Highly intelligent, highly different
Highly intelligent children’s brains have different growth patterns, according to researchers who have analyzed a series of imaging scans collected since 1989 and reported in Nature on March 30. Brain scans from 307 children in Bethesda, Md., have been regularly taken using magnetic resonance imaging) starting in 1989. The project began under Dr. Judith Rapoport of the National Institute of Mental Health; Philip Shaw, Dr. Jay Giedd and others at the NIMH and at McGill University in Montreal have recently analyzed the data.
According to Scans Show Different Growth for Intelligent Brains in yesterday’s New York Times, the researchers “… looked at changes in the thickness of the cerebral cortex, the thin sheet of neurons that clads the outer surface of the brain and is the seat of many higher mental processes.” It was found that
…parts of the frontal lobe of the cortex are larger in people with high I.Q.’s. Looking at highly intelligent 7-year-olds, the researchers said they were surprised to find that the cortex was thinner than in a comparison group of children of average intelligence.
It was only in following the scans as the children grew older that the dynamism of the developing brain became evident………
“One interpretation, Dr. Rapoport said, is that the brains of highly intelligent children are more plastic or changeable, swinging through a higher trajectory of cortical thickening and thinning than occurs in average children.”
Charlie is smart–is probably extremely intelligent—and tests in the lowest percentiles on standardized tests. I believe that his cognitive and neurological wiring causes him to have supreme difficulties in processing sensory and other information, from language, to colors and the distances between objects; to the whole sensory, physical world.
I can’t prove it. But presuming competence and, even more, at-least average intelligence in Charlie as his best teachers and ABA therapists do, makes all the difference.
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POSTED IN: Neuroscience, Science
4 opinions for Highly intelligent, highly different
zilari
Mar 31, 2006 at 9:45 pm
I was given an IQ test, one of the popular ones, at age 4. My scores on some of the subsections were decent, but others were squarely in the range referred to as “retarded”. Something like “lower than 25th percentile” retarded.
I am extremely skeptical of any set of tests that presume to define a person’s potential. All it tests is a person’s potential to perform on that test. It scares me that some people would use such tests as a means to pigeonhole someone for life into a particular echelon of society, or caste of intellect, or any sort of false categorization of that nature.
One comment made by the examiner when I took that first IQ test was that I didn’t seem to understand the point of the test…that I didn’t see why I “should” have to perform the tasks a certain way, as directed, whether I thought I could do them or not. I’m sure this is common in many people on the autism spectrum.
I also think, from what I’ve read, that Charlie is very, very smart.
kristina
Apr 4, 2006 at 4:49 pm
Once Charlie performed—as expected, as I gathered from speaking to the examiner—in the “lowest percentile,” the word I kept hearing was “functional” as in his score on the test was the nail in the coffin about his education.
Actually, we had long heard the word “functional” ascribed to Charlie, in regard to weary attempts by special ed teachers and aides to teach him to sight-read. Charlie was given words like “door” and “office” to learn—what kind of functional is that for a child, who knows the door is a door without a label, and why should he know office?
Thank you!
Phil Schwarz
Apr 6, 2006 at 5:54 pm
There was a 100 point difference between the IQ scores I tested at, at age 7, and those my son Jeremy tested at, at age 7. I am a couple of Nobel prizes short of what my score supposedly implied about my potential, and Jeremy has well exceeded the corresponding implications of his score about his potential.
The scores mean nothing but an indictment of the testing instrument. IQ tests do not predict anything beyond how well an individual is likely to do on further such tests.
Kristina Chew, PhD
Apr 6, 2006 at 8:46 pm
I tremble at Charlie’s next spar with the test!
And the difference between him and me…..did you say 100 points…..
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