Friday, December 21, 2007

Gender inequality?

Ever wondered why the great scientists, philosophers, musicians and painters are mostly male? All you can come up is a feminist view that women are not given enough chances. They are suppressed and harassed and maltreated by men. However I found out a fact which might as well be another reason.

*Males have 26 billion neurons in their neocortex while females have only 19 billion (Neocortex is a part of brain that is involved in higher functions such as sensory perception, generation of motor commands, spatial reasoning, conscious thought, and language)

*Males have more grey matter in their brain while females have more white matter (Grey matter consists of the neurons while the white matter is just the nerve fibres)

(from My Brilliant Brain, National Geographic Channel)


P.S. Im not a masculist or something but a fact is a fact. Sorry ladies :-)

8 comments:

dranz3r said...

hmmmmmmm........u seem to be a scientific man........i like facts......nicely said.....no female can ever say a word on tht..... :D

Net Esportes said...

Filósofas really missing women, but is it only for a few million neurons less?

Abdullah Shahid said...

@ b!ack-dranzer

Im not a scientist or something, just a medical student. :-)

Abdullah Shahid said...

@ net esportes

Well..that seems to be the reason apparently.

Unknown said...

"Grey matter consists of the neurons while the white matter is just the nerve fibres"

i wonder y da word JUST is used here.. are not da nerve fibres equally important?Wot abt all da tracts white matter consists of?
it is rightly said abt da nuerons *USE IT OR LOSE IT*
I guess u guys lose more of ur nuerons :D

Abdullah Shahid said...

"are not da nerve fibres equally important?Wot abt all da tracts white matter consists of?"

Fibres do not generate action potentials, its just the cell bodies which have the receptors and ion channels that START the action.

Further,less grey matter and more white matter means that less neurons have more dendrites and axons, while more grey matter simple means that there is a greater number of neurons.

I think you prove the hypothesis lady..lolz

Abdullah Shahid said...

The parietal lobes in Einstein's brain were 15% bigger than normal. They contained more amount of neuroglial cells.

Awais Aftab said...

Coincidentally, a new University of California–Irvine study addresses the issue of differences between male and female brains. It found that while there are "no disparities in general intelligence between the sexes," there are differences in brain structure. According to the analysis, men have approximately 6.5 times as much gray matter related to general intelligence as women, and women have nearly 10 times as much white matter related to intelligence as men. Gray matter is where the information-processing centers in the brain are located, while white matter represents the connections between these processing centers. These differences, according to a coauthor 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."

[http://www.usnews.com/usnews/tech/nextnews/archive/next050121.htm]