It may not be rocket science, but researchers have found aerospace engineers and brain surgeons are not necessarily brighter than the general population.
Researchers examined data from an international cohort of 329 aerospace engineers and 72 neurosurgeons who completed 12 tasks online using the Great British Intelligence Test (GBIT) from the Cognitron platform, as well as answering questions around their age, sex and levels of experience in their speciality.
The tasks examined various aspects of cognition, including planning and reasoning, working memory, attention, and emotion processing abilities. The researchers then compared the results against those previously gathered from more than 18,000 members of the British public.
The findings, which were published in the festive edition of the BMJ, reveal that only neurosurgeons showed a significant difference, with quicker problem-solving speed but slower memory recall compared with the general population.
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“The difference in problem-solving speed exhibited by neurosurgeons might arise from the fast-paced nature of neurosurgery, which attracts those with a pre-existing flair for rapid processing, or it could be, albeit less likely, a product of training for rapid decision-making in time-critical situations,” the researchers noted.
