“What would we expect to find if we examined the brain scans of people with high versus average IQ scores? We might picture the active brain of an Einstein as a hotbed of smoldering colors ”but we’d be wrong. Neurologist Richard Restak summarized a UCLA study that compared individuals with high IQs to those with average IQs. Restak wrote, The researchers started off with the seemingly reasonable idea that ‘smarter brains work harder, generate more energy, and consume more glucose. Like light bulbs, the brains of bright people were expected to illuminate more intensely than those of dimwits with a reduced wattage. What they discovered instead was exactly the opposite. Higher IQ people had cooler, more subdued brain scans “while their less intellectually gifted counterparts lit up like miniature Christmas trees..
Why would smarter brains work less hard? One strong bet is that when we are inexperienced ”when we still have a lot to learn we have to make a conscious effort to think about what we’re doing. But later, after we’ve become more adept, much of what initially took effort becomes automatic.”
Madeleine Van Hecke, et al in their book, “The Brain Advantage.”
In effect, it seems that high IQ people are able to more easily filter the signal from the noise, knowing what information to process to derive an outcome without need to process all the other spurious thoughts.
You could say that the OSS equivalent is represented by the smarter ways of picking out insights from the deluge of data collected by our suite of systems. It is in the domains of alarm and performance management where cooler OSS brain scans are required [Ed. Where cooler heads prevail??]. Techniques such as Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF), k-means clustering, pattern matching, statistical correlation and other machine learning techniques offer great promise for filtering out the important events from the unimportant (as described in this video from Moogsoft).
Just don’t ask me to explain how any of these techniques actually work. Unfortunately my brain scans would be showing up in reds and yellows rather than the cool blues of high IQ people!