Brain scans may help find your ideal job

LONDON - Forget tests and career councillors, a brain scan may soon be the best way to discover your ideal job.

Neuroscientists will soon be able to pinpoint your talents by just looking at the landscape of your mind.

They are slowly mapping the brain so they can match particular areas to particular skills and knowledge, reports The Telegraph.

The so-called “psychometric assessments” could also show how good you are with your hands and whether you have any “super talents”.

The latest research by the University of California scanned the brains of more than 6,000 volunteers and compared the brain map with the results of battery of eight cognitive tests to see if there was a correlation between brain and aptitude.

These findings were published in the journal BMC Research Notes.

The researchers found the amount of grey matter, parts of the brain used for computations, the part used for communication and where they were positioned, seemed to indicate how good you are at a number of tasks including mathematics, learning and remembering facts and figures.

The parts of the brain at the root of intelligence are called Brodmann areas.

Those with good speed of reasoning and memory from the tests were found to have large amounts of grey matter - special tissues packed with nerve cells - in the Brodmann areas.

Richard Haier, professor and psychologist at the University of California who led the research, said: “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.”

The researchers discovered that men and women - although scoring the same results in IQ and other tests - had different brain make-ups which suggests that intelligence was not always linked to physical size of different parts of the mind.