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posted by chromas on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:55AM   Printer-friendly

What the brains of people with excellent general knowledge look like: Some people seem to have an answer to every general knowledge question; why?

The brains of people with excellent general knowledge are particularly efficiently wired.

[...] The researchers examined the brains of 324 men and women with a special form of magnetic resonance imaging called diffusion tensor imaging. This makes it possible to reconstruct the pathways of nerve fibres and thus gain an insight into the structural network properties of the brain. By means of mathematical algorithms, the researchers assigned an individual value to the brain of each participant, which reflected the efficiency of his or her structural fibre network.

The participants also completed a general knowledge test called the Bochum Knowledge Test, which was developed in Bochum by Dr. Rüdiger Hossiep. It is comprised of over 300 questions from various fields of knowledge such as art and architecture or biology and chemistry. The team led by Erhan Genç finally investigated whether the efficiency of structural networking is associated with the amount of general knowledge stored.

The result: People with a very efficient fibre network had more general knowledge than those with less efficient structural networking.

The Neural Architecture of General Knowledge. European Journal of Personality, 2019; DOI: 10.1002/per.2217


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday August 01 2019, @12:39PM (6 children)

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Thursday August 01 2019, @12:39PM (#873975) Homepage Journal

    Would help to better define "general knowledge" as well. Like I consider my chemistry, physics, law, literature, non-musical art, and medicine rudimentary at best but I can build a house from the ground up (everything included) that'll last a hundred years or more, forge a knife, catch a fish, repair a car, paint a car, program anything you can provide the relevant docs for (and some shit you can't), cook most anything I can find a recipe for or make up a recipe on the fly, do things with meat and a wood fire that would make angels weep, and enough on top of that to have my hands numb and unusable for a week if I tried to type them all out. I doubt academia types would consider me to have much in the way of general knowledge though, even though I know a hell of a lot more actually useful things, and the theory behind them, than they do.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:27PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:27PM (#873994)

    Your humblebrag hit a nerve with some smooth brained idiot.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:44PM (1 child)

      by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:44PM (#874007) Homepage Journal

      Apparently, and it wasn't even meant as a brag. Plenty of people from the plains area of the nation know how to do a hell of a lot of things just because you have to when paying to have X done isn't an option. My breadth of knowledge isn't anything special out there.

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      • (Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Thursday August 01 2019, @03:48PM

        by Hyperturtle (2824) on Thursday August 01 2019, @03:48PM (#874068)

        I think not looking up how to do something on youtube is becoming a dying artform.

        People that amass enough general knowledge to win at trivia and word games without always having to refer to a search engine first are becoming harder to find.

        (I've found that in some cases, finding schematics or how-to documentation not in the form of some guy in a shaky video is also hard to find as well...so. +1 to all those people that don't mind learning how something works so they can maybe fix it or improve it later if it's broke...)
         

  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:18PM (2 children)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:18PM (#874091) Journal

    I have my doubts about that "last 100 years". The models you're basing around had better lumber to work with. Also if you're going to claim to make that fish-hook, did you dig the ore and forge the metal from it? (Blacksmiths *did* during the middle ages, so this isn't a totally unreasonable request.)

    Your point that "general knowledge" needs defining is quite reasonable, though, as my guess is that they focused heavily on verbal knowledge. And probably not the kind that would let you win at "Trivial Pursuit".

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    • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday August 02 2019, @03:00AM

      by Reziac (2489) on Friday August 02 2019, @03:00AM (#874450) Homepage

      You can make a fishhook from a piece of bone or even a wood splinter -- anything that can be swallowed and gets stuck inside the fish..

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    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday August 02 2019, @11:04AM

      You don't need especially wonderful lumber to work with to manage a hundred years. You just need to follow best practices, not cut any corners, and take it if an opportunity arises to do a bit of overkill. Mind you, you also need residents who are going to do the proper upkeep (clean gutters regularly, new shingles when needed, etc..).

      Yeah, I actually could make my own metal fishing hooks all the way from ore. I'm not going to though. The Roomie has an unholy fascination with doing things the old way or from absolute scratch. I want to know how to but after I learn I'm going to go with modern convenience unless it gains me something significant to do otherwise.

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