Scientists Scan My Brain to See If I’m a Genius

if you got your brain scanned today what would it reveal about you what would it say the other day i got an invitation to a windowless office building in downtown manhattan to get a quantitative electroencephalogram which is designed to measure brainwave patterns as electrical signals it is being increasingly used to analyze various aspects of brain function including things like cognitive flexibility intelligence and even creativity then i'll be jumping on a call with the neuroscientist andrew hill who has a phd in cognitive neuroscience from ucla he is going to analyze my brain and the results honestly shocked me peak brain institute oh hi you must be monica yes nice to meet you for the brain scan yes okay so just tell me what to do so i put this on so the first step was a 15-minute test designed to measure my stamina attention and focus involving responding to a series of changing numbers both visual and audio it was exhausting i really got in the zone with that test i was like look at the numbers then it was time to get wired up for the brain scan this isn't gonna hurt is it i'm like so nervous right now i'm going to hold it here okay do a lot of people do this yes like people come here all the time like being like hey i'm going to get my brain mapped today yes so this cap is going to like detect my brain waves so it contains a series of electrodes that measure the strength of brain waves in different areas of the brain and also connectivity among different regions of the brain so like you could tell whether somebody's like smart or not it's actually a little more complicated than that but there is a bunch of research that actually says it does oh i'm so nervous i feel like this is gonna really reveal my true nature xiaoma exposed by brain scan is the title of this video but like what kind of people would like want to do this well i guess i'm doing it so maybe a lot of finance people athletes maybe i literally felt like i was in the matrix as monica hooked my brain up to a machine that would beam my brainwave data straight to her laptop so this is going to be able to tell how many languages i actually speak i'm gonna answer that question once and for all for everybody's always wanted to know how many languages do you really speak this is science guys okay although that looks like a big needle and it is a big needle oh my god i can feel it oh no oh so it's gel it's just like a jelly kind of feeling electro gel yeah so it's for conducting the electricity better you know people always ask like oh you know xiaomi you must be so smart to learn these languages i'm like is that really i think it's really just more a matter of like how much time you put into it and yeah exactly like anything so the first scan is with eyes closed so your brain waves aren't disturbed by too much visual sensation ready so what what did my brain my hair look like tired you're tired tired yeah me really whoa this is pretty crazy it's creepy like you could bring it read my mind tell me all my secrets for the next portion i had to keep my eyes open but to minimize movement i had to literally stare at a bottle of hand sanitizer for five minutes without blinking no blinking for five minutes i mean i want to avoid coving as much as the next guy but come on we're done all right great i'm uh i'm excited to see what the results say hello sir hi andrew i thought it might be fun to look at your brain since you're always in the process of pushing your brain around and see what it can take and i was curious uh what we would see can i just say i'm like super nervous right now it's like going to expose me right like xiaomi exposed a little bit a little bit so we have two things here for you we have your performance which is that really fun test you did where the computer said one and two a bunch of times and you have your brain which shows how unusual your brain is but start here in the performance which is the executive function where the average score like most age match stuff is a hundred plus or minus 15 points is the typical range now attention is how well you can click successfully when that one popped up that you were supposed to hit the response controls how well you can not click when the distractor the two popped up so you're well above average for self-control okay you're not reactive or impulsive control yeah you're matt you do statistically you're way above average okay um the auditory system is actually much higher than that one and a half standard deviations better than average and the bars which i'll explain in a minute the sub scales are pretty flat pretty level so you're very efficient you can use this extremely high powered auditory performance the same no matter how you're feeling you're stressed or tired or hungry or angry it won't matter so much you can still stick with it in a really interesting way and not become reactive or distractible or miss stuff you know in conversations it's a it's a bit of a superpower whatever the opposite of adhd is you have that for auditory system processing like dramatically your one and a half standard deviations above average this was 440 trials of attention performance by the way great you're typical for visual but most of that's because you have good stamina with it you're managing it pretty well but i'm just kind of like brute forcing i'm not really really like exactly special there i use that term sometimes yeah good stamina yeah you can tell that your visual system isn't able to be as careful or as prudent it can't be a selective so it gets a bit more like squirrel you know and your auditory does not now on this side how well you can activate this is the get this is the gas pedal the spotlight the grabbing stuff and the one came up how well you can click your speed's a bit slow my attention isn't so great but i can maintain focus on something boring you should be better at being alert than being bored oh so you think there's something like holding me back yes yes so i think we're seeing bottlenecks here and after i've seen your brain i have a sense of which they are you're really tired so my conclusion from the intelligence test results is that my brain really isn't that special i'm just good at focusing on boring stuff but let's see if that changes with the brain scan results my hunch is that you have bilateral language both hemispheres which is unusual for a man maybe there's a combination early in life or maybe you just developed it because you love language or maybe language did this to you you know what is what does bilateral language mean the language in each hemisphere most humans have mostly language production left hemisphere in terms of the words we use the average person average human a man boy who is older than about 11 can't learn a new phoneme can't hear a new sound the brains pruned away phonemes that were not present in languages earlier in life that's why you can inoculate a kid by having listened to 100 hours of tv show what you know with subtitles don't learn mandarin or don't learn you know farsi or whatever but just have them watch the cartoon or the kids tv show for a few seasons and you'll inoculate them against losing the phonemes later in life which keeps them speaking like a native person in some ways i mean if i had to if i had to kind of like you know rank order the things that i that i have you know natural talent in probably an ability to imitate accents and speech patterns would be on the top of the list yeah that's that's that's uh the the non-verbal aspects of language the porosity the tonality yep the lilt the rhythm comes from the opposite side of the brain the analog to vertices area on the right hand side is where that comes from your wiring with your hemispheres