5 ms·
This is an important note. Also, even when we are able to find physical variations in brains, that doesn't necessarily lead to any useful conclusions about how
by MrJohz 3y ago
This is an important note. Also, even when we are able to find physical variations in brains, that doesn't necessarily lead to any useful conclusions about how the brain works.
For example, male brains tend to be larger than female brains, but the only thing this seems to be correlated with is head size - it doesn't seem like larger brains make you more intelligent or are associated with particular traits.
- dartos 3y agoI wonder how much of brain size is just blood.
- Staple_Diet 3y agoWell, akshually... A major male:female difference relates to hippocampal volume, with large and robust performance differences in hippocampal dependent tasks between the sexes across mammalian species, inc humans. In this space you generally see the vole studies, where the monogamous prairie vole has a smaller HC than the hustler meadow vole. The going theory is most (97%) of mammalian species are not monogamous, thus the males needs to know where his ladies are at, which requires more spatial memory capacity ergo larger HC. Curiously across species hippocampal function is boosted in post-partem females compared to females without pups/kids, suggesting an evolutionary adaption perhaps. Anyway, this isn't my niche area of neuroscience so the above is mainly quoted from lectures I attended a few years back. But this paper seems to give an adequate overview; https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-018-0208-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-018-0208-4