Woman Does Not Live By Hormones Alone

If you caught my post titled "Making a Mountain Out of a Molehill" (2/24/04), you read about a recent study from Belgium that shows that women are much more affected emotionally by ordinary language than men.

What is it in the female brain that would cause this super-sensitive reaction to emotional components? Believe it or not, Woman does not live by hormones alone...

There are approximately one billion nerve cells in the human brain. Not only do women have significantly more connections between these cells than men, they also have an advantage in the region known as the corpus callosum.

The corpus callosum is the main tissue “bridge” that links the two hemispheres of the brain, running from the front to the back of the head. Some 200 million fibers facilitate the exchange of information between the left and right hemispheres. Remember when I told you that women have four times as many connections between the two sides of the brain? This is where it happens.. and it gets even more fascinating. The female corpus callosum not only has four times as many connections, it is much thicker as well – as much as 15%! Researchers believe that this combination of size and connectivity makes women more perceptive, articulate, and verbally fluent. We are simply better equipped to move data from one side of the brain to the other. We also attune ourselves to a wider perspective in thought processing, by responding to nuances in body language, tone of voice, and other non-verbal clues. Our brains are virtual superhighways of whole-thought processing!

But what good would this gift of “turbo” processing be if we didn’t have the ability to store a thought and pull it up for comparison when a similar thought enters the brain? Our right brain is a vast, deep vault of emotions, memories, and experiences. The key to the vault is a wonderful little trigger called emotional memory.

More on this soon...

Comments

[bv]

Humans have at least 10^11 neurons in the brain, so your figure is off by two orders of magnitude (nit-picky, but true).

Wouldn't CC size and greater interconnectivity necessarily be correlated? If you have a series of wires, all approximately the same diameter, adding more connections would have to make the bundle bigger. The CC isn't a region that has connections, it's just the wiring that connects the two hemispheres.

"We also attune ourselves to a wider perspective in thought processing, by responding to nuances in body language, tone of voice, and other non-verbal clues. Our brains are virtual superhighways of whole-thought processing!"

I'm not even sure what this means, in a scientific sense. Are you saying men do not do this?

That said, women do tend to have a massa intermedia more often than men. This is a commisure (axon bundles) that interconnect the left and right thalamuses, with an unknown function.

I just want to advocate care with regards to making inferences about certain facts.

Quite a few bloggers have been doing this lately with respect to neuroscience-related topics...

[bv]

Ha! Wow, this post is over 3 years old... no one will see my response!