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Education United Kingdom

Rocket Scientists and Brain Surgeons Aren't Necessarily More Clever, Study Finds (bbc.com) 195

Thelasko shares a report from the BBC: Considering a career in brain surgery or rocket science? It might well be within reach. Members of both professions aren't necessarily more clever than the general public, according to a study. Researchers asked 329 aerospace engineers and 72 neurosurgeons to complete a series of tasks to test their cognition. The results, published in the British Medical Journal, show few differences with members of the British public.

Professionals from both groups were assessed online in six cognitive domains, using a 'Great British Intelligence Test' originally devised at Imperial College, London. The test looked at areas like working memory, attention and emotion processing, and respondents were asked about their age, sex and industry experience. The results were then compared between both groups, and data previously gathered from 18,000 members of the British public. It found that neurosurgeons scored significantly higher than rocket scientists in semantic problem solving, like defining rare words. Aerospace engineers, meanwhile, performed better than their rivals when it came to attention, and to mental manipulation tasks like rotating images of objects in one's head. When compared with public scores, however, rocket scientists didn't show significant differences in any domains.

Neuroscientists, on the other hand, scored differently in only two areas: their problem solving speed was quicker, but their memory recall was slower. Researchers suggested this may be due to the "fast-paced nature of neurosurgery... or it could be, albeit less likely, a product of training for rapid decision-making in time-critical situations." "It is possible that both neurosurgeons and aerospace engineers are unnecessarily placed on a pedestal," the study reflected. "Other specialties might deserve to be on that pedestal, and future work should aim to determine the most deserving profession."

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Rocket Scientists and Brain Surgeons Aren't Necessarily More Clever, Study Finds

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  • Erm (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LeeLynx ( 6219816 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2021 @06:06AM (#62082133)

    "It is possible that both neurosurgeons and aerospace engineers are unnecessarily placed on a pedestal," the study reflected. "Other specialties might deserve to be on that pedestal, and future work should aim to determine the most deserving profession."

    Why do we need that pedestal, again?

    • Re:Erm (Score:5, Funny)

      by fazig ( 2909523 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2021 @06:10AM (#62082143)
      For convenient idioms, of course.
      It's not rocket science!
    • Why do we need that pedestal, again?

      To support an even higher pedestal of course. It ain't rocket surgery figuring that out.

    • Re:Erm (Score:4, Interesting)

      by MrKaos ( 858439 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2021 @07:55AM (#62082345) Journal

      Why do we need that pedestal, again?

      You're either put on the pedestal or the pedestal is put on you.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      For kids. Kids are all chasing the aspirational jobs, it motivates them to work hard at school. It can become a problem when a job they want, like say rocket scientist, appears to be far out of reach and unobtainable unless you happen to be born a genius.

      Side note, I always found the term rocket scientist a bit odd. Most of the people designing and building rockets are engineers. Rockets are an engineering challenge, the hard part is the implementation.

      • So setting an unnecessary set of expectations for a child, for them work to do what they think society wants them to do, only to spend a lot of time and money to get into a market that doesn't want them, because they are others who are much more into it then they are.

        My Facebook feeds, has high school friends who are struggling day to day, while in school they were saying they were going to be a Lawyer, Rock Star, Doctor... While the other students who were just focused on more humble jobs, are actually do

      • Side note, I always found the term rocket scientist a bit odd. Most of the people designing and building rockets are engineers. Rockets are an engineering challenge, the hard part is the implementation.

        A rocket scientist to a aerospace engineer would be the same as an architect to a civil engineer.
        The engineering can be tricky especially if the architect requires materials with new exotic
        characteristics but the first step is proving it can be done on paper.
        In many cases, once the technical requirements are hashed out, implementation is the easy part.
        You do always run into the case of reality making it harder than the theory though.

      • Re: Erm (Score:5, Insightful)

        by NagrothAgain ( 4130865 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2021 @12:35PM (#62083123)
        The question isn't why we put them on a pedestal, it's why the sudden effort to push them off it?
    • by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2021 @10:51AM (#62082765)

      We don't need to classify people as this job means you are a better person than people who work an other job.
      They are smart people and dumb people in every profession, dumb people can get the degrees, and all the paperwork to be "qualified" for a job. Smart people may have little interests in working such jobs.

      I am not a Medical Doctor, was it because I failed out of pre-med? or I just wasn't good enough at biology?... No, I don't like dealing with people that much, so being a Doctor never appealed to me for a profession. So I put my time and resources into learning Computer Science and Business to be a Software Architect in the Medical field. So in my job I often get MD's asking me to break things down more simply so they can understand, because there is only a small amount Math and Tech skills taught to be a MD, compared to Computer Science, so they don't realize the complexity of the job, that I usually make it seem like it is rather easy. However I am not qualified nor able to do more than basic First Aid skills. I only have a 10th grade education in Biology, I wouldn't be able to tell if someone has Gas or appendicitis.

