NEWS
People who score high on intelligence tests are also good at keeping time, new Swedish research shows. The team that carried out the study also suggests that accuracy in timing is important to the brain processes responsible for problem solving and reasoning.
Researchers at Umeå University and Karolinska Insitutet in Sweden have now demonstrated a correlation between general intelligence and the ability to tap out a simple regular rhythm. They stress that the task subjects performed had nothing to do with any musical rhythmic sense but simply measured the capacity for rhythmic accuracy. Those who scored highest on intelligence tests also had least variation in the regular rhythm they tapped out in the experiment.
"It’s interesting as the task didn’t involve any kind of problem solving," says Fredrik Ullén, Karolinska Institutet, who led the study with Guy Madison at Umeå University. "Irregularity of timing probably arises at a more fundamental biological level owing to a kind of noise in brain activity."
For the study, 34 right-handed men aged between 19 and 49 were recruited randomly via a newspaper advertisement. According to Fredrik Ullén, the results suggest that the rhythmic accuracy in brain activity observable when the person just maintains a steady beat is also important to the problem-solving capacity that is measured with intelligence tests. "We know that accuracy at millisecond level in neuronal activity is critical to information processing and learning processes," he says.
Additionally, they demonstrated a correlation between high intelligence, a good ability to keep time, and a high volume of the “white matter” in the parts of the brain’s frontal lobes involved in problem solving, planning and managing time.
Essentially, this research discredits the old theory that drummers are not the most intellectual members of society. "All in all, this suggests that a factor of what we call intelligence has a biological basis in the number of nerve fibres in the prefrontal lobe and the stability of neuronal activity that this provides," says Fredrik Ullén.
Publication: "Intelligence and variability in a simple timing task share neural substrates in the prefrontal white matter", Fredrik Ullén, Lea Forsman, Örjan Blom, Anke Karabanov and Guy Madison, The Journal of Neuroscience, 16 April 2008.
For further information, please contact:
Guy Madison, Associate Professor Umeå University, Department of Psychology Phone: +46 (0)90-786 64 01 E-mail: guy.madison@psy.umu.se
Fredrik Ullén, Associate Professor Karolinska Insitutet, Department of Woman and Child Health Phone: +46 (0)8-517 773 55 E-mail: fredrik.ullen@ki.se
