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Science

Size Does Matter... But Only in Women 125

Posted by Hemos from the half-usage-full-usage dept.
Frankenmoro writes "This online article at Nature notes that new research indicates that a woman's intelligence is directly related to the size of her brain. But, before you uber-male-geeks start to gloat, it may be that a woman with half your brain size has the same language processing power as you do, seeing as how you only use half of your brain to process language, and she's using it all... Lazy boy."
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Size Does Matter... But Only in Women More

Size Does Matter... But Only in Women

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  • But we only need to use half our brain... (Score:5, Funny)

    by joto ( 134244 ) on Monday November 11, 2002 @08:40AM (#4641835)
    But, before you uber-male-geeks start to gloat, it may be that a woman with half your brain size has the same language processing power as you do, seeing as how you only use half of your brain to process language, and she's using it all... Lazy boy.

    Stupid women who must use all their processing power simply to process language. With our superiour intellect, we can use the rest of our brain for more important stuff while they are struggling to understand what we said...

    Or more likely, when she talks, I'm concentrating on something else, and never listen...

  • ...women will still be irrational 90% of the time.

    Can I just say though: IQ testing is the biggest load of wank. There is no way to measure intelligence. There isn't even a decent definition of what intellegence is. The fact that they use short term memory tests as some sort of metric tells you about how irrelevant IQ testing is. Compare this with the fact the brigtest individuals can intuit answers or have brilliant ideas come out of nowhere - I don't see any future in trying to measure the subconsious.
    • ...women will still be irrational 90% of the time.

      I would like to be sure of that.

      By the way, you seem to give great importance to intuition. Is there a rational explanation for intuition? And you don't see any future in trying to measure the subconscious, yet you're ready to measure rationality?

    • Re:No matter what size their brain is... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by BerntB ( 584621 ) on Monday November 11, 2002 @11:04AM (#4642548)
      IQ testing is the biggest load of wank.

      The consensus of the active researchers in the field might be wrong, of course, but you are contradicting the researchers in a way that seems to assume they are fools that don't know about the scientific method.

      A bit like creationism where all paleontologists and evolutionary biologists have to be idiots or in a conspiracy to hide the truth.

      I'm sorry, but my bogosity counter went off.

      • Yes I'm sure that a lot of people are honestly trying to do their best when it comes to this type of research. But you need to realize that there is no single definition of "intelligence" neither is there any way to really measure it.

        It's not like measuring the time it takes for an apple to fall to the ground. Because in psychology you don't know what the apple and ground is, and you can't measure time.

        The same thing is happening in other "soft" sciences. Interesting examples in the field on anthropology can be found in the book "Lila" by Robert M Pirzig. (Same guy who wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence.)

        The scientific method is a powerful tool, but like any good tool you might try to apply it to cases where it doesn't apply.

        And it should perhaps be mentioned that I'm not knowledgeable about all that much research in the area. I have read some about cognition and that's really interesting IMHO. The researchers there are generally not stupid/brave enough to say that they now have found "intelligence" they tend to discuss more specific problems. Like what happens in your brain when you see different objects, or read different words. Then the scientific method is valid.

        And I have yet to take an IQ test which I afterwords felt actually did a good job of exploring my intelligence. (Yeah, it's just because I do poorly, har har. ;-)
        • But you need to realize that there is no single definition of "intelligence" neither is there any way to really measure it.

          Without being even a layman, I know that modern intelligent researchers address those obvious points. My thesis is that the criticism is doing a trivial straw man attack.

    • Re:No matter what size their brain is... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by kmellis ( 442405 ) <kmellis@io.com> on Monday November 11, 2002 @03:12PM (#4644369) Homepage
      "Can I just say though: IQ testing is the biggest load of wank..."
      ...and some more relevant stuff deleted.

      I both agree and disagree with you. If you are saying that as a practical matter it's very difficult or impossible to accurately and precisely measure general intelligence, I'll agree with you (at least on the "difficult" part). If you're saying that it's impossible as a matter of principle, or that there's no such thing as general intelligence, then I strongly disagree with you.

