ABSTRACT
Although numerous psychological reports describe the characteristics of giftedness, few studies have investigated gifted students from a neurological perspective. However, researchers have recently begun to explore the relationship between the brain structure (grey matter volume) and IQ (Frangou et al., 2004; Narr et al., 2007; O’Boyle, 2005; O’Boyle et al., 2005; Wilke et al., 2003; Singh and O’Boyle, 2004). Neuroimaging studies have revealed that the grey matter densities of the orbitofrontal cortex, cingulated gyrus, cerebellum, thalamus and posterior temporal cortices were positively related to IQ (Frangou et al., 2004; Narr et al., 2007; Wilke et al., 2003). By contrast, the grey matter density of the caudate nucleus was negatively correlated with IQ (Frangou et al., 2004). However, few studies have focused on the brains of gifted persons or have analysed the brain function of mathematically talented students (Singh and O’Boyle, 2004; O’Boyle, 2005; O’Boyle et al., 2005; Prescott et al., 2010; Kuo et al., 2012). Desco and colleagues (2011) suggested that the greater ability of maths-gifted adolescents for complex mathematical reasoning may be related to more bilateral patterns of activation and increased activations in the parietal and frontal regions, which are associated with enhanced skills in visuospatial processing and logical reasoning. Zhang et al. (2015) indicated that the dynamically reconfigured network architecture in a maths-gifted brain enhances both global and local information processing in reasoning processes, which can be considered neural correlations with the superior problem-solving ability of maths-gifted adolescents for logical reasoning.
