{"id":7657,"date":"2005-01-21T06:41:08","date_gmt":"2005-01-21T13:41:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/2005\/01\/21\/brain-and-brain.html"},"modified":"2005-01-21T06:41:08","modified_gmt":"2005-01-21T13:41:08","slug":"brain_and_brain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2005\/01\/21\/brain_and_brain.html","title":{"rendered":"Brain and brain!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yes, there really are differences between men and women’s brains<\/a>:<\/p>\n

While there are essentially no disparities in general intelligence between the sexes, a UC Irvine study has found significant differences in brain areas where males and females manifest their intelligence.<\/p>\n

The study shows women having more white matter and men more gray matter related to intellectual skill, revealing that no single neuroanatomical structure determines general intelligence and that different types of brain designs are capable of producing equivalent intellectual performance.<\/p>\n

[…] In general, men have approximately 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence than women, and women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence than men. Gray matter represents information processing centers in the brain, and white matter represents the networking of ? or connections between ? these processing centers. <\/p>\n

This, according to Rex Jung, a UNM neuropsychologist and co-author of the study, may help to explain why men tend to excel in tasks requiring more local processing (like mathematics), while women tend to excel at integrating and assimilating information from distributed gray-matter regions in the brain, such as required for language facility. These two very different neurological pathways and activity centers, however, result in equivalent overall performance on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as those found on intelligence tests.<\/p>\n

Hmmm. Aren’t statements like that — noting differences in the cognitive bents of male and females — what got the President of Harvard in such deep water<\/a> over the last week?<\/p>\n

It’s an interesting conundrum. We know that male and female physiology are different (and vive le difference!<\/em>), and even go so far as to acknowledge it in physical sports (which usually have different male and female categories), but given past prejudice against women, we’ve, societally, lashed out at any suggestion that such difference might extend to mental faculties as well.<\/p>\n

Which is kind of goofy, because it’s like saying that both Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong are great athletes but not being willing to admit that Lance is probably better at cycling and Tiger is probably better at golf. It seems legitimate to say that male vs. female brains (just like the rest of their bodies) are designed\/adapted around different biological tasks, and so are going to have certain advantages on average in certain pursuits (or certain ways of doing certain pursuits), and that it’s not all just “nurture” that is responsible for behavioral and cognitive differences — and to say that without saying “and the guys are better than the gals” or even “and this is universally true in every case.”<\/p>\n

After all, I can point toward women who are stronger than me, and some who are smarter, and some who are better at certain things than I am. “Different” does not necessarily mean “better” or “worse,” either as an overall evaluation or in particular instances. Which is why the article above falls all over itself to keep noting that differences in specific cognitive excellence still balance out in overall cognitive ability.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yes, there really are differences between men and women’s brains: While there are essentially no disparities in general intelligence between the sexes, a UC Irvine study has found significant differences…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","category-zt-pc"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":13406,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2008\/12\/29\/creation_science_for_dumm.html","url_meta":{"origin":7657,"position":0},"title":"Creation Science for Dummies","author":"***Dave","date":"Mon 29-Dec-08 1:19pm","format":false,"excerpt":"A visit to The Creation Museum and the wonders seen there.\u00a0 Um ... yeah, don't think I'm going to go out of my way to visit. 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It's just that the paint has faded and worn off over the millennia since, leaving modern audiences to consider their white marble and other stone to be a \"classic\" look, whereas the ancients would have considered that as unfinished and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "~PlusPosts"","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8390,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2005\/11\/30\/its_not_the_siz.html","url_meta":{"origin":7657,"position":5},"title":"It’s not the size, it’s what you do with it","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 30-Nov-05 6:55am","format":false,"excerpt":"Evidently, higher levels of cognition (or, at least, visual working memory) isn't so much a matter of remembering a lot, but of ignoring stuff that's not important to remember. 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