      Don't believe me? Well, kill off three-quarters of someone's brain and try to convince me that they are not less intelligent. Is there a monolithic thing that is "intelligence"? I very, very much doubt that there is. But that doesn't mean that the term "general intelligence" is senseless. It could be, and probably is, our way of describing what we experience in ourselves and others as the composite level of functioning of most or all mental activities of which we are intuitively aware. Thus, "general intelligence", and even comparing intelligence across species, is meaningful as long as we understand what we mean. D'uh.

      By the way, evolutionary psychology specifically (and, I think, correctly) argues on evolutionary grounds that a generalized rational ability doesn't exist in humans.

      I'm of the opinion that we have a very long way to go till we achieve what was aimed at when the IQ test was developed. But I think it's possible. I do think that current tests are still greatly hampered by the fact that we understand our own minds so poorly. We do a lot of cognition, of course. Are we really trying to measure a true composite of every important cognitive task? I doubt it. And I doubt that the various tasks are weighed remotely correctly, nor tested without enormous bias.

      It seems to me that language processing and abstract/mathematical reasoning are each quite important to us and amenable to measurement. They likely correlate pretty strongly to people's intuitive measure of "intelligence".

      When I was in school, we spent a lot of time being very careful about defining our terms. There is something of a quandry when we are trying to talk about concepts expressed in everyday language. Is the thing what we explicitly think it is? That is to say, in this example, is what we're measuring the monolithic abstract intelligence that some people think "intelligence" is? On the other hand, we wouldn't use the word "intelligence" if it isn't meaningful in some sense. So I would always make the point that even if we figure out that we can't really say something like "you're smarter than him" and mean what we think we mean in one regard, that doesn't require that what we're saying is totally meaningless. In fact, it's often very interesting and revealing to discover what it is that we're groping for in language.



      • Well, that's the heck of it. Remember the hydrocephalic kids who were saved by shunts (it was highlighted on Nova) and grew up normally and healthily and then were found out to have more than 90% of their brains destroyed by the disease. Literally, their brains were mostly hollow and filled with CSF fluid.

        I am not sure what point you were making with the 3/4 quarters destroyed argument, but it has been undercut by reality (and it does sort of give credence to the "myth" of using only 4%)
      • "I'm of the opinion that we have a very long way to go till we achieve what was aimed at when the IQ test was developed."

        Actually, the IQ test was developed simply to identify people likely to have difficulty in school, and as far as I can remember, it fulfilled that goal. As originally designed, it was not intended to test "intelligence" as such.
    • The better way to put this (as Rob Becker in his record-breaking comedy routine does) is: "Women are not hindered by rationality."

      Think about it, if you can.

    • Re:No matter what size their brain is... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Raiford ( 599622 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @12:08AM (#4648352) Journal
      This is absolutly the greatest topic I have seen on Slashdot for sometime and I can't really think of a thing to say. I had better go find some women to speak for me.

    • Ah, IQ testing is not as much of a yardstick of intelligence as it is a yardstick of the ability to pick things up quickly. Example: Someone with an IQ of 75 would need to study a LOT more than someone with an IQ of 200. Not saying they will never learn it, they just need a bit more of the ol' forced-info-oscillation to get it down solid.
    • Men don't or can't be bothered to understand women 99% of the time!

  • Ahhhhh..... (Score:4, Funny)

    by WeaponOfChoice ( 615003 ) on Monday November 11, 2002 @08:47AM (#4641858) Homepage
    Since I only use half my brain for language processing this must mean that I am, basically, always distracted by something else going on inside my head... This must be why I get ambushed in conversations by women capable of focusing their entire intellect on the task at hand [and so on... world's out to get me blah blah blah...

