Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums GT Research The Nature and Nurture of High IQ

Well, the thing is, though, they shouldn't if there is a direct correlation between their measure of "plasticity" and cortical thickening. The latter has been shown to absolutely correlate with high IQ, and no need to chop the tails off of the distribution, either.

What I am wondering, though, is if they wanted to show a bimodal distribution with increasing frequency with increasing IQ, and the tail interfered with that hypothesis significantly because... they weren't really measuring a different developmental phenomenon the way they are proposing. This plasticity theory is the teacher's pet right now, but honestly, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that there are plenty of things wrong with it, too. Enrichment alone doesn't make NT kids PG, no matter how much we'd like for it to be so.


Could be it's a measurement problem, and therefore an artifact, and that the inclusion of the tails makes it crystal clear that the correlation doesn't hold up.

What I meant, in case it was unclear, was that people with high IQs are probably drawn to more complex environments and more complex environments may alter brain structure, and a resulting difference in the brain might have nothing to do with high IQ directly and more to do with environment chosen based on high IQ.

I know one of the co-authors, and since he leads the local journal club, we should be able to persuade him to include this paper in the journal club discussion when journal club resumes with the new school year.

I guess anywhere but here 124 would be considered high IQ.