      Sure while I have a Masters level education, I do not specialize in everything, so I will often will need to rely on people with say only an 8th grade education, who dropped out of school early on, perhaps took some vocational training, for their intellectual advice on things that they have specialized in doing. Recently I got a heat pump system installed. Beyond just the labor, they had pointed out some changes to the install that will make it more efficient and make the heat pump work more reliably, some of the changes weren't obvious to me, initially, but they had explained their experience of when it was installed they way I thought it should be failed.

      They are Dumb educated people, and smart uneducated people, they are also smart educated people and dumb uneducated people, however we tend to have gravitated towards specializing in doing some sort of work, in which their skills are unique and valuable. In general a Smart Person, is able to be really good in multiple things, while a dumb person is only good at a few things. A stupid person is good at a few things, but thinks they are really good at a lot of things.

      • by ufgrat ( 6245202 )

        I used to (and still do to a lesser extent) provide IT support at a major university's brain institute, and the running joke was "you can't say it's like brain surgery... THAT, they can do!".

    • Re:Erm (Score:5, Insightful)

      by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2021 @11:00AM (#62082805)
      You're just restating the intent of the study - to 'prove' that people on a pedestal aren't actually any different and there's no such thing as merit or talent. This flies in the face of the last couple centuries of findings [iqcomparisonsite.com] to the contrary, but, it seems a study can be performed to prove whatever you want, within the limits of the reader's ability to assess the quality of it.
  • by locater16 ( 2326718 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2021 @06:06AM (#62082135)
    Many doctors have the noted skill of "cramming for a test" without actually understanding what they're reading. The amount of people that have to keep going to different doctors till they fill out their "symptoms bingo card" is... disturbing. Similarly, to quote John Carmack "Rocket science has been mythologized all out of proportion to its true difficulty."
    • by JasterBobaMereel ( 1102861 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2021 @06:19AM (#62082149)

      Rocket Science when it was mythologised was difficult, it was something you had to get right first time, every time, with something that was working on the edge of the limits ...

      Now you can actually reliably design a rocket engine, it's complex but rarely done by one person, and simulated on computers with much more knowledge, it's still difficult but the rocket engineer is no longer a wizard who miraculously gets it right ...

      • by fazig ( 2909523 )
        As Carmack was mentioned and you mention the simulations.
        The people that came up with those kinds of 6 degrees of freedom simulations, which are also used in modern video game 3D engines, are some heroes to me.

        They have to deal with hypercomplex number math to make the 3 rotation axes work properly. A still common source of math induced headaches to me. The people that designed those engines have to make those concepts presentable in a way that's more naturally understood by the user.
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        it was something you had to get right first time, every time

        I don't think that's ever been the case with rockets. It's always been accepted that there will be failures along the way, and a lot of effort is put into making sure they happen on the ground in controlled circumstances.

        I suppose you might have a point about when there are crewed launches, the point at which all the issues need to have been resolved, but even then there were redundant systems and many unexpected failures that had to be worked around.

    • by Viol8 ( 599362 )

      There's science and then there's science. A lot of medical diagnosis is still a case of lick finger, stick in the air, order some tests, hope for a result, which pretty much anyone could do given enough training. OTOH not everyone can grok for example quantum mechanics and its associated mathematics no matter how hard they persevered at it.

      • by laughing_badger ( 628416 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2021 @07:19AM (#62082261) Homepage

        A lot of medical diagnosis is still a case of lick finger, stick in the...

        I really wondered where this sentence was going.

      • Unlike a lot of science and engineering, you don't have a reset, restore to factory conditions option, an easy replacement part, hot backup, or acceptable downtime threshold.

        Finding a root cause, may require taking parts out and putting them under a microscope, which will do more damage to the person.

        So most MDs will have a good amount of guess work, and try to figure out the safest options to try first, then go further until the point to where trying to find a cure to the problem is worse than the problem

    • Maybe so, but John Carmack's rocket company failed to make it to space, so there's that...

    • by tragedy ( 27079 )

      One thing to consider about doctors is that one of the filter courses for pre-med students is organic chemistry. Passing organic chemistry could potentially be done with a very deep understanding of the subject, but it's normally done with lots and lots of memorization. This is a generalization, but typically doctors do seem to have good memories (not sure about speed of memory) but they often also seem to be not great at math. Different specializations may also filter differently as well.

