Posted on 06/20/2008 3:08:52 PM PDT by blam
When It Comes to Brains, Size Matters
In a study of 200 university students, the researchers found that women and men performed similarly on tests of language and reading skills. Differences in brain organization between men and women may be driven by sex differences in brain size, they said.
“People have said women have relatively larger language areas of the brain,” said Christine Chiarello, UCR professor of psychology. “In none of our language tasks were women better than men. When you account for differences in brain size between men and women there are few differences in the relative size of areas. While there are differences between men and women, those differences are minimal compared to the wide range of individual differences in both sexes.”
The study, “Size Matters: Cerebral Volume Influences Sex Differences in Neuroanatomy,” was published recently in the journal Cerebral Cortex.
The researchers gathered demographic data, tested language and reading skills, and performed magnetic resonance imaging to map brain structures of 100 female students and 100 male students. The men and women were similar in age, parental education and proportion of students who were right- or left-handed.
There were great individual differences in brain organization, brain size and where language and speech are processed, Chiarello said. For most people, speech and language are processed in the left half of the brain.
Brain tips
Differences in brain size account for much of the variance in brain structure size that at first glance might appear to be attributable to sex, Chiarello said. On average, the brains of men in the study were 13 percent larger than the women.
Men and women “confront similar cognitive challenges using differently sized neural machinery,” the researchers wrote. Their findings imply that “any sex-specific adaptations to overall brain size are not associated with large relative differences in the size of various cerebral regions. In this respect, our results suggest that brain size matters more than sex.”
Study co-authors include Chiarello; Christiana M. Leonard and Stephen Towler of the Evelyn F. and William L. McKnight Brain Institute of the University of Florida; UCR graduate students Suzanne Welcome and Laura K. Halderman; Ron Otto of the Computerized Diagnostic Imaging Center, Riverside; and Mark A. Eckert of the Medical University of North Carolina.
Source: University of Florida
Pretty much matters in most things, I’d say.
My ex told me I was very well endowed. Who am I to argue ?
So . . . men are smarter than women???? (quickly ducking to avoid being hit)
A well known fact is that libs only use 12% of their brain capacity.
The article appears purposely vague, and my take is that they steered their parameters and results to achieve a politically correct conclusion.
The article appears to be a waste of pixels.
So this is why more women vote liberal then do men?
The article appears to be a waste of pixels.
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Yes, it is.
They said they used students.
Were all the students ( male and female) medical or law students? Where all the male and female students studying the same major, or were they comparing male graduate students majoring in physics ( who happen to have the highest verbal and math SAT scores) with primarily female education majors ( who have the lowest SAT scores, both verbal and math)?
A comparison comparing brain size with liberalism vs. conservatism would be very interesting.
thanks, bfl
no, men are fat heads......
but I agree with you...this article is written in a twisted way, as if to color the results or to make some great astonishing statement.....
fact is, no matter how much brain you have, if its not used, its a moot point....apparently within the next decade, a large majority of college grads will be female......does that mean women are getting smarter than men?...no.....stats are meaningless when not understood or given too much weight....
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