Brain scans could help you choose a career

WASHINGTON - Researchers are questioning the possibility of brain scans guiding a person in his/her choice of career.

General aptitude tests and specific mental ability tests are important tools for vocational guidance. And if performance on such tests is based on differences in brain structure, maybe brain scans can reveal to a person his choice of work.

Richard Haier, from the University of California, USA, and his team compared brain networks identified using scores on broad cognitive ability tests to those identified by using specific cognitive tests to determine whether these relatively broad and narrow approaches yield similar results.

Using MRI, the researchers correlated gray matter with independent ability factors like general intelligence and reasoning.

They found that, in general, the grey matter correlates for the broad and narrow test types were different.

“A person’s pattern of cognitive strengths and weaknesses is related to their brain structure, so there is a possibility that brain scans could provide unique information that would be helpful for vocational choice. Our current results form a basis to investigate this further,” said Haeir.

The study is published in the open access journal BMC Research Notes. (ANI)