Dr. Fredrik Ullén — Mensa Foundation Prize 2025

Neuroplasticity in Action: How Practice Changes the Brain

Spend enough time learning a skill — say, playing the piano — and your brain starts to change. That’s not a metaphor or a TED Talk line; it’s a measurable shift in white matter. On a diffusion MRI scan, you can actually see white matter pathways thickening and stretching like backroads turning into highways. Prof. Fredrik Ullén, PhD, MPA, knows this because he’s both a cognitive neuroscientist and a world-class concert pianist. He’s spent his career studying how practice shapes the brain, why it works better for some than others, and what all of it tells us about intelligence.

Voices of Recognition

“The Mensa Foundation’s credo is ‘Unleashing Intelligence,’ Prize Committee Chair Harry Ringermacher said, “and indeed Dr. Ullén has done exactly that and made a science of it, integrating the world of music, brain pathways, and human intelligence.”

Mensa Foundation President Nguyen Pham echoed that sentiment in announcing the Board of Trustees’ unanimous confirmation of Dr. Ullén. “As a former young pianist (and forever nerd) myself, I feel personally connected to and uplifted by Dr. Ullén’s revolutionary work at the intersection of art and science,” Pham said. “By honoring and investing in this groundbreaking research, the Foundation is proud to partner with Dr. Ullén in delivering on our organizational values and furthering the broader understanding of human intelligence.”

From Västerås to the World: A Career at the Intersection of Music and Science

Born in Västerås, Sweden, Dr. Ullén trained as both a scientist and a pianist — two disciplines that would eventually converge in his research. He’s probably best known for a series of studies showing that the brains of expert musicians look and behave differently from other brains. In one landmark project, his team found that pianists who had logged thousands of hours of practice had significantly more developed white matter pathways, especially in areas responsible for fine motor control, hearing, and higher-order planning. The changes scaled with experience. More hours meant more robust neural wiring. It was a striking confirmation of neuroplasticity and proof that skill development doesn’t just improve performance, it physically alters the brain’s structure.

Why White Matter Matters

White matter is the brain’s high-speed transit, essential for linking the regions responsible for complex thought. Dr. Ullén’s research helped make that connection measurable. In the same study, musicians with more white matter in the frontal lobes also performed better on intelligence tests. That correlation set the stage for one of his most important insights: Practice and intelligence don’t just coexist; they are playing a duet.

Practice, Intelligence, and Population Patterns

And when you zoom out from brain scans to large-scale population data, that duet plays out even more clearly: People who practice more also tend to score higher on IQ tests. That’s not just because practice boosts IQ. In many cases, people with higher cognitive ability are more inclined to practice in the first place. Dr. Ullén’s team has shown that intelligence amplifies the effects of practice. Two students might log the same number of hours in a practice room, but one of them improves more per hour. There’s no single formula for greatness, but Dr. Ullén’s research helps explain why some people pull ahead even when everyone is working hard.

Dose–Response: Structured Practice and Brain Development

Dr. Ullén and his fellow researchers have also shown that the more a person engages in structured music practice, the more their brain’s white matter develops, particularly in regions tied to movement, hearing, and executive control. These gains are especially pronounced in expert-level musicians, and they’re proportional to the amount of time spent training. Just as striking, those same brain regions are consistently linked to cognitive function — a clue that prompted Dr. Ullén to probe how much of that link is shaped by biology versus experience.

Twin Studies: Experience Leaves a Trace

One of the cleanest demonstrations of that idea came from his twin studies. His team scanned the brains of monozygotic twins — same genes, same starting line — where one had trained intensively in music and the other hadn’t. The trained twin showed more white and gray matter in auditory and motor regions. That’s a strong argument for experience as a brain-shaping force. Even with identical genetics, effort leaves a trace.

Beyond Practice: Shared Genetic Influences

At the same time, those twin studies helped reveal the limits of what practice can explain. In a series of large-scale population studies, Dr. Ullén and his colleagues showed that correlations between musical training and intelligence (or between musical ear and rhythm accuracy) were mainly due to shared genetic influences. Smart kids are more likely to take music lessons, yes. But it’s not just the music lessons making them smart. It’s the same underlying biology — cognitive ability, personality traits such as persistence, maybe even auditory sensitivity — showing up in both.

