GENDER DIFFERENCES IN BRAIN ANATOMY [ back to What's New ]
Neuroscientists Ruben and Raquel Gur of the University of Pennsylvania Medical
Center, a married couple, just published a study of anatomical differences between the brains of men and women. Evolutionary anthropologists have noted that the larger the brain the more intelligent the creature. Yet while men have larger brain volume than women they test the same in IQ and while men excel at spatial tasks, women do better on verbal tests. Why? The Gurs used a group of 40 healthy men and women to answer the question. They gave the subjects a battery of cognitive and performance tests and Took MRIs of their brains. The conclusion was that male brains are larger because of more white matter connections (which make men better at finding places without maps), and that female brains have a greater number of cells more densely packed in their  gray matter (making them superior at verbal tasks) The study was published the May 15, 1999 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.