Students and lecturers leave all sorts of things in lecture theatres, including lecture notes, pens and water bottles, that accumulate around the edges like flotsam on the beach because no one wants to throw away something for which the owner might return.  A few weeks ago, I found the front page of a letter published in Nature which roused my curiosity. Its title was ‘Verbal and non-verbal intelligence changes in the teenage brain’.  My memories of my teenage years are almost uniformly bad; in part because I was unable to reproduce the academic promise that I had shown when I was younger and the pressure to do so was unrelenting.  I suspect that my experience is not uncommon and the research described in this letter offers a potential explanation for my inability to ace examinations regardless of how hard I tried.

The conventional understanding of human intellectual capacity is that it is constant during our life. However, the authors of this article have shown that the statistics, upon which this understanding is based, hide a variation in our teenage years; because some teenagers experience a reduction and some an increase in intellectual capacity, which leaves the population’s average unchanged.

In addition, using structural and functional imaging, they were able to correlate changes in verbal IQ with changes in grey matter density in a region of the brain activated by speech (the left motor cortex), and changes in non-verbal IQ with changes in grey matter density in regions activated by finger movements (the anterior cerebellum).

The timeline of the reported research does not extend far enough to establish whether or not the changes seen in teenagers is temporary; however, my anecdotal evidence suggests that might be the case.  I would conclude that the effort used to apply psychological pressure on teenagers to ace examinations might be better expended on piano lessons and piano practice to enhance sensorimotor skills which are strongly correlated to cognitive intelligence – but I suspect many parents have already worked that one out!

Source:

Ramsden S, Richardson FM, Josse G, Thomas MSC, Ellis C, Shakeshaft C, Seghier ML & Price CJ, Verbal and non-verbal intelligence changes in the teenage brain, Nature, 479:113-116, 2011.