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."
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...
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...
Maybe one day, people will get over the x% of your brain myth. Mayber, just maybe. Here.
Why not fork?
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.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
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.
Well, I use the other half to drink beer and scratch my nuts.
thpt.
Wat you say? Males have half-brain?
Schmelter angry! Schmelter smash!
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.
Whoa, check out the lobes on *that* babe!
- undoware.ca
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.
"player 4 hit player 1 with 0 stroms"
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.