Different brain areas while same IQ for men and women
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2005-01-21 14:47

Significant differences exist in brain areas where males and females manifest their intelligence, although there are essentially no disparities in general intelligence between the sexes, US scientists said Thursday.

A latest study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, 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.

"These findings suggest that human evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior," Richard Haier, who led the study, said in a press release.

"In addition, by pinpointing these gender-based intelligence areas, the study has the potential to aid research on dementia and other cognitive-impairment diseases in the brain."

In their paper appearing on the online version of journal NeuroImage, scientists said 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 these processing centers.

This may help explain why men tend to excel in tasks requiring more local processing, like mathematics, and women tend to excel at integrating and assimilating information from distributed gray- matter regions in the brain, such as language ability.

These two very different neurological pathways and activity centers, however, result in equivalent overall performance on broad measures of cognitive ability, researchers said.

The study also identified regional differences with intelligence. For example, 84 percent of gray-matter regions and 86 percent of white-matter regions involved with intellectual performance in women were found in the brain's frontal lobes, compared to 45 percent and zero percent for males, respectively.

The gray matter driving male intellectual performance is distributed throughout more of the brain.

Researchers said this more centralized intelligence processing in women is consistent with clinical findings that frontal brain injuries can be more harmful to intelligence of women than men. Studies such as these someday may help lead to earlier diagnoses of brain disorders in males and females, as well as better treatment for damage to particular brain regions.

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