Gray and White Matter

[Deleted member 750603]

If this is not the right forum let me know.

For those that have exposure to neurology what is the consensus on the differences between brain sizes between men and women. The number that is thrown around is that men have brains which are 10% larger than women.

Men have more gray matter, but women have more white matter.

My other question is how does one have an increase in gray matter or an increase in white matter? Is it simply the differences in myelination amount vs soma size or are the more axon terminal connections vs more dendrite connections and if so how does that translate reasoning/functioning/information gathering/etc or at least in theory?

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[Microshaft]

#Metoo

 

[Anti-PD1]

If this is not the right forum let me know.

For those that have exposure to neurology what is the consensus on the differences between brain sizes between men and women. The number that is thrown around is that men have brains which are 10% larger than women.

Men have more gray matter, but women have more white matter.

My other question is how does one have an increase in gray matter or an increase in white matter? Is it simply the differences in myelination amount vs soma size or are the more axon terminal connections vs more dendrite connections and if so how does that translate reasoning/functioning/information gathering/etc or at least in theory?

"Adjusting for age, on average, they found that women tended to have significantly thicker cortices than men. Thicker cortices have been associated with higher scores on a variety of cognitive and general intelligence tests. Meanwhile, men had higher brain volumes than women in every subcortical region they looked at, including the hippocampus (which plays broad roles in memory and spatial awareness), the amygdala (emotions, memory, and decision-making), striatum (learning, inhibition, and reward-processing), and thalamus (processing and relaying sensory information to other parts of the brain).

When the researchers adjusted the numbers to look at the subcortical regions relative to overall brain size, the comparisons became much closer: There were only 14 regions where men had higher brain volume and 10 regions where women did.

Volumes and cortical thickness between men also tended to vary much more than they did between women, the researchers report this month in a paper posted to the bioRxiv server, which makes articles available before they have been peer reviewed."

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/04/study-finds-some-significant-differences-brains-men-and-women

I always found brain volume stuff to echo the days of phrenology, not because of malintent, but because there's so much interperson variation. But still, there are differences, as this piece points out.

Your second point is just another way of saying men have more neurons, or bigger neurons. Emma Watson won't be happy.

Not sure on your last questions. All I know is the brain had 100 bn neurons, 100 bn glia, and the cerebellum has more neurons anyways.