionism and naturalism.
No one’s gona read all that, RR. You need to reduce your arguments to soundbites if you want to convince anyone.
Psychological concepts do not fit into any type of lawlike generalizations about human behavior.
P1) To explain psychological events, we need to rely on terms like “desire”, “rationality”, “consistency”, and “coherence”
P2) If there were a lawlike account of psychological events, we would need to dispense with such concepts since they are external impositions on the events.
P3) We can’t dispense with such concepts when discussing psychological events.
C) Therefore psychophysical laws don’t exist
P1) For psychological events to be reduced to physical descriptions, there would have to be physical equivalents to terms like “rationality”, “consistency”, “desire”
P2) No such physical equivalents of these terms (and other psychological terms) exist
C) Thus, psychological terms described as physical events (when using the language of psychology) cannot be reduced to physical explanations
That the irreducibility of the mental to the physical has been established by the arguments presented means that psychological traits cannot be genetically inherited.
P1) In order for psychological traits to be genetically inherited, laws are required linking mental events under their mental descriptions and physical events under their physical descriptions
P2) No such laws exist
C) Therefore psychological traits cannot be inherited
Ultimately, the mind cannot be selected for because there are no psychophysical laws.
P1) For psychological events to be reduced to physical descriptions, there would have to be physical equivalents to terms like “rationality”, “consistency”, “desire”
P2) No such physical equivalents of these terms (and other psychological terms) exist
How do you know there are no physical equivalents of these terms? The human brain is the most complex known object in the universe so the default assumption is we just can’t understand its physicality.
That’s irrelevant.
I know there are no physical equivalents of those terms because mental states don’t reduce to physical states. We can know everything about the brain but even if we knew everything about the brain, we wouldn’t know everything about the mind.
Psychophysical reductionism is false.
I know there are no physical equivalents of those terms because mental states don’t reduce to physical states.
Circular logic. This is what your argument is supposed to prove, not the premise it rests on. You’re a dog chasing its own tail.
I showed the proofs.
Your proofs rested on false premises such as physical analogs to mental states not existing. How do you know?
“As Carl Sagon said:
“The beauty of a thing is not the atoms, but the way those atoms art put together.””
That’s a nice antireductionist quote.
Think of sunburn. Sunburn is caused by the action of the sun. Thus, no completed physics would use the concept, since part of the explanation of the state (sunburn) is built into the characterization of the state; you can imagine 2 states of two different skins which are identical in every way, but one skin has sunburn and the other doesn’t.
You can then think of two people in the same physical (brain) state but one is thinking of X and the other of Y. The only hope for identifying mental properties with physical properties or a lawlike connection between the two would entail that mental properties supervene on physical properties. But supervenience is an unassessable thesis—that is, there is no way to determine whether two people have the same mental states because self-reports are consistent with having no mental states at all.
The meanings of expressions cannot be tied in a lawlike way to specific neural configurations.The mental is normative—that’s why it’s irreducible to physical structure. (Psychology cannot be reduced to physics.)
“Saying the mental isn’t reducible to the physical (a form of antireductionism) doesn’t mean that one is “religious” of making “religious arguments”.”
Since your arguments are the same as Intelligent designers(God of the gaps, irreducible complexity), then how are they any less fallacious?
“Thus, no completed physics would use the concept, since part of the explanation of the state (sunburn) is built into the characterization of the state”
Right, that only changes the scope of explanation though, that doesn’t make it incommensurate. Seriously Check out Rob west’s thesis. I can link it again if you want.
“You can then think of two people in the same physical (brain) state but one is thinking of X and the other of Y.”
LOL no. Someone thinking X will always have a different brain pattern then someone thinking of Y. However, 2 people who are both thinking X can have different brain states, that’s only because neurons move in populations not as individuals.
” But supervenience is an unassessable thesis”
Supervenience is necessary in an emergent or holistic system.
“The mental is normative”
Can you actually give me one example of a mental state that I can not explain Neurophysically?
“Since your arguments are the same as Intelligent designers(God of the gaps, irreducible complexity), then how are they any less fallacious?”
The arguments are sound. Guilt by “association.”
