Here’s an interesting idea, and one I’m in a position to test to boot!

Over several iterations of performing a simple motor task, an interesting pattern of activity occurs in the frontal cortex of the brain: the amount of activity diminishes with each iteration until a certain threshold is reached, indicating what appears to be motor learning behavior. It’s more or less linear, but I believe that the slope differs between subjects.

Now, my hypothesis is this: that the motor rate from a simple motor task could in fact be used to estimate the rapidity of motor learning in general. In other words, if I could stick you in an fMRI scanner for a few seconds and have you twiddle your thumbs, I could predict how fast you would be able to type or how long it would take you to learn to play the piano, for example.

But that’s only the beginning: that this is taking place in the frontal lobe rather than the cerebellum suggests that the processing may be somewhat unified with the process of normal cognitive learning, and thus may be a form of intelligence.

So can we build an IQ test from this? Maybe. I’m going to perform some quick experiments on data that we already have at the lab as soon as I can. Since I don’t have test data from the subjects, the initial analysis will be clustering, but if that succeeds, I may attempt to test them and perform regression.

If both of these hypotheses are true, Gardener’s theory of multiple intelligences may need to be amended.