First post! I am an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin - Madison majoring in neuroscience.

I want to do research in cognitive neurogenetics, particularly the neurogenetics of intelligence. Some topics to give you an example of what I want to do are:

- IGF2R: Correlations to intelligence (Robert Plomin did research which revealed that IGF2R allele 5 occurs at a frequency of 53% in people of IQ 150 but only 26% in people of IQ 100)
- How do genetics tie to the neuroscientific and psychological characteristics of consciousness?
- How are genes expressed differently during cognition in people of differing IQ? (I know IQ is a flawed test of intelligence, but it's the best quantitative assessment method intelligence research has got)

Since intelligence is not the most well-researched topic (my field is in its infancy), I would think neuroscience would be the best field to major in to develop a general sense of the neural milieu and to get a better grasp of neuroanatomy and neurophysiology than I've already got (which, since I'm a little more than halfway through my undergraduate degree, is actually a fairly good one), and do some genetics research to learn the techniques and do an undergraduate thesis in neurogenetics before going to graduate school.

Any suggestions/comments/criticism from the peanut gallery?

Well good luck with that field. Its a very controversial area with many potential landminds to avoid.

Here are most of the IQ genes that I could find.
COMT
DTNBP1
SNAP-25
CHRM2
Human neuropsin
FADS2

This is a good paper on the neurobiology of intelligence (pdf File here).

A good IQ blog is located here.

If you go to near to the bottom of this blog, he has a list of intelligence researchers and resources. Starting from the bottom of the blog it's located above the "Archives" section, and the "Previous Posts" section (on the right hand side).

cognitive-intelligence research would fall more under psychology, cognitive and behavioral neuroscience; where neurogenetics would fall more under developmental biology. they both conduct totally different research methods. intelligence is hard to be quantified by studying neurogenetics simply since human nervous is evolutionary complicated. you'll probably learn about it when you take psychophysiology undergraduate/grad courses. However, many psychology neuroscience researchers can't quantify intellgence either because it is mostly studied on animal models that don't have advanced and developed brains like humans

humans want to define intelligence in rational terms, math and science and be able to processes abstract ideas, but what if it is something irrational and would probably be even harder to undertstand in both cognitive psychology and neurogenetics.

I agree. Intelligence is a multifaceted phenomena. Tell me, what do YOU mean, kldickson, by the word 'intelligence'? Is intelligence only a score on IQ tests, such as Wechsler Intelligence Scale (VIQ/PIQ), or more abstract intelligence, like intelligence of knowing how to put something together (somatic intelligence), Kinesthetic IQ, Spatial IQ, Musical IQ, et cetera.... (ref. Howard Gardner - Seven Types of Intelligence).

I take issue with "IQ". I think it is a preposterous idea to try and quantify people when, in reality, you can't capture intelligence within a single test of verbal, math, working memory,.... abilities.

However, trying to correlate a gene with 'intelligence' (we'll say scores on the Wechsler scale) does seem pretty fascinating.