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Brain of neurosurgeons and aerospace engineers is as common as yours.

In the English language, two sentences are used to describe concepts or tasks that are easy to understand or perform: “it’s not space science” and “it’s not brain surgery”. Other phrases like “it’s a piece of cake” or “it’s a walk in the park” have similar meanings, but the two related to the aerospace industry and neurosurgery are the only ones associated with professions.

A study published in the scientific journal The BMJ revealed that the functioning of the brains of aerospace engineers and neurosurgeons may not be that different from the general population.

To demystify the traditional English expressions, a group of British scientists evaluated the results that the professionals obtained from the realization of the Great British Intelligence Test (Great British Intelligence Test, in free translation), an initiative of the Imperial College, in London, and from the BBC Horizon.

The test has already been used to measure distinct aspects of human cognition, covering planning and reasoning, working memory, attention and emotion processing skills in more than 250,000 people in the UK. Unlike traditional IQ tests, the assessment seeks to differentiate aspects of cognitive ability more precisely.

The study had 748 participants, including 600 aerospace engineers and 148 neurosurgeons. After processing the data, 401 complete sets of information were included in the final analysis, including 329 aerospace engineers (82%) and 72 neurosurgeons (18%).

what do the results say

When test category scores were compared between groups, neurosurgeons scored significantly higher on semantic problem solving. Aerospace engineers scored significantly higher on mind manipulation and attention.

According to the study, no differences were found between the groups in domain scores for memory, spatial problem solving, problem solving speed, and memory retrieval speed.

In the final analysis, scores were compared with those of 18,257 members of the general population who completed the same tasks as part of the test.

In all six categories, only two differences were significant: the speed of problem solving was faster for neurosurgeons than for the general population and the speed of memory retrieval was slower for neurosurgeons than for the population in general.

“In situations that don’t require quick problem solving, it may be more correct to use ‘It’s not brain surgery’, but in situations where rapid information retrieval is required, this phrase should be avoided,” says the article. “It’s possible that neurosurgeons and aerospace engineers are unnecessarily placed on a pedestal and ‘It’s a walk in the park’ or another unrelated phrase might be more appropriate,” the study says.

Reference: CNN Brasil

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