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Women's Brains Are 'Four Years Younger' Than Men's, Study Finds (theguardian.com)
Women's brains are nearly four years younger than men's, at least in how they burn fuel, according to scans performed by U.S. researchers. "Scientists found that healthy women have a 'metabolic brain age' that is persistently younger than men's of the same chronological age," reports The Guardian. "The difference is apparent from early adulthood and remains into old age." From the report: The finding suggests that changes in how the brain uses energy over a person's lifetime proceed more gradually in women than they do in men. While researchers are unsure of the medical consequences, it may help explain why women tend to stay mentally sharp for longer. "Brain metabolism changes with age but what we noticed is that a good deal of the variation we see is down to sex differences," said Marcus Raichle, a neurobiologist at Washington University school of medicine in St Louis. "If you look at how brain metabolism predicts a person's age, women come out looking about four years younger than they are."
The scientists used a brain scanning technique called positron emission tomography to measure the flow of oxygen and glucose in the brains of 121 women and 84 men aged 20 to 82. The scans revealed how sugar was being turned into energy in different parts of the volunteers' brains. To see how brain metabolism differed between the sexes, the researchers used a computer algorithm to predict people's ages based on brain metabolism as measured by the scans. First, the scientists taught it to predict men's ages from metabolism data gleaned from the male brain scans. The striking result came when the scientists fed metabolism data from the women into the same program. While the program estimated male ages accurately, it judged the women's brains to be, on average, 3.8 years younger than their real ages. "The scientists then flipped the analysis around," the report adds. "They trained the algorithm to predict women's ages from data garnered from their brain scans. This time, when they fed metabolism data from the men into the computer, it estimated them to be 2.4 years older than they were. The way male brains burned sugar made them seem older than female ones of the same age." The study has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The scientists used a brain scanning technique called positron emission tomography to measure the flow of oxygen and glucose in the brains of 121 women and 84 men aged 20 to 82. The scans revealed how sugar was being turned into energy in different parts of the volunteers' brains. To see how brain metabolism differed between the sexes, the researchers used a computer algorithm to predict people's ages based on brain metabolism as measured by the scans. First, the scientists taught it to predict men's ages from metabolism data gleaned from the male brain scans. The striking result came when the scientists fed metabolism data from the women into the same program. While the program estimated male ages accurately, it judged the women's brains to be, on average, 3.8 years younger than their real ages. "The scientists then flipped the analysis around," the report adds. "They trained the algorithm to predict women's ages from data garnered from their brain scans. This time, when they fed metabolism data from the men into the computer, it estimated them to be 2.4 years older than they were. The way male brains burned sugar made them seem older than female ones of the same age." The study has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
...they aren't used as much. ZING!
Glucose is a type of sugar. How old is your brain?
You could also say that men's brains are 'Four Years Older' than women's. So by assuming men's brain's are the reference and women's are younger I suspect you will annoy some. Just saying...
If women are so smart how come most of them end up marrying men?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Thatâ(TM)s not true at all. In time periods where the average age of death was considerably lower it was infant mortality pulling it down. Once you hit 18 it wasnâ(TM)t uncommon to make it into the 60â(TM)s.
Doubtful. The human lifespan was never long enough for it to matter until recently. Most people were dead in their 30s.
This is a myth. In earlier times, average lifespan was short because of high childhood mortality. But if you made it past 5, you were likely to live to 50, 60, or 70.
The presence of a maternal grandmother in the household is correlated with better child and maternal health. Interestingly, the presence of a paternal grandmother has an overall negative effect. So women actually have a scientific basis for hating their mother-in-law.
But that's not the statistic of interest. If we had the all the data available, the statistic of interest is the life expectancy at birth, split for only those people who bring a child into this world who also brings a child into this world.
In other words, grandparent-caliber people, with some staying power in the gene pool, who put in the long hearth years.
That group of people could quite easily have a life expectancy at birth of 50 or more years, even with the number you've quoted above.
Especially considering that it wasn't uncommon for a male child to reach adulthood, join an army, and not survive to start any family, whatsoever (who's tragic death at age 18 or 22 would be excluded from my split above).
If I'm reading this right, an AI model of the male brain is being asked to interpret a female brain as a male brain, and then to predict the age of such a male brain, which comes out lower than the age of the female brain masquerading as a male brain.
AI algorithms are notorious for finding any manner of correlation. How do you correct for brain size differences (or anything else) in such a study?
However, I wouldn't discard this study outright if I were planning to undergo a cross-sex brain transplant sometime soon.
No, I don't. The parent is. I just picked a prominent example.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
So as a male I should get to retire earlier . It seems only fair. I must be really old because I actually learned cobol.
Pot meet kettle
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
Based on the data from modern hunter-gatherer populations, it is estimated that at 15, life expectancy was an additional 39 years (total 54), with a 0.60 probability of reaching 15.
https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-life-expectancy-of-humans-in-prehistoric-times
The average life span was 35 in the paleolithic, but that is taking all the life spans and adding them and dividing, that brings it down due to the high infant mortality rate, those who survived child hood usually lived to be 40 or 50