the way these two areas were on the back are probably a little different than average um just based on how you work with language because you shouldn't be able to absorb new uh accents in with phonemes the way you do this is your brain and it's the the frequencies of your brain waves and this is the bell curve for the amounts of brain waves let's assume about one plus or minus is typically weird good job be weird and outside that range things may get in the way they don't necessarily but let's use that as our threshold a lot of what i noticed looking at your brain was really two features maybe three one is there's lots of slow brain waves in the back of the head here now the eyes are closed so if you open the eyes oh you actually wake it up in the back of the head mostly but not completely this may be why the visual system has those slight consistency and stamina because it's a bit tired your eyes are open here eo the back of the brain the visual system is a little tired so the consequence probably of something else is making you not be as rested but even eyes open we see these midline structures the front midline the back midline are making little extra alpha waves they're struggling to make beta waves these particular circuits are involved at the overlap of attention and stress in some ways so if you're driving your car you get distracted for a second the posterior ceiling kicks into gear and goes ah watch the road if your brain learns the world is not especially predictable or sometimes safe it'll cramp up that evaluator a little bit in the back and people often experience some rumination from this so i would hypothesize my my first guess for you that might be significant i would guess that you chew on stuff in your mind and it's hard to put things down 100 unpleasant okay yeah so there it is you see here this light blue suggested a little fatigued actually your eyes are open here as well your brain's like give me a minute man a little tired sometimes you know yeah this is not how you're feeling the night before this is like weeks and you know it's a trait not a state essentially right yeah i'm tired all the time yeah i'm sorry to hear that but i'm glad we're seeing it because we get a sense of how it works we also get some connectivity patterns down here for the link gears page so i'm seeing a lot of beta information connectivity called coherent so it's talking to itself scaling on the lines is line thickness so you can see for instance about three standard deviations above average is this thick line so some places where your beta waves are kind of locked together a little bit front midline and then back behind the right ear they're kind of talking to each other a lot more than it's typical we also see that there's this i want to talk about this for a second this connectivity stuff um so bait is activated i mentioned the back mid line as a visceral kind of chewing on things the front mid line appears to be activated as well um when that one gets stuck people get things stuck in their head i would guess you have songs playing in your head you bite your nail something obsessive this also might represent a mild tick or something i have a hunch that a tiny bit of a blink tick is showing up represented by um like when you get stressed or maybe a stutter or something you know it's that kind of mild little little timing thing showing up is my guess here or maybe you're actually a little bit obsessive i don't know maybe it's bigger than i think uh but that seems to be a thing yeah i um i i don't have any tics but i have the behavior that would lead to ticks i'm my i'm extremely obsessive um and when i was younger i had i did many things that you could characterize as ocd got it we also have behind the right ear there's a big structure there called the tpj so people that have a hot right tpj will often have a few features that go along with it and the first is i bet you're a little bit of a princess and the p with sensory information i bet you can't ignore anything in the environment everything gets in that's so true it's so true i mean like i'm like an incredibly light sleeper like the slightest thing oh yeah but this is also like you hate your friends chewing around you and you notice like the dog 17 houses away oh yeah 100 100 yeah 100 okay um let's see what else we can see here this is kind of creepy right i can see screaming this is weird yeah all right let's go to here which is how fast your brain is um we don't know how fast your brain is because you're so tired you're running at half speed so i will be able to tell you about how your your native speed a bunch about your natural resources after your sleep gets sorted out but the sleep print stuff is clouding all the speeds here and you're a little sluggish running a little slow but if this was happening in me who's older than you this alpha is slowing down i'd be having word finding issues and tip of the tongue phenomena and hunting for names and words and stuff like that i'll be talking and then all of a sudden like if i'm not really paying attention i'll just like pause and just like forget what i was saying in the previous you know first half of the sentence your brain is not getting good delta good deep sleep dream less sleep you'll probably find you're getting 15 minutes to half an hour of deep sleep at night facing these numbers and you need more like an hour and a half minimum maybe maybe two hours for someone like you um this suggests when you're asleep your brain's actually aware of the world yeah and and not getting good deep sleep not feeling your bucket and so therefore when you're awake you're kind of half asleep so you're too awake you're too awake when you're asleep and asleep when you're awake based on yes yeah i take naps during the day because i'm just so tired uh here's ratios at the end ratios will throw things into more great relief and mostly you have the back midline visceral worry in the back right sensory like rawness the sensory integration difficulty or the princess and the peace syndrome that i call it where you can't ignore anything coming in from the outside world um this can also produce a touch of social anxiety because social information gets loud as well people's faces can get loud emotionally almost but you know this is a gifted kind of cluster too people were extra sensory stuff even unusual auditory processing stuff that comes along with a gifted kind of brain so once you have better sleep uh deep sleep then we will see these alpha waves come up in speed significantly so my conclusion is that while my brain may have certain advantages that help with language processing they're offset by massive oversensitivity that leads to poor sleep and greatly slows me down so my brain might actually be special but just in the wrong direction sounds like i need to get better sleep is the conclusion yeah i would recommend you get a sleep tracker of some sort like an aura ring o-u-r-a or a whoop strap w-h-o-o-p those are probably the two good ones that will measure the heart rate variability as a way of staging sleep but i i the point the point was not to sell you services or equipment was to be like wait a minute i bet i know what that guy's brain looks like and i was kind of curious and i was kind of right i expected to see this this is what i talked about in my message to you i was like i wonder if you have that kind of caught in high gear i was obliquely kind of referring to that piece of it because i thought i saw it a little bit in your mannerisms which means that you have this high powered brain that you can tune a tiny bit and retain all of that but not have it like drive you so i was you know i was excited to show you that basically wow it's so interesting thank you [Music] you