  • Confounding Variables ignored? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kris_lang ( 466170 ) on Monday November 11, 2002 @09:04AM (#4641921)
    So the statement by Kigar is limited to ~100 brains measured post-mortem from 100 women who died of cancer but supposedly had "normal brains". I can think of a few confounding variables.

    Was there any correction for the BMI (body mass index) of these women? Larger people have larger cranial vaults and thus have room for larger brains.

    What is the correlation between pre-mortem CNS volume and post-mortem CNS volume?

    What was the age at death of these women? (I know the article states that, unlike men, womens' brains do NOT shrink with age, but the distribution of ages could have played a role.)

    What was the self-selection index in these women? How were they chosen to be in the group of women whose brains were donated to science? Were they organ donors (a very small pool) or were they cancer victims (a much larger pool) who were approached to enter this study?

    As to some of the other comments so far, even though I don't believe I.Q. is an accurate measure of intelligence, it is at least a fixed quantitative measure of performance on an I.Q. test. Kinda like the SATs: they just measure how well you perform on the SATs.

    • As to some of the other comments so far, even though I don't believe I.Q. is an accurate measure of intelligence, it is at least a fixed quantitative measure of performance on an I.Q. test. Kinda like the SATs: they just measure how well you perform on the SATs.

      But the idea behind the standardized tests is that correlations have been found where people who perform well on the tests generally also become successful in other fields.

      But I'm all behind you on being skeptical of studies not taking in or at least LISTING the other statistics of the test takers. I'm almost afraid it would be likely because they don't want any other researchers deriving anything from the time they put in.
    • From what I've read about both IQ tests and the SATs, they are very good predictors of success or failure in specific areas for the bottom and top 15% or so. Meaning, if you score very well or very poorly on one of these tests, there is quite a good chance that you will succeed (or fail fail) academically or in a variety of fields. For the middle 50% type people the coorelation is looser and not such a good predictor of success or failure.

  • Ugggh.. annoying out of context brain percentages (Score:5, Insightful)

    by perljon ( 530156 ) on Monday November 11, 2002 @09:30AM (#4642041) Homepage
    That's like when people say you only use 4% of your brain... imagine if you could use 100%. Well, I IMAGINE that if you approached 6% of 'usage', your brain would probably melt... (not literally, but it wouldn't work quite right)

    The percentage usage is based on concentrations of oxygen which are supposed to indicate usage... but really parts of your brain appear to be programmed to only be able to do certain things. ie, part of your brain will only be used to see, and as long as you can see, it will be used for that. So, it wouldn't make sense for you to use 100% of your brain to calculate math or compose and essay because X% will always be reserved for the tasks of seeing.

  • Monday Morning Joke (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 11, 2002 @11:13AM (#4642603)

    There were 11 people hanging onto a rope that came down from a helicopter. Ten were men and one woman. The rope was starting to fray so they all agreed that one person should let go because if they didn't the rope would break and everyone would die. No one could decide who should go so finally the woman gave a very touching speech saying how she would give up her life to save the others, because women were used to giving up things for their husbands and children, giving in to men, and that after all men were the superior sex and must be saved.

    When she finished speaking, all the men clapped.

  • mismeasure of man (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 11, 2002 @11:38AM (#4642745)
    the late stephen jay gould wrote a fantastic book called The Mismeasure of Man dissecting the use of various metrics (brain size, iq test, etc.) as a measure of intelligence. it's a very engaging book.

  • Oh yeah? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Tom7 ( 102298 ) on Monday November 11, 2002 @11:40AM (#4642765) Homepage Journal

    Well, I use the other half to drink beer and scratch my nuts.

    thpt.
    • Well, I use the other half to drink beer and scratch my nuts.

      Just don't get too sauced-up and mix these activities up.
    • funny - I was going to say nearly the same thing (at least the beer part).

      I thereby theorize that women get proportionally stupider the more beer they drink, while men get proportionally smarter (volume of living cells being used vs total cells).