      As far as brain su

      • "and their variations have more to do with the challenge of those tasks than some sort of absolute brilliance required to do them"

        Especially in a world where the equations all had to be memorized and calculations performed by hand and wherein the vast majority of the population did not perform engineering or mathematics on a regular basis.

        My experience is that it tends to be less about the raw capability of the brain than how and how frequently it is used. Given the raw processing capacity of the brain it i
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      In my experience doctors try the most common, cheapest thing first and only bother investigating further if that doesn't work.

      What patients want is a Star Trek style full body level 3 diagnostic that correctly identifies the problem first time, but that's going to be expensive. Maybe we should think about making it affordable though.

      • by fazig ( 2909523 )
        If you frame it in terms of Star Trek technology, cost is not even the primary issue. The main issue is that we just don't have that Star Trek level technology in any sense.
        You can't just perform a full body MRI and CT scan and then quantify an entire person's biology.

        A lot of the methods that have to be used to get a greater degree of certainty are of an invasive nature that also always bring some risks with them besides of costing more money.

        Of course medical science has seen some amazing progress, u
      • There tend to be two very broad general classes of perspective out there.

        In one the problems of the world are due to limitations be they of resources, physical limits, human capacity, etc. Things are generally the best they can be, so far and in equilibrium without having gone so far askew in any area that it all collapses down and with such failures happening from time to time on a scale which can be absorbed while we all collectively work it all out.

        In the other everything would be perfect if not for inst
      • by tragedy ( 27079 )

        Considering how often doctors also seem to fall back on "if only this had been caught sooner we could have done something" it seems like maybe diagnosing early could actually save money. Then again, maybe that's just a platitude (one that seems like it should make patients feel worse, not better, really).

        What patients want is a Star Trek style full body level 3 diagnostic that correctly identifies the problem first time, but that's going to be expensive. Maybe we should think about making it affordable though.

        How possible making it affordable is probably depends a lot on how much of the cost is the actual work involved and materials required and how much is just the cost of the patented methods used for the test

    • Many doctors have the noted skill of "cramming for a test" without actually understanding what they're reading. The amount of people that have to keep going to different doctors till they fill out their "symptoms bingo card" is... disturbing. Similarly, to quote John Carmack "Rocket science has been mythologized all out of proportion to its true difficulty."

      Of course. It is engineering. But that isn't even the point IMO.

      It's an idiom for delicate and difficult work. Not unlike the old "They can put a man on the moon, but they can't (fill in whatever is annoying you at the moment)

      And brain surgery is largely a motor skill and some personality traits. delicate and difficult work.

      But some idiom will exist, so if it wasn't rockets or brain surgery, or even rocket surgery, something would come along.

      Let's try some ...

      It isn't orbital mechanics.

      It isn't qu

    • To get into Medical School requires pretty much perfect grades in Pre-Med. To get those may require as much social skill as academic. How many people who would have made great doctors were turned away because of a single 'B'?

    • That may be true - but it still puts them a large step above the huge number of mouth-breathers in the population barely capable of graduating high school.

      I'm deeply suspicious of any study that claims there's no significant difference in intelligence between doctors and engineers and the general public.

      • Just because you barely graduated high school, or didn't doesn't make you dumb, there can be many reasons for that.

  • Rocket scientists and brain surgeons may not be special but rocket surgeons are something else. It is a job so demanding that they couldn't find a single one to participate in the study.

    • Forget rocket surgeons, brain rockets are the really clever ones!
      • Forget rocket surgeons, brain rockets are the really clever ones!

        Brain rockets? You mean amyl nitrate?

    • Are those the people who have to figure out what went wrong after a rocket crash and burn? That has to be a tough job.

      • Are those the people who have to figure out what went wrong after a rocket crash and burn? That has to be a tough job.

        Kind of like figuring out airplane crashes. At least in the heavy duty detective work.

        Gotta be a huge endorphin buzz when you figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.

  • Ben Carson, Trump's housing secretary, proved that neurosurgeons can be significantly more idiotic than even your typical college dropout.

    • https://www.pbs.org/newshour/p... [pbs.org]

      Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson on Thursday stood by his belief that Egypt’s great pyramids were built by the biblical figure Joseph to store grain — not as tombs for pharaohs.

      Trump put him in charge of HUD. Best and brightest after all...

  • Neither are nerds who claim to be autistic and "don't care about feelings" or social issues.
  • by mwvdlee ( 775178 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2021 @07:17AM (#62082253) Homepage

    Researchers suggested [...] "Other specialties might deserve to be on that pedestal, and future work should aim to determine the most deserving profession."

