Irvine, Calif.

(January 20, 2005) -- While there are essentially no disparities in

general intelligence between the sexes, a UC Irvine study has found
significant differences in brain areas where males and females manifest their
intelligence.

The study shows women having more white matter and

men more gray matter related to intellectual skill,
“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.

In general, 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,
Grey matter is a major component of the central nervous system, consisting of neuronal cell
bodies, neuropil (dendrites and both unmyelinated axons and myelinated axons), glial cells
(astroglia and oligodendrocytes) and capillaries
The function of grey matter is to route sensory or motor stimulus to interneurons of the CNS in
order to create a response to the stimulus through chemical synapse activity. Grey matter
structures (cortex, deep nuclei) process information originating in the sensory organs or in
other gray matter regions.

white matter represents the networking of – or connections between – these processing

centers. The white matter is the tissue through which messages pass between different areas of
gray matter within the nervous system.
Using a computer network as an analogy, the gray matter can be thought of as the actual
computers themselves, whereas the white matter represents the network cables connecting
the computers together

Unlike gray matter, which peaks in development in a person's twenties, the white matter
continues to develop, and peaks in middle age (Sowell et al., 2003)

A 2009 paper by Jan Scholz and colleagues[4] used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to demonstrate
changes in white matter volume as a result of learning a new motor task (juggling). The study is
important as the first paper to correlate motor learning with white matter changes. Previously,
many researchers had considered this type of learning to be exclusively mediated by dendrites,
which are not present in white matter.

This, according to Rex Jung, a UNM neuropsychologist and co-author 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.

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.