      • Re:Oh yeah? (Score:2, Funny)

        by mijok ( 603178 )
        No,no,no!!! Beer contains female hormones - it's a scientific fact. In an experiment a group of men had to drink lots of beer and they began to behave more like women: - they all became way too talkative - nothing they said made any sense - they got easily upset without any reason - none of them could drive ;)
    • You forgot about farting those juciey ones out!

  • Define Intelligence! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cybrangl ( 621520 ) on Monday November 11, 2002 @11:54AM (#4642851)
    This article is a complete waste of time. Thsi puts down some data and loosly corrilates it to intelligence, but I didn't se one shred of solid fact there. One thing the article did not mention is how the brains of the genders work. Several studies have shown that women use their brain differently. Women tend to distribute the processing over smaller segments around the brain. It is unknown at this point, from the studies I read, if this is biological or enviromental. Such distribution would show up as usuing the entrie brain for a single task, whereas men tend to concentrate processing in localized areas. This would also explain why women tend to recover from strokes faster. Imagine a linux cluster where processing was devided into physical groups. Once group would handle memory mangement, while another graphics output, and another would handle IO. If you drop just one machine out of any subsetted group, you see a larger impact than if you evenly distribute the processing. Going back to the idea of intelligence, one must first define intelligence before one can measure it. The fact that I.Q. testing was originally developed for men would tend to taint the articles assumed results. I have seen people that supposedly have high I.Q.s but are complete idiots in most areas of life. I have also seen some people noted as "idiots" who have risen up in the world and become big successes. I will note that the assessment of these people changes when they do succeed, so intelligence tends to be relative.
    • Several studies have shown that women use their brain differently. Women tend to distribute the processing over smaller segments around the brain.... This would also explain why women tend to recover from strokes faster

      I knew it! They've got neural Beowolf clusters in their heads, and they use it to produce PUSH MEDIA into our ears! And the reason why they change their minds so often, it's feedback fed dynamic modification of the cluster quota!
      • I knew it! They've got neural Beowolf clusters in their heads, and they use it to produce PUSH MEDIA into our ears! And the reason why they change their minds so often, it's feedback fed dynamic modification of the cluster quota!

        Leave it to a Slashdoter to turn an analogy into a technobabble session ;)

  • Women unite (Score:3, Funny)

    by Slashdotess ( 605550 ) <gchurch@hotm[ ].com ['ail' in gap]> on Monday November 11, 2002 @12:53PM (#4643249)
    I love being a woman. I am obviously smarter than most men out there. Using an X-ray, I was able to determine my brain size to be 5 inches in diameter. With the formula, Brainpower = (diameter * radius^4 ) / 43. My brainpower is 34.402192 inches^3.
    • But have you taken steps to protect your intelligence as you get older?

      http://www.msnbc.com/news/832140.asp?cp1=1

      My wife should be thankful I've helped her out in this regard......

    • I could be that smart... if only I'd, like, read books and stuff instead of Slashdot.

      Men would be more apt to measuring another area of their body and claiming it is 5 inches in diameter... I'm one of them.

      btw, hope you don't get brain cancer from all the rads you pumped through your skull. What were you thinking?!?

  • Grrr.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Schmelter ( 563031 ) on Monday November 11, 2002 @01:17PM (#4643408)
    Wat you say? Males have half-brain?

    Schmelter angry! Schmelter smash!

  • It has nothing to do with brain structure. The reason women are so good a gab is because they practice too damned much!
  • First thought upon seeing the title:

    'Well, yeah. That's the whole point.'

    I sincerely apologize for my dirty mind.

  • let me be the first to say it (Score:5, Funny)

    by Snafoo ( 38566 ) on Monday November 11, 2002 @05:29PM (#4645572) Homepage
    Whoa, check out the lobes on *that* babe!

  • Ah! (Score:3, Funny)

    by hrieke ( 126185 ) on Monday November 11, 2002 @07:46PM (#4646665) Homepage
    That might be true that men only think with half our brains, but since we're true engineers we've made use of our redunant head to assist us with some of our thinking!

