Scientists believe they have identified a specific area of the human brain which is responsible for IQ. It’s been called  the ‘G’ Factor.’ So now all we need is a ‘G’ Factory, and we’ll be sorted. Researchers from the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge University, and Dusseldorf University, used positron emission tomography scanning techniques to assess the blood flow in subjects’ brains when they were carrying out a number of ‘high-g’ and ‘low-g’ tests, which involved identifying mismatched symbols or sets of letters. Results indicated that a part of the brain called the frontal lateral cortex was the only area where blood flow increased when volunteers tackled these complicated puzzles, involving sequences of symbols and letters. This seems to support the 1904 theory of psychologist Charles Spearman, who proposed that the same clever folk tended to do well at different tasks because they employed a generally useful component of their brains - which he called the ‘g’ factor. Contrary to the predictions of more recent scientists, high-g tasks did not require numerous regions spread around the brain to be used together.

Instead, activity was concentrated in the lateral frontal cortex, in one or both brain hemispheres. This, the researchers suggest, indicated that ‘general intelligence’ may derive from a specific frontal system important in the control of diverse forms of behaviour. This will explain, finally, why people with Mekon-like foreheads are always cleverer than anyone else.