Study Suggests Brain Scans Could Help Guide Career Choices

(July 21) -- Those much-maligned high school career tests could one day get a major revamp. Instead of pencil and paper, though, the tests would use brain scans to offer more useful vocational tips.

A new study, published in BMC Research Notes by a team out of the University of California, investigates the connection between eight different tests often used by career counselors and gray matter in the brain.

"Individual differences in cognitive abilities provide information that is valuable for vocational guidance," lead researcher Richard Haier said. "There is some debate, however, as to whether results on individual tests of specific abilities may be more helpful than results on tests of broader factors, like general intelligence."

The team used MRI scans to determine which brain areas were implicated in a host of different "ability factors" like analytical reasoning, memory skills and spatial awareness. They then linked those brain areas to individual test scores, completed by 40 study participants.

Their conclusion? Gray matter offers an accurate indicator of how someone will score on tests of cognitive strengths and weaknesses, and also provide a more precise analysis than tests of general intelligence.

How swiftly you can reason, for example, wouldn't come down to arithmetic or logic puzzles. Instead, it would be evaluated based on an MRI of the activity in your "posterior cingulate BA 31, BA 37/38 in the temporal lobe and frontal BAs 10 and 47."

"In addition to being more transparent and related to specific performance than factor scores, individual tests also can provide measurement of more specific abilities than broader factors allow," the study reads.

And this isn't the only team to be doing such work. Professor Willem Verbeke at Rotterdam's Erasmus University anticipates brain scans in some job interviews "within five years' time."