different but equal

there's more than one way to be smart, and men and women do it differently.

new research suggests that women and men derive their intelligence from disparate areas and types of brain matter. men derive their intelligence from information-processing gray matter throughout the left hemisphere, whereas women's brainpower hails primarily from the connective white matter in the frontal lobe.

this could be a key to understanding sex differences in performance tasks that utilize less connectivity, such as physics, and more, such as language. i'd like to see results from women in non-traditional fields requiring this "male" type of processing and vice versa. were they born with aberrant brains? and are male and female brains distinct from infancy, or could society have a hand in shaping these differences?

equally interesting, however, the results suggest

that there is no singular underlying neuroanatomical structure to general intelligence and that different types of brain designs may manifest equivalent intellectual performance. (quoted from the abstract)

this comes out of further study of data gained this summer when the same folks reported that the more of gray matter present, the better, as far as intelligence went, and that intelligence is dispersed throughout the brain.

reference: haier, rj, jung, re, yeo, ra, head, k, and alkire, mt. the neuroanatomy of general intelligence: sex matters. neuroimage, in press.

Labels: neuroscience