A New Framework: The Multifactorial Gene–Environment Interaction Model

Dr. Ullén and his collaborators eventually distilled these insights into the Multifactorial Gene-Environment Interaction Model — a framework that moves past the tired talent-versus-training debate. Expertise, in this view, doesn’t come from practice alone or innate talent alone. It comes from a mix: cognitive ability, motivation, personality, genetics, and environment, all combining to shape performance. Practice still matters, but it doesn’t land the same way for everyone.

Rethinking Expertise: Shifts in the Field

His research helped shift the field away from “practice-only” theories of expertise — and shifted his own thinking, too. “Studying expertise and creativity in genetically informative samples has definitely changed my view of talent and skill acquisition in general,” Dr. Ullén told the Mensa Bulletin. “Traditionally, this field of research has had a strong tendency to view practice as the only variable of importance for expert performance. Of course, practice is essential, but it is also clear that many other factors matter and that the acquisition of expertise is a very complex interplay between our genes and our environment.”

Keeping Time: Rhythm, IQ, and Brain Efficiency

In one small but telling study, Dr. Ullén’s team handed a group of Swedish men a set of drumsticks and played them a cowbell beat — just a steady clonk, repeated at different tempos. The participants were asked to tap along. No thinking, no creativity — just keeping time. The tighter the timing, even down to millisecond differences, the higher the participant’s IQ tended to be. Brain scans revealed that the best timekeepers had more white matter in regions associated with timing and executive function. It wasn’t about rhythm or “more cowbell.” It was about how efficiently the brain’s timing networks fire and what that says about cognition.

Heritability of Musical Traits and Cognitive Links

Even seemingly discrete traits such as having a musical ear or an accurate sense of rhythm turn out to be genetically entangled with intelligence.
Dr. Ullén’s work has repeatedly shown that these connections aren’t just behavioral. They’re structural, and often heritable.

Beyond the 10,000-Hour Myth

This also helps explain why the whole “10,000 hours” axiom doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Practice is essential. But it’s not the only ingredient, and it doesn’t work the same for everyone. His findings reframe the path to excellence as more than just a grind and more than just a gift. It’s messier, more interesting, and more human.

Implications for Education: Why the Arts Still Matter

It also offers a reality check for the music-makes-you-smarter crowd. Dr. Ullén’s studies suggest that music training won’t magically raise your IQ or help your kid crush the SAT. The cognitive “benefits” of music training mostly reflect who’s drawn to music in the first place. And yet, he’s still a vocal advocate for keeping the arts in education — not because they’ll boost test scores, but because they matter. “If kids aren’t exposed to these things in school, they might never be,” he’s said. “Culture enriches our lives.”

Current Leadership and Broader Research Program

At Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Germany, Dr. Ullén leads research that connects culture, cognition, and health. That work is ongoing, and it stretches well beyond music. But music is still his favorite model, both for its complexity and accessibility. Almost everyone engages with music in some way; even people who can’t hear it often feel it. And when you study music at the level Dr. Ullén does, it becomes a window into how the brain learns, adapts, and performs under pressure.

Living the Research: Pianist and Scholar

He’s spent years decoding how expertise forms, but he’s also lived it. Dr. Ullén is the first and only pianist to record Sorabji’s complete 100 Transcendental Studies, an eight-and-a-half-hour Everest of modern piano music. He’s played all over the world and has a couple dozen albums to his name. In interviews, he brushes off the idea that his musicianship gives him an edge as a researcher, or vice versa. Still, it’s hard not to see the symbiosis. He’s not just studying expertise; he’s been practicing it for decades.

Conclusion: Mastery as a Gene–Environment Feedback Loop

And maybe that’s the most compelling part of his story. Dr. Ullén has shown that mastery is more than just effort, more than just a gift. It’s a complicated feedback loop between biology and behavior. That insight alone earns him the Mensa Foundation Prize. But his work leaves us with something better than a formula; it furnishes a better understanding of what makes excellence possible and why it looks different for everyone.

“I personally think we can be rather happy with the fact that both genes and environments matter for individual differences,” Dr. Ullén said. “The trick to realize your potential is, of course, to find what you really like to do and have an aptitude for, and then focus on developing that further through deliberate, goal-directed practice.”Kenneth Douglas Thomso(193-201