“Someone thinking X will always have a different brain pattern then someone thinking of Y. However, 2 people who are both thinking X can have different brain states, that’s only because neurons move in populations not as individuals.”
Good to know we agree that mental states are irreducible to brain states.
“Supervenience is necessary in an emergent or holistic system.”
”But supervenience is an unassessable thesis”
“Can you actually give me one example of a mental state that I can not explain Neurophysically?”
All of them, since mental states are irreducible to physical (brain) states. Beliefs, desires. A mental state is a mental condition which connects the agent with a proposition. An intentional mental state is a mental state that is “about” something or carries information. Mental states are irreducible to physical states.
You can then think of two people in the same physical (brain) state but one is thinking of X and the other of Y. The only hope for identifying mental properties with physical properties or a lawlike connection between the two would entail that mental properties supervene on physical properties. But supervenience is an unassessable thesis—that is, there is no way to determine whether two people have the same mental states because self-reports are consistent with having no mental states at all.
That means we can’t PROVE the mental states are caused by physical states.
This is different from saying mental states are irreducible to physical states which is what you’ve been saying.
The first statement is agnostic, the second is dogma.
If you want to call out evolutionists for relying on an assumption, that’s legit, but it’s not legit to assert the assumption is wrong, because that’s just an assumption on your part.
Rr i didn’t think you go that far because they are plenty of data that show that the mind is a product of the brain like brain damage. And the genes build the brain through the proteins.
“Guilt by “association.””
No. Creationist arguments are not fallacious because they are creationists, they’re fallacious because they are arguments from ignorance. Since your arguments are the exact same, they are also fallacious and your conclusions are also wrong.
“Good to know we agree that mental states are irreducible to brain states.”
That’s not what those statements mean. If you actually extrapolated that from them, then you truly do not have any idea what you’re talking about.
“”But supervenience is an unassessable thesis””
Are you making another god of the gaps argument or are you saying the systems do not rely on supervenience?
“All of them”
No. i said give me one example. Go ahead I’ve been dying to demonstrate your stupidity even further.
[redacted by pp, July 13, 2018]
if one’s “true score” were 150 the probability he would score 125 on a test with a g-loading of .72 would be 14.53%.
uncommon but not THAT uncommon.
Not that uncommon at all
and g-loading depends on…
1. the battery
2. the population
would be surprising if any “official IQ test” had a g-loading >= .72 on the global population and irrespective of (comparison) battery.
…he would score 125…or lower…
swank showed his autism in believing that my dad is dead.
i’m in the midst of arranging for his brain to be preserved…waiting for a call from UCLA.
the brain person was very intent on getting this set up before the end of the day in case he died over the weekend…as he is scheduled to be cremated.
my dad would like that. his whole brain preserved.
you joked that he died in surgery while transitioning into a South Asian. Maybe swank thought you were hiding your grief behind humor?
grief?
i would’ve killed him myself if i were sure to get away with it.
in case peepee didn’t get it.
I AM HUGH LYGON!
ONE THING ALL SMART PEOPLE DO IS ASK IF THEIR UNDERSTANDING IS STUPID.
NO MATTER HOW SURE YOU ARE THERE’S STILL A CHANCE THERE’S SOMETHING YUGE YOU’VE MISSED…
OR…
YOUR WHOLE FRAME OF REFERENCE IS BULLSHIT.
HEGEL KNOWS.
jesus, he looks like an old dyke…
anyone who has lived long enough in this world and reflected on his own thinking is a hegelian.
that’s not just a “turn of phrase”. i MEAN that babe.
the YUGE problem with hegel (for monolingual proles like myself and 90+% of north americans) is that his translators suck!
he only has 2: miller and bailey.
i mean REALLY SUCK!
or so i have read.
the Gita is translated well enough. but NOT The Phenomenology.
Aesthetics dont lie.
You can take your life cues from Enlightenment Ellen Degeneras though.
law school professor <<< mugabe.
the fact that someone like Hegel is thought of as a genius for recognizing that one’s place in the fishbowl will hamper his ‘bird’s eye view’ of the fishbowl and that one must create an entirely different frame of reference to even attempt to construct the latter viewpoint just shows how retarded most people are and lost to ideology.
the vanity of enlightenment philosophy is entertaining….
meticulous