Men think using gray matter, women with white

If you keep up on the news, you may have seen a lot of talk recently about new research that calls into question the common assumption that women talk more than men. It turns out, men talk about the same amount, or 16000 words a day. Here is a link to an article about it. Actually, men did talk less than women by around 500 words a day, but that was statistically insignificant.

In light of this, it is interesting to explore the differences between the way the two sexes think, and to analyze whether it could have any effect on language.

One such study found that men think more with what is called “Gray Matter”, while women use more “White Matter”. Men have 6.5 times more gray matter related to general intelligence than women, and women have almost 10 times more white matter related to intelligence.

Gray matter refers to nerve cell bodies, while white matter refers to the axons that transmit nerve cell messages. You could think of gray matter a bunch of little computers, and white matter as the internet.

The interesting part is that this fact doesn’t significantly affect cognitive performance. Men and women both perform equally well on a large variety of cognitive tests, although the neural methods used to reach the same correct answer may be different. Neural processing in men is more localized, while in women it is distributed, integrating information from many different areas.

“These findings suggest that human evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior,” said Richard Haier, professor of psychology in the Department of Pediatrics and longtime human intelligence researcher, who led the study with colleagues at UCI and the University of New Mexico.

However, this could help explain why certain fields are preferred by either sex. The localized processing favored by the male mind is ideally suited to mathematical processing, while the distributed computing of the female mind is ideally suited to – you guessed it – highly developed language skills.

Here is an article on the topic: http://today.uci.edu/news/release_detail.asp?key=1261

Written by admin on July 7th, 2007 with 3 comments.
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