  • Interesting ideas regarding sex and the brain (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dukerobinson ( 624739 ) on Monday November 11, 2002 @09:03PM (#4647218)
    A person's sex, as we all have noticed, tends to affect the size of that person's body. Men, of course, tending to have the larger frame, also have the larger average size skull. As much as people would like to dismiss this truth, their continues to be a correlation between an individual's skull volume and that particular individual's intelligence as measured by a variety of tests. The strange thing about these findings is that while men with larger skulls tend to be of greater intelligence than men with smaller skulls, and women with larger skulls tend to of greater intelligence than women with smaller skulls, men, as a group having larger skulls, do not tend to be of greater intelligence than women, who as a group tend to have smaller skulls. (that was quite a sentence.) It seems to be the case that women have a greater concentration of "computational" neurons than men, and that men have a greater concentration of "transportational" neurons in any given section of the brain. These neurons could be thought of in terms of processors and memory chips being the computational variety and the transportational neurons being the wires that provide for their communication. These transportational neurons, used for transmitting messages over comparitively larger distances in the brain are of obvious use to men, whose larger neural network require more interconnections in comparison to run at an efficient speed. Women who have been endowed with a larger than average skull manage to avoid the genetic instructions that require resources to be given to the wires rather than the chip, seem to make out with greater computational power, possibly at the expense of a negligable amount of speed.
    • so..the bigger your head is the more intelligent you are ?
      if that was true wouldnt there be some evolutionary trend towards larger and larger heads ?? pre homo sapien men were considerably larger and had more cranial capacity. they dont seem to have the extra computational capacity to go with it however.
      • so..the bigger your head is the more intelligent you are ? if that was true wouldnt there be some evolutionary trend towards larger and larger heads ?? pre homo sapien men were considerably larger and had more cranial capacity. they dont seem to have the extra computational capacity to go with it however.

        Okay, I'll bite.

        Many scientists think that pre-humans were indeed smarter than us. Being smarter does not guarantee being more civilized or technologically advanced. Dolphins and blue whales both have larger, more convoluted and interconnected brains than us. It's quite possible they're more intelligent (I think so, but how do you prove it?).

        As for us evolving larger brains, our current stage of evolution is not necessarily one of upward progression. People on the whole don't pick their mates because of their big heads. Most pick them for their beauty. Beauty and intelligence are not necessarily linked.

        Very stupid people can survive in this world, and very smart people can die of starvation. Survival of the fittest doesn't apply very well to human development.

    • so women think more but men think faster?

  • Necessary Seinfeld Reference (Score:3, Funny)

    by yoink! ( 196362 ) on Monday November 11, 2002 @10:09PM (#4647619) Homepage Journal
    Jerry: Louise! That's what's doin' it. You're no longer pre-occupied with sex, so your mind is able to focus.

    George: You think?

    Jerry: Yeah. I mean, let's say this is your brain. (Holds lettuce head) Okay, from what I know about you, your brain consists of two parts: the intellect, represented here (Pulls off tiny piece of lettuce), and the part obsessed with sex. (Shows the rest of the lettuce) Now granted, you have extracted an astonishing amount from this little scrap. But with no-sex-Louise, this previously useless lump, is now functioning for the first time in its existence. (Eats tiny piece of lettuce)

    *sigh* of course the intelligence always fails at some point.


    Jerry: Where have you been? You know, you're on next.

    George: I got lost on the way over.

    Jerry: Got lost? We went to school here for three years.

    George: What are these? (Holds test tubes to his head like antennae) Take me to your leader.

    Jerry: Oh my God. You had sex. You had sex with Louise!

    George: No, the Portuguese waitress.

    Jerry: The Portuguese waitress?

    George: I calculated my odds of ever getting together with a Portuguese waitress. Mathematically, I had to do it, Jerry.

  • In related news.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by EggplantMan ( 549708 ) on Monday November 11, 2002 @11:30PM (#4648110) Homepage
    Men have been found to use half of their brain to think about sex at all times.

