New AI tool can tell your IQ from brain scan

Washington DC: Scientists have developed an artificial intelligence system that can tell how smart a person is just by looking at a scan of the individual's brain.

Researchers from California Institute of Technology, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and the University of Salerno in the US show that their new computing tool can predict a person's intelligence from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of their resting state brain activity.

Functional MRI develops a map of brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow to specific brain regions.

In other words, an individual's intelligence can be gleaned from patterns of activity in their brain when they are not doing or thinking anything in particular.

"We found if we just have people lie in the scanner and do nothing while we measure the pattern of activity in their brain, we can use the data to predict their intelligence," said Ralph Adolphs from Caltech.

To train their algorithm on the complex patterns of activity in the human brain, researchers fed the brain scans and intelligence scores from almost 900 individuals into their algorithm, and set it to work.

After processing the data, the algorithm was able to predict intelligence at statistically significant levels across these 900 subjects, said Julien Dubois, a postdoctoral fellow at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.