Neuroscience of Intelligence

Hi All,

This week in PSY327 we discussed the neuroscientific techniques of elucidating biological mechanisms of intelligence. PET scans and fMRI imaging were brought up as analytic instruments to visualize brain morphology and dynamics. However powerful and high resolution these devices are they fail to reveal the dynamics on the signal neuronal level. All data retrieved from these techniques are markers of neuronal activity rather than neuronal activity itself. Scientist have seemed to disregard this and accept that these are markers of neuron activity for the sake of practicality.
However, I would advocate for mass postmortem anatomical/protein/genetic studies of disease state brains and compare them to relevant clinical data of the live patients. (You could have standards of brain tissue atrophy and develop a predictive system which can decipher the previous in vivo version of the brain). This type of study would reveal structural characteristics of the brain which could be used to predict functional capacities of each brain variant. This type of approach may yield less data than PET and MRI technologies; however, the information gathered will be more powerful in the long term. The current paradigms plaguing neuroscience should be altered and replaced with practical techniques which can have influence on the field of neuroscience.
Thoughts???

Until my next post,

Ryan