What is the difference between gray matter and white matter?
Gray is central to processing information and plays a vital role in aiding skills such as mathematics, map-reading, and intellectual thought. White matter connects the brain’s processing centers and is central to emotional thinking, use of language, and the ability to do more than one thing at once. Because women use less gray matter–critical to map-reading–they tend to have more difficulty with this skill than men. “This may help explain why men tend to excel in tasks requiring more local processing, like mathematics and map-reading, while women tend to excel at integrating information from various brain regions, such as is required for language skills,” co-study author and neuropsychologist Rex Jung of the University of New Mexico told the Daily Telegraph. “These two very different pathways and activity centers, however, result in equivalent overall performance on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as those found on intelligence tests.” This isn’t the first study to assail w
