A study conducted at UNM claims men and women think differently.
But that doesn't mean one gender is more intelligent than the other, the report states.
The paper appeared in an issue of the journal NeuroImage and was published by Rex Jung, an assistant research professor at UNM.
The study was designed to determine whether men and women process information the same way and found consistent differences based on gender.
Jung recruited 26 women and 22 men between the ages of 18 and 24 for the study. All participants were UNM students with the same IQ.
Jung works at the UNM Mental Illness and Neuroscience Discovery Imaging Center and co-authored a paper with University of California-Irving scientist Rich Haier.
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Jung said previous research claimed bigger brains are better, but this reasoning is vague. He said it is well-established that men have a larger cerebrum than women by about 8 percent to 10 percent.
The subjects had no neurological or psychological diseases, Jung said. A series of tests were conducted using Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale to measure their IQ.
He said IQ is strongly related to differences in the amount of gray matter and white matter in areas in the brain, mostly frontal, temporal and parietal regions.
Researchers did MRI scans of the subjects and analyzed the scans looking at densities of gray and white matter and how they relate to intelligence, Jung said.
Men and women need both white matter and gray matter to have normal thought processes, Jung said.
He said the differences in the amount of matter depend partly on genetics and partly on the social and cultural interactions of each subject.
However, Jung said the study suggests women use a greater range of the brain to process information, and men seem to have more local processing.
"Men and women have the same level of intelligence," Jung said. "We wanted to see how designs of the brain differed to meet information."
The difference between the gray and white matter is similar to having one supercomputer churning away at a problem - the way he described a male brain processes - versus having the problem distributed to individual computers, which is the way a female brain processes.
Jung said the two methods achieve the same result.
Gray matter is the thinking part of the brain.
Jung said the gray matter processes information on the surface of the brain.
White matter refers to the connections between regions that enable the brain to function as a whole.
The study found men had about 6.5 times more gray matter than women, and women had about nine times more white matter than men.
Using the MRI samples, Jung discovered that in the men, the greatest volume of gray matter was in bilateral frontal lobes and in left parietal lobes, also known as the Wernicke's area.
In female subjects, the strongest amount of gray matter was in the right frontal lobe and the largest cluster was found in Broca's area, which is where language is processed.
UNM student Jesus Mu§oz said the study made sense to him.
He said the study explains the stereotype that men are insensitive, because their thought process goes through one main part of the brain.
But the division of gender does not seem clear cut to student Senseney Stokes.
Stokes said she gets annoyed when she hears study results like this, because people do not get the big picture behind it. Instead, they might get the impression men are narrow-minded and women are more thorough in their decisions, she said.
Stokes said people could also start thinking women are scattered and men are efficient.
"You could get conclusions like that as a result of research, but it's your association that it's accurate," she said. "But it's totally not."
Jung said he would like to begin a follow-up to this study in April.
