Peter Douglas Zohrab wrote in message
<4HvV8.4102$7G4.658649 at news.xtra.co.nz>...
>[...]
>Assuming, for the sake of simplicity, that there are n forms of
intelligence
>that are each associated with one particular part of the male brain, then
>surely it is conceivable, and it will often occur, that some of these parts
>will be, say, 5% larger than the male population mean, and some will be 5%
>smaller -- and sometimes parts will be 10% or 15% or even 20% larger or
>smaller than the mean. It seems to me obvious that, in some individuals,
>the sum of these differences will result in a brain that is significantly
>larger or smaller than the mean, and that we should expect this to be
>correlated, respectively, with a higher or lower IQ, since the IQ is the
sum
>of scores in sub-tests of various forms of intelligence.
all 'brains' undergo topologically-distributed hyper-/hypo- trophy as a
by-product of the neural activation that occurs within them.
the maximum possible quantity of such neural activation is probably a
function of genetic inheritance, and, on average, neural activation is much
smaller than this maximum because there are mechanisms built into the brain
whose main purpose is to minimize neural activation.
because of the actions of these minimization mechanisms tend stongly to be
structurally 'egalitarian', if one 'area' undergoes hypertrophy, another
'area' will tend to undergo hypotrophy.
a well known, slightly-different, but still correlated, case ensues
following loss of an extremity. neural processing spreads to the cortical
foci of the former projections from the lost limb, yielding a commensurately
'distorted' brain-side topographics map.
the same thing happens in cases of extremely-focused experience [as
Einstein's whole life's experience was], but such has nothing explicitly to
do with 'maleness' or 'femaleness', and everything to do with experience
[probably including prenatal experience pertaining to the Mother's 'stress'
level, and shared nutrients, etc.] albeit, there're huge gender stereotypes
that focus experience.
the argument that a larger overall brain size is correlated with
information-processing capacity is hard to defend because all things else
being proportional, because of the longer fibers necessary, an overly-large
brain suffers a penalty in energy consumption and/or convergence 'time'.
[which is another viewport into the hyper-/hypo- trophy stuff. to maintain
overall minimization of energy consumption, and overall 'timely'
convergence, requires a hypertophy-hypotrophy 'off-setting'. this, of
course, can be 'stretched' a bit if it's the case that an individual
experiences greater than 'normal' "leisure" ["leisure", here, is not
necessarily a state of "ease".]]
before reading the page to which your post directed me, i'd only read rather
sketchy reports on "Einstein's brain". my understanding was that it was cut
up, fixed, and sat in a jar, almost lost, for decades, with only
long-post-mortem investigation. the thing that i found most-interesting is
that Einstein's brain was found to have significantly-mor neuralglia cells.
significant information not presented on the web page is that pertaining to
cell types, counts, distributions and interconnection information.
without such information and without detailed discussion of individual
experience, drawing generalized conclusions is completely unjustified. and
it's expecially so because Einstein's experience was so unique. before one
couuld begin to draw conclusions, one would have to match/contrast and
interpolate with respect to experience. whose experience, 'male' or 'female'
matches that of Einstein? one who comes to mind is Mother Teresa. analogous
experiential focus, analogous Genius, analogous accomplishment... just
different fields of endeavor.
anyway, the answer to your Q is that "you can't get there from here".
k. p. collins
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