Sept. 18, 2007 — Rex Jung says researchers need to understand how the brain is put together to better understand how it unravels.
To that end, Jung — a research scientist at the Mind Research Network — and psychology professor Richard Haier of the University of California Irvine's School of Medicine scoured the neuroscience literature and analyzed studies of reasoning and measures of intelligence to put together a theoretical model aimed at letting researchers study intelligence in a more systematic way.
There's a lot of interest in measuring intelligence and how people solve tasks that require reasoning, said Jung.
"The terms intelligence and IQ are just so infused in our culture. ... We like to know fundamentally how our brains differ from others," he said.
Intelligence — the capacity of the brain to function well in a given setting — can be affected by such diseases as schizophrenia or Alzheimer's.
"Understanding how the brain produces intelligent behavior may allow us to address the cognitive decline associated with some of these devastating diseases," Jung said.
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Jung and Haier, looking at the network of gray and white matter that comprises human intelligence, concluded there is significant consistency in brain structure and function related to intelligence.
From their review, they created the Parieto-Frontal Integration Theory, or P-FIT, which Jung said is the first testable, physical model of where intelligence resides in the human brain and what neural factors might affect cognitive performance.