  • IQ and all that (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Frodo2002 ( 595920 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @08:56AM (#4650078) Homepage

    I want to add my two cents on this IQ debate. Simon and Chase and Simon did a number of studies on chess players in the 70's. Give an expert a chess position - s/he can memorize the entire board in one look. Give it to a novice chess player, s/he can memorize just a few pieces. THEN they gave the experts and novices RANDOM positions (pieces just mixed up everywhere) and there was no difference in ability to remember the position. Both the experts and novices were unable to remember more than a few pieces. The explanation is that experts have deep and complex schemas which they use to memorize large patterns and relational structures on the chess board. When they cannot use them, they are in the same position as a novice. Carry this over to the IQ test. Someone who is a mathematics expert will be able to memorize far more numbers in a random string than someone who is an expert in poetry for the same reasons mentioned above. Basically the IQ test is a test of expertise in an extremely limited range of subjects chosen mostly for historical reasons I guess.

    Second point. Someone said that humans are not naturally "rational" or words to that effect. Absolute rubbish! First of all what do you mean by "rational"? If you will accept my (and others) definition of "rational" - which is roughly ability to engage in logical reasoning ala the "scientific method" then humans are innately rational. Humans engage in hypothetico-deductive reasoning all the time just in order to function. Read Anton Lawson (1993) in Cognition and Instruction, for complete explanation.

    • What kind of insight is that? A real chess position makes sense to a chess player, a random one doesn't. Neither makes sense to a non-player. You'd get the same results from testing how well people can memorize random strings vs. non-random strings: "the quick brown fox" vs. "cyq asongf wklan weo".
      • Let me make it explicit then. An IQ test is meant to test innate brain capacity right? So for example a smarter person would have a larger short term memory capacity than a stupider person. This is tested by getting the subject to memorize a random string of numbers say. The more you can memorize, the higher your innate intelligence. THe point of the example is to argue that there can be no independent unbiased test of such a thing as short term memory. Someone who has a "gift for numbers" or who is a mathematics expert would be able to memorize more than someone who is not. Maybe the other one can memorize lots of words and infact his short term memory is better. You can try and give absolutely random combinations of stuff to reduce this effect, but I would argue that you can never remove context dependence completely. There are too many factors which can affect the outcome. I would argue that IQ tests are inherently bad at best and extremely damaging to society as a whole at worst. The ideas of memorizing random strings of stuff to measure short term memory have been discredited for 50 years. (plusminus 10 years).
    • Very cool study (chess players). Your logic on human rationality sucks however. Which disproves your point twice ;) Your definition is fine. But even if humans can be rational, doesn't mean they are. I haven't read Anton Lawson, but I suggest reading The Emotional Brain by Professor Joseph Le Doux. It's more reasonable to say that we are sophisticated emotional beings rather than rational.
      • Yes, I have not read "The Emotional Brain" either. I'll go and read it, and you go and read Lawson and then we will see. I never wanted to say humans act rationally all the time. I wanted to suggest that rational behaviour is one of many innate traits of humans necessary for our survival. Whether it is genetically hard-wired or fostered early in development through interaction with the surrounding environment is not worth arguing over though. Point is that it is there. Isn't it funny though how people turn off their rational thinking capabilities as soon as they see anything "scientific". :)
        • I did find an online paper by Lawson, not read it yet.
          As for rational, I would say we are pseudo-rational. If we were capable of being completely rational, we wouldn't get conned by salespeople, politicians etc. Look up the term "junko logic".
          Some people are obviously capable of being more rational than others.
          Your note about something presented as science is a well known influence technique.
          Another very cool book is "Influence" by Robert Cialdini.
  • has ability to remember string of numberst to do with intelligence??
  • why not dedicate the other half for some seti@home work? :)
  • Are we then de-evolving in our capability for intellingence? Cromagnon man had an average brain size that was 15% larger than that of the average modern European man.

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