Smarter brains take longer to solve problems says new study

Do smart people think faster than the rest of us when they’re trying to solve complicated problems? This was a question researchers at the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité tried to solve in a recent international study and they came up with a surprising answer. 

It wasn’t just researchers at the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité University Berlin that wanted to figure out how quickly smart people think, there was also a collaborator from the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, and together the researchers got answers. 

“We want to understand how the brain’s decision-making processes work and why different people make different decisions,” said Professor Petra Ritter, the Head of the Brain Simulation Section at the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité.

Researchers noted in their study that there has been a long-held belief that intelligent people think faster and pointed out there were strong correlations between reaction times and intellectual performance that have shaped intelligence research for decades. 

However, in a study the researchers published in the journal Nature Communications, they demonstrated that the scientific community's understanding of how intelligence used their brains was wrong. Smarter people don’t always think faster based on their findings. 

The researchers developed a specialized learning algorithm so they could build models of personalized brain networks for 650 participants of their Human Connectome Project. Using these networks, they studied how people thought when solving different problems.

Surprisingly, people who were classified as having higher intelligence took more time to solve difficult problems than people who were not as intelligent. Slower solvers also had a higher average functional brain connectivity, which the researchers linked to intelligence. 

“With simulations we identified a mechanistic link between functional connectivity, intelligence, processing speed and brain synchrony for trading accuracy with speed in dependence of excitation-inhibition balance,” the study’s authors wrote in their paper. 

The bit about synchrony is very important because it essentially means how the human brain forms functional networks and that explains why people who are more intelligent take longer to solve difficult problems, they’re storing data while exploring other options. 

“In more challenging tasks, you have to store previous progress in working memory while you explore other solution paths and then integrate these into each other,” lead author of the study Michael Schriner explained in a news release on the research. 

“This gathering of evidence for a particular solution may sometimes take longer, but it also leads to better results,” Schriner continued, adding that the model they developed could show the whole process of decision-making down to the granular neural groups. 

Slower brains turned out to be more synchronized according to the news release of the research and this is what allowed their frontal lobes to pause, which let them consider other solutions to complicated problems longer than less sophisticated brains could. 

Petra Ritter noted that when synchronization in the brain is reduced, its decision-making circuits jump to conclusions faster while individuals with higher synchronization between their brain regions allow them to better integrate evidence from their working memory. 

Essentially, people with lower intelligence jump to conclusions without considering all the facts and more intelligent people will take the time required to consider everything they know about a complicated problem before deciding on an answer to the issue. 

“Intuitively this is not so surprising: if you have more time and consider more evidence, you invest more in problem-solving and come up with better solutions,” Ritter explained. 

Ritter added the research not only showed that “performance differences are a consequence of the dynamic principles in personalized brain network models,” but also noted they presented “new evidence that challenges a common notion about human intelligence.”