    Next news release; "Researches find they themselves deserve to be on the pedestal".

    • by xalqor ( 6762950 )
      Yeah that sentence was bothersome. Do they not have enough pedestals or something? I prefer to just appreciate everyone for what they accomplish. Doesn't cost anything.
  • by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak @ y a h o o.com> on Wednesday December 15, 2021 @07:49AM (#62082337) Homepage Journal

    First, the test doesn't test all aspects of intelligence. No single test can because we don't really understand what intelligence is. We rely on known specific tasks being hard to define it, but intelligence utilized by specific professions may involve unknown specific tasks that are hard. Systems Analysts, when developing early weak AI and expert systems, discovered many skills experts were utilizing but never realized they were. These days, weak AI is strong enough to figure some tasks out but it's so convoluted that we can't then identify what those tasks are.

    So we don't know what we're supposed to measure, here.

    We can circumvent this, but it requires the use of high-end research MRI. In studies of London taxi drivers trained in the Knowledge, there were structural changes to the brain that could be measured that were absent in any similar drivers who lacked the Knowledge. That shows that this skill does require a very specific form of intelligence -- but that it arises because of being trained. Any innate difference is minor compared to the difference resulting from the training. In highly skilled polyglots and highly skilled fine artists, you also see neurological changes resulting from the application of intelligence.

    If you use this approach, then you'd see the impact of the utilized intelligence but unless you do a before-and-after, you won't see how clever the person was to start with. You ONLY see how intelligent the person became as a result of utilizing the skill.

    So, the second flaw is that the study didn't look at the brain, it only looked at a subjective, flawed test.

    Third, we're told that there's no real difference. But what do they mean by this? They seem woolly on whether they just mean the mean, or whether the distributions were compared and found to match. I'd want to see a more thorough description of what analysis they did and what analysis was missing from the assessment. This distribution, though, cannot be of the overall scores. You'd need to look at the distribution in each measured skill area.

    A classic stereotype is the socially-oblivious, absent-minded professor. Their average overall intelligence will be low because it's minimal in so many areas, even though in the key area they're a specialist in their intelligence is very high. But this kind of special interest intelligence also requires that a skill-differentiating intelligence test you use doesn't mask this peak by looking at skills incorrectly Incorrect boundaries will smudge the signal you're looking for. Some of the time, that's fine. The difference will be enough to tell you that there is a signal there even if you can't really get to grips with what it was telling you. In other cases, however, it'll smudge to the point of being indistinguishable from the noise.

    Imagine you were trying to identify whether a sound sample was a piece of classical music (the form of intelligence person X knows about) but you were trying to perform this analysis over only five seconds, sampled using a single channel 8 bit ADC at a rate of one sample per second. Your odds of success even of identifying that it is music at all are not very good, are they? You simply don't have sufficient information.

    But that's about the same amount of information you're going to get from one of these intelligence tests. If intelligence can arise not only from individual parts of the brain but interactions between those parts, factoring in that the two hemispheres won't necessarily be performing the same role, the number of possible forms of intelligence vastly outstrips the number of different forms of music that exist.

    This is one reason I'm a big fan of looking at mechanisms. You're never going to be able to build a test that can look for a signal in every possible form of intelligence, there are too many. What you CAN do, though, is look at the mechanisms in the brain, hypothesize what that brain is likely good or bad at, and then test your hypothesis. So you would get totally non-standardized qualitative measures rather than directly comparable quantitative measures, but at least you'd see if the signals you're expecting to see actually exist.

  • Tall poppy syndrome describes aspects of a culture where people of high status are resented, attacked, cut down or criticised because their achievements make them stand out from their peers.
  • I have skimmed the whole comment thread and I don't think this has been posted yet.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • This was just a study to make people feel good about themselves. Of course rocket scientists and brain surgeons are smarter than the average person. They're just not necessarily smarter than your average chess grand master or maybe a thoracic surgeon. Or even a decent medicinal chemist. But Fox News and the New York Post are making a big deal out of this. We know rocket scientists and brain surgeons are way smarter than their readers.
  • If the tests rather boring, then the smartest people will become disinterested more quickly.

  • "Rocket Science" is a catch-phrase/proverb. It's obvious that you can't be a dimwitt when doing any kind of real science, but it's also obvious that "rocket scientists" and brain surgeons whilst obviously not being dumb are first and foremost ultra-highly specialized - which is why they are used as colloquial synonym for "being smart".

    Nobody needs a study to assess this.

