Slashdot Mirror
Size Does Matter... But Only in Women
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."
it's more about how your brain processes things and that most iq testa deployed don't really work, because they're not designed right.
kinda like how when african-americans(or whats the pc term anyways) were 'proven' to be stupid because they couldnt do complex math in iq test that was designed for people who had gotten more education.
conqrats on first post!
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
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Of course, there is some correlation with intelligence. But then we'd have to define what intelligence is (which is very much open to debate).
Some people view intelligence as the ability to perform well in the society. In that case it should take into account social aspects (and health). Some think that intelligence is your ability to solve abstract problems (in which case IQ tests is more meaningful). Some think intelligence should somehow be a measure of your brains "capacity". In that case, it would make sense to view educated people as more intelligent. After all, it doesn't matter much with potentials, it's the end-result that matters. And so on...
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...
It's not that I'm Anti-American - I'm Pro-Freedom
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.
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.
This isn't the sig you are looking for... Carry on...
well, yeah, that was sort of what i was trying to say.
Maybe one day, people will get over the x% of your brain myth. Mayber, just maybe. Here.
Why not fork?
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.
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.
Well, I use the other half to drink beer and scratch my nuts.
thpt.
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.
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.
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!
Table-ized A.I.
We use all of our brain.
> (not literally, but it wouldn't work quite right)
I think some people's brains in this day and age will never work quite right, no matter how little or how much of their brain they use...
"But I can't get an ocean that's deep enough for my day..." ~The Frames, "Fitzcarraldo"
How 'bout a date with an anonymous coward?
"Intellegence"? "Brigtest"? "Subconsious"? Jesus! Learn your own damn native language, for God's sake.
Anyhow, given the number of men I know who sincerely believe GCC complies with the ISO C++ standard (and/or spend all their disposable income adding newer and better air dams and spoilers to their fucking Civics), I'm not sure the irrationality is all on one side there, chump.
Me? I'm a guy and I spend my time flaming dumbasses on Slashdot. How much more rational can you get than that?
One of the biggest problems I have with IQ tests such as Weschler and Stanford-Binet is that they are cuturally biased. For instance, they use knowledge of vocabulary and comprehension as metrics. An example question from the Weschler page: "Describe how the following pair of words are alike or the same--hamburger and pizza." A correct response would be "Both are things to eat." Well what if I am a vegetarian from new Dehli? Would you have known the answer if I had said Pakora and Naan?
Stop Continental Drift! Reunite Gondwanaland!
A woman finished speaking?
;-)
or,
All the men clapped except for the one with the knife that had been busy cutting the others below him loose.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
I can imagine that fully half of my brain's langauge processing ability is being used to try and process the BODY language of an attractive girl, as opposed to what it is she is actually saying. I typically don't do this consciously, mind you, but I feel as if that after chatting with an attractive woman at a bar/party/etc., I am more inclined to be able to describe to you what she looks like, and what her physical posture was indicating (usually this is something to the effect of "you're a computer geek? Ewww.") then what it was she was actually saying.
:)
I'm kind of wondering if maybe I'm not the only man out there with this problem
'Well, yeah. That's the whole point.'
I sincerely apologize for my dirty mind.
Of course, there is some correlation with intelligence. But then we'd have to define what intelligence is (which is very much open to debate).
Actually, there is correlation between previous and future peformance on standardized tests. Many medical schools only grade their students via bubble test because there exists a correlation over the years between bubble test scores and national certification test scores (I've forgotten the exact name of the national test that every US medical student must take).
"Would you rather have a playstation addicted dork wearing a star wars t-shirt?"
Dang it! Now you've made me hungry for Indian food. :-)
I wonder... could problems like that be addressed through localized versions of the tests, so that rather than being merely language translations, a Mexican test would compare tostada and burrito? Admittedly, that still doesn't account for regional subvariations within a country (beignets? hush puppies?) but maybe a third locale level (variant) could be used there. The down side to this is an explosion of localized versions...
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
killing them with beer..
Whoa, check out the lobes on *that* babe!
- undoware.ca
"Using" is the operative term. The brain can't use all the neurons all the time because a relaxation period is required every time a neuron fires. You can test this yourself by staring in one spot for an extended period without moving your eyes. then shift your gaze to a white surface. You'll see the previous scene "burned' into your vision. Normally your eyes move around a scene in front of you. This shifts the focus from neurons that have fired, to ones that are ready to fire. Stay focused on one spot too long, and you exhaust the available pool of refreshed neurons for a portion of your feild of vision.
The brain has to work within its limitations and if it were possible for more neurons to be active at any given time, they would be active.
There are situations where most of the brain is active and those are when one is experiencing a siezure. And since the person is likely to be unconcious during that time, it can't be said such a state is a period of increased intelligence.
Actually that isn't entirely correct. The idea behind IQ tests was to predict who would do well in higher education, and hence who it is worth letting in. As that, it succeeds pretty well- the correlation coefficient between IQ and academic success is something like 60% IRC.
Extrapolating this index further to other areas works less well; I believe that high IQ scores correspond to only about a 5% increase in earnings. Probably other factors like so called 'EQ' correlate better with the other 'success' metrics.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"When she finished speaking, all the men let go to get away from the incessant whining.
Women may live longer than men, but to a married man, his life just feels longer.
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!
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
(in case the comparisons are unclear, the ENIAC is the one that produced a lot of hot air)
That's why we often have to think with our other organs.
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.
Is the education of a person not a factor in his or her intelligence? If you are proposing that a test be developed that would measure "what if?" intelligence I say more power to you. With such a test you could tell me my intelligence in any array of possibly situations I might have lived in. Think of it! And the African-Asians..... wow they are in for a shock. Well I suppose Tiger Woods warmed them up for this. My intelligence as a barkeep in London, 1743 AD My intelligence as a caveman in the cold recesses of the north, 7000 BC My intelligence had I been a "Native American" while still living in the Siberia/Mongolia region before moving with my nomadic tribe across the Bering Straight and arriving in North America. Therefore not making me a "Native American" Wait a second..... All humans came from Africa, so that must make me an African American! Ha, listen to those damned African-Europeans not knowing what to call themselves. What ignorance! Sorry for digressing. My point was just that it is impossible to separate the environment of the individual being tested from the individual h/im/erself. Damn it we need neuter pronouns.
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.
Stuff that's hit AP and other news stuff like Slashdot in the last two weeks or so:
"Size does matter"
"Drinking proven to reduce mental competence"
"Pot smoking worse than cigarette smoking"
Ah, yes. Science grants. Your tax dollars at work.
May we never see th
Men have been found to use half of their brain to think about sex at all times.
?-|||-----x<*))))><
nobody gives a fuck about people from new dehli, or anywhere, besides the US.
Don't get me wrong, I like it that way.
Unfortunately your link doesn't seem to cover what he's referring to.
The percentage usage is based on concentrations of oxygen which are supposed to indicate usage
Anyone know what this is about?
Oh really? Doh. I feel kind of bad now. Maybe he was actually talking about something valid and I am a moron.
Why not fork?
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.
If have no reason to doubt your numbers, but that would suggest that academic success correlates little, if at all, with earnings. Given the salary surveys (at least here in Germany) I got a totally different impression.
Do you have a reference?
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?!?
has ability to remember string of numberst to do with intelligence??
Good thing that you don't need to take more bubble tests for national certs...
We now have confirmed reports from an informed Orange County minister that Ethel is still an active communist.
You used all your brain to read the article posted above, then post one of the suggested retorts upon hearing that only 1/10 of the brain is used.
why not dedicate the other half for some seti@home work? :)
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
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.
Nuf said
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
What?