A team at Utrecht University has found that the most efficiently wired brains belong to the most intelligent people—a finding that suggests that improving this efficiency with drugs could offer a tantalising means of boosting IQ. According to lead scientist Martijn van den Heuvel, “The concept of a networked brain isn’t so different from the transportation grids used by cars and planes.

“If you’re flying from New York to Amsterdam, you can do it in a direct flight. It’s much more effective than going from New York, then to Washington, and then to Amsterdam. It’s exactly the same idea in the brain.” In fact, the scientists have based their findings on an analysis of 19 people—an 8-minute-long snapshots of the brains of the people were taken, as they did nothing in particular, the New Scientist reported.

After mapping the communications between tiny slivers of brain, measured by an fMRI machine, the team found that the subjects’ brains did not go completely quiet. The scientists reasoned that any brain activity they measured represented underlying connectivity between brain regions, near and far. This allowed them to build connectivity networks for each volunteer, and to measure the efficiency of each network.

source: PTI