  • Psychologists have been measuring this stuff for decades and the generally accepted approach is a combination of the Five Factor Model and IQ. IQ tests have been around since around 1900 (tested on all US Army recruits since then) and, like them or hate them, no one has managed to find a more accurate way of measuring problem solving ability. As a general rule an individual needs to be at least a standard deviation above the average to have the ability to get a degree, and slightly higher for a science or e
    • Psychologists know that IQ tests measure your ability to do IQ tests ... ...All the other tests measure thing that Psychologists think might be important ... but are guessing ..and are not even sure exactly what they measure

      • There is a (from memory) 0.5 to 0.7 correlation between IQ score and high achievement. Combine with Conscientiousness and the correlation greater. IQ tests are very relevant to the US Army and have been for over 100 years. If you don't attain a high enough IQ in their tests you don't get in. Historically, no army has been particularly choosy about who gets to dodge bullets and kill for their country so why throw in an intelligence barrier and lose out on intake? My guess would be that the army realised that
  • It does not take a rocket scientist to figure that out.

  • They aren't more clever or they aren't cleverer? I can't decide.
    • by quenda ( 644621 )

      They aren't more clever or they aren't cleverer? I can't decide.

      It depends on your dialect and pronunciation. For Americans, "more clever" is better.
      For non-rhotic Brits or Australians, who pronounce it "cleva", "cleverer" sounds OK.

      Did I just show how cleverer I was?

  • The human brain can get very good at the tasks we train ourselves to do but not at the ones we don't. If you get good at algebra it doesn't make you good at chess or music. Check out the research on transfer appropriate processing.
    • It's arguable that highly specialized people spend most of their time thinking about or studying their domain and might develop deficiencies in their general knowledge.
  • He was top of his field. He supervised his own appendectomy under a local anesthetic and using a mirror. He was a complete idiot in other fields.

    For example, his wife was quite short. Had a Mercedes two door roadster of some model. Couldn't see over the dash very well. So he elevated her seat by installing wood 4x4s. If she'd had a significant accident (this was long before air bags), those would have sheared and she would have been loose inside the passenger compartment. What was needed was for t
    • My wife is a PhD astrophysicist/astronomer, brilliant in her field, absolute bollocks in others

      . . . being that she's your wife, we're going to measure your intelligence/cleverness based on if you've ever told her that or not. :D

    • by Vanyle ( 5553318 )

      Why would you want to supervise your own appendectomy? This is a very routine surgery with minimal risks. This shows only distrust in his operating doctor and speaks against his own skill in reviewing his work.

  • Internet Poster.

    It takes incredible creativity and intelligence to spend your time on on the internet, critiquing and commenting on what other people are actually out there doing!

     

  • I don't know if's a metric of intelligence or cleverness per-se . . . I know a lot of smart people who struggled with it in college.

    Then again, I know a lot of smart people that avoided it and saved a lot of time . . .

    Go back to the guy who said we need to have idioms and that's probably it.
  • In my experience, those with a huge depth of knowledge tended to have less ability to properly make use of it. They could see all of the trees but couldn't see the forest through it.
  • They might do skull thinning or expose parts of the cortex. They might steer patch clamps under microscopy but that is done with stages.

    This article seems to think neuroscientists are neurosurgeons, when in fact those two professions are totally different.

    What a shite article.

  • The reason why these two things are often referenced is the result is the culmination of a lot of effort (costly) and the results can be horrible (billions $$ or death). Sayings like "Its not rocket science" just means you don't have to go over the numbers 10 times and risk that something might blow up or you may cut the wrong section of brain out.

  • by DrLudicrous ( 607375 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2021 @01:01PM (#62083237) Homepage
    Let the physicists take it. They'll probably flunk out the emotional processing tests and ace the rest.
  • I look at intelligence, perhaps in a different way than most do, I'll explain below:

    A persons ability to use the tools, knowledge the person has acquired over the years to the best of his/her abilities, defines their intelligence.
    It's all about problem solving, and not ready knowledge.

    It's based on our ability to solve problems with your existing knowledge, not things you have learned to do by reading a book with pre-defined answers, but things that you are faced with that has no readily available answers t

  • ..is competence on the job.
    Intelligence tests are limited and not very useful.
    Rotating objects and defining rare words are not what working professionals do

  • IQ tests for all their flaws correlate with future earnings better than other tests. They don't measure empathy and other emotional indicators simply because these aren't generally particularly valuable traits economically.
    However there has been significant pressure on standardized testings methodologies to measure a wider range of attributes to make testing more inclusive and to find value across wider segments of society.
    However fundamentally many of these traits aren't finding indicators of value so whil

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