1. Is There a Correlation Between the Number of Brain Cells and IQ?
- Author
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Thomas W. Teasdale, Mikkel V. Olesen, Nicharatch Songthawornpong, and Bente Pakkenberg
- Subjects
Male ,Cognitive Neuroscience ,Intelligence ,050109 social psychology ,Stereology ,Biology ,Cerebral Ventricles ,Correlation ,White matter ,03 medical and health sciences ,Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience ,0302 clinical medicine ,cell numbers ,medicine ,Humans ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,human brain ,Børge Priens Prøve (BPP) ,Intelligence Tests ,Neurons ,Neocortex ,Microglia ,Intelligence quotient ,AcademicSubjects/SCI01870 ,05 social sciences ,Brain ,Human brain ,Oligodendroglia ,medicine.anatomical_structure ,nervous system ,Astrocytes ,stereology ,Original Article ,Neuron ,intelligence quotient ,Neuroscience ,030217 neurology & neurosurgery - Abstract
Our access to a unique material of postmortem brains obtained from decades of data collection enabled a stereological analysis of the neuron numbers and correlation of results with individual premorbid intelligence quotient (IQ) data. In our sample of 50 brains from men, we find that IQ does not correlate with the number of brain cells in the human neocortex and was only weakly correlated to brain weight. Our stereological examination extended to measures of several other parameters that might be of relevance to intelligence, including numbers of cerebral glial cells (astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, and microglia) and the volume of key areas in the gray and white matter and of the cerebral ventricles, also showing near-zero nonsignificant correlations to IQ.
- Published
- 2020