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Neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have conducted the most comprehensive brain mapping to date of the cognitive abilities measured by the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS), the most widely used intelligence test in the world. The results offer new insight into how the various factors that comprise an "intelligence quotient" (IQ) score depend on particular regions of the brain.

In a study published recently in the Journal of Neuroscience, UCLA neurology professor Paul Thompson and colleagues used a new type of brain-imaging scanner to show that intelligence is strongly influenced by the quality of the brain's axons, or wiring that sends signals throughout the brain. The faster the signaling, the faster the brain processes information. And since the integrity of the brain's wiring is influenced by genes, the genes we inherit play a far greater role in intelligence than was previously thought.

A radically new form of neural network based artificial intelligence has been conceived that in contrast to preceding forms of AI, builds itself and then enters into an intellectual bootstrapping process wherein it learns from its own mistakes and successes to create useful ideas and strategies. Not only is this technology capable of autonomously inventing and discovering new products, services, and procedures, as it has for numerous international corporations and government agencies, it has also devised several revolutionary neural network paradigms. For these reasons and more, AI visionaries and futurists, such as Dennis Bushnell, NASA Langley's chief scientist and visionary, have called this technology, known as the "Creativity Machine," AI's best bet at creating human to trans-human level intelligence in machines. This technology, based upon an extremely profound scientific discovery, is produced and delivered exclusively by Imagination Engines, Incorporated as either customer tailored or mass produced products.

Tsien, based at Princeton University in New Jersey at the time, named his creation Doogie after the teenage genius in the television programme Doogie Howser, MD. The work was one of the earliest examples of neuroscientists using genetic engineering to generate cognitively enhanced animals in a bid to understand memory and learning.