Mind Games with the Stroop Effect

If you've seen one brain, you've seen them all, right? Not really. The brain might appear identical to all of us with an untrained eye, but to a brain surgeon they can see differences in size, shape and structure between people.

In the 18th and 19th Centuries, phrenology was developed as a claim that intelligence correlated directly with brain size. But we have since come to understand things are not so simple. Plenty of highly intelligent people have had smaller heads than others who had larger heads. But, in the 1960s, neuroscientist Norman Geschwind found a correlation between the size of the planum temporale and someone's verbal abilities. MRIs later showed how cerebral structures can be correlated to specific functionality, like social skills or spatial reasoning.

I posted new research months ago that demonstrate there are changes in the brain shape that correlate with specific qualities of personality, like the Big 5 of the five-factor model (FFM). Thickness, area and the amount of folding in certain brain regions seems to be directly related to differences in personality, like neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness. Phrenology might be bogus in totality, but the notion of how brains are structured differently relates to differences between people has proven to be valid.

Without MRIs, differences in brains can be intimated through cognitive tests. P. Thomas Schoenemann did a study in 1998 where he compared women with different prefrontal cortex sizes. Women with larger cortices tended to show greater proficiency in filtering out previously learned information in order to complete a new task. This study correlated evidence that the prefrontal cortex was important for extracting meaningful and relevant information from complex environmental stimulus that is damaged in certain injuries.

One such test is based on how ingrained learning through reading can conflict with visual classification. This is a test many have probably already tried, where you have to say the visual color of written words of different colors that are colored differently than the words themselves. The written word blue is not colored blue, but yellow, red, or green, etc. This is called the Stroop effect which demonstrates the interference in reaction times of a task, named after John Ridley Stroop published this effect in 1935.

Try it out, and record how much time it took to go through the whole list:

Apparently, if you're between 20 and 59, the average score is 55 seconds to say the correct colors being shown, not written. Being above that time means you might have a smaller prefrontal cortex, and being lower means you might have a larger prefrontal cortex. For those 61 to 74 years old, the average is 71 seconds, while those over 75 years old average 78 seconds.

But this is only one test, and some people are better at some cognitive tasks than others. This test only shows 20% of the total prefrontal cortex differences people can have among each other. The use of functionality in the brain is like a muscle, where practice and exercise improve the performance. Getting better at cognitive skills is doable.

The same goes for learning how to think, learning about logic, logical fallacies, cognitive biases, etc. The more we are aware and use that awareness to analyze, discern and diagnose reality around us, the better we get at it.

---

Thank you for your time and attention! I appreciate the knowledge reaching more people. Take care. Peace.

---

References:

• Does Your Brain Measure Up?, Discover Mind Games, Spring 2017

---

_{If you appreciate and value the content, please consider:
Upvoting ,    Sharing or   Reblogging below.}

_{me for more content to come!}

_{Looking to contact me? Find me on Discord or send me a message on SteemKURE.}

---

_{Please consider supporting me as a Steem Witness by voting for me at the bottom of the Witness page; or just click on the upvote button if I am in the top 50:}

_{If you are unsure how to vote for witnesses, you can put my name in the "SET PROXY" section at the bottom of the Witness Voting page which will use my witness votes.}

---

2017-03-24, 3:57pm