Going to law school can be a life-changing
experience. A new research paper says just studying for the law school
entrance exam alters your brain structure—and could make you smarter.
Intensive
study for the Law School Admission Test reinforces circuits in the
brain and can bridge the gap between the right and left hemispheres,
according to neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley,
in findings reported last week in the online journal Frontiers in
Neuroanatomy.
Those changes can improve reasoning ability and may increase a person's IQ score, the researchers said.
The
research team performed brain scans on 24 college students and recent
graduates, both before and after they spent 100 hours studying for the
LSAT over a three-month period. The researchers also scanned 23 young
adults who didn't study for the test. For those who studied, the results
showed increased connectivity between the frontal lobes of the brain,
as well as between the frontal and parietal lobes, which are parts of
the brain associated with reasoning and thinking.
"The
fact that performance on the LSAT can be improved with practice is not
new," said lead researcher
Allyson Mackey,
a graduate student in UC Berkeley's Helen Wills Neuroscience
Institute. "What we were interested in is whether and how the brain
changes as a result of LSAT preparation—which we think is,
fundamentally, reasoning training. We wanted to show that the ability to
reason is malleable in adults."
The
study focused on fluid reasoning—the ability to tackle a novel
problem—which is a central part of IQ tests and can to some degree
predict academic performance or ability in demanding careers.
"People
assume that IQ tests measure some stable characteristic of an
individual, but we think this whole assumption is flawed," said
Silvia Bunge,
the study's senior author. "We think the skills measured by an IQ
test wax and wane over time depending on the individual's level of
cognitive activity."
John Gabrieli,
a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Massachusetts Institute
of Technology who wasn't involved in the study, said it shows "brain
pathways important for thinking and reasoning remain plastic in
adulthood."
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