When it comes to attracting top talent from across the country, Raleigh and Durham are outperforming most of the United States. That is according to a new analysis by Bloomberg, which puts both cities in the top 10 metropolitan areas that are beneficiaries of brain drain from other parts of the country.

Raleigh came in at No. 6 while Durham was No. 7, the company reports. Boulder, Colorado, topped the ranking, followed by San Francisco and San Jose.

North Carolina's fastest-growing cities beat out Madison, Wisconsin, Seattle and Denver on the top 10 list.

The Bloomberg Brain Concentration Index measures business formation in cities with more than 100,000 residents, along with such metrics as STEM employment in those places.

Raleigh and Durham’s gains — and the gains of all the leading cities — are coming at the expense of places like southwestern Virginia, the upper Midwest and even eastern North Carolina. Goldsboro, North Carolina, was the fourth-worst performing city by Bloomberg's reckoning.

That is because talented workers, wherever they grow up, are moving to jobs in places like the Triangle, Colorado, and Washington, D.C., rather than go home after earning degrees in such hot fields as computer science and engineering.