It might not be rocket science, but researchers have found that 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 about their age, sex and levels of experience in their specialty.
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 than the general population.
“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 decisionmaking in time-critical situations,” the researchers said.
The study was, in part, carried out to lay to rest the question of whether one of the professions had the intellectual upper hand — a tension made famous by the Mitchell and Webb sketch in which a swaggering neurosurgeon is slapped down by an aerospace expert who says: “Brain surgery ... it’s not exactly rocket science is it?”
However, the team found few differences between the cognitive abilities of aerospace engineers and neuroscientists, although the results suggest the former had higher scores for attention and mental manipulation — such as rotating objects in one’s head — while neurosurgeons showed higher scores in semantic problem-solving — such as definitions of rare words.
It might be best to ditch rocket science and brain surgery idioms for phases like: “It’s a walk in the park,” the researchers said.
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