Scientists tie 52 genes to human intelligence

Scientists tie 52 genes to human intelligence

In a significant advance in the study of mental ability, a team of European and American scientists said Monday that they had identified 52 genes linked to intelligence in nearly 80,000 people.

[...] the findings could make it possible to begin new experiments into the biological basis of reasoning and problem-solving, experts said.

For over a century, psychologists have studied intelligence by asking people questions.

In a typical test, the tasks might include imagining an object rotating, picking out a shape to complete a figure, and then pressing a button as fast as possible whenever a particular type of word appears.

Brain size explains a small part of the variation, for example, although there are plenty of people with small brains who score higher than others with bigger brains.

Danielle Posthuma, a geneticist at Vrije University Amsterdam and senior author of the new paper, first became interested in the study of intelligence in the 1990s.

[...] all of these genes account for just a small percentage of the variation in intelligence test scores, the researchers found; each variant raises or lowers IQ by only a small fraction of a point.