It ages noticeably more slowly than the "gray matter" of the stronger sex. The difference reaches 4 years on average!
From an early age, we learned the folk wisdom: "A woman's hair is long, but her mind is short." And no stories about the outstanding abilities of the genius of mathematics Sophia Kovalevskaya or the Nobel laureate Maria Sklodowska-Curie are able to shake the belief of other representatives of the stronger sex in the intellectual superiority of men. "Yes, there are exceptions among the ladies, but they only confirm the general rule!" - this is how the gentlemen react to the above arguments.
However, recently a group of neurophysiologists from the University of Washington discovered the superpowers of the brain, which is characteristic not of individual smart women, but of all the fair sex. Their brains age noticeably slower than the "gray matter" in men! …
Male chauvinists will exclaim: “What nonsense ?! The rate of withering of the body can somehow be determined by external signs. But how do you calculate brain aging? " This methodology for assessing the age of "gray matter" was created by the Americans. Aging of the human brain is associated with a decrease in metabolism, or, more simply, with a change in metabolism. It is known that glucose acts as a source of energy for the brain. By studying with the method of positron emission tomography how the brain consumes glucose, oxygen and how the intensity of blood flow changes, scientists have learned to determine the metabolic age of the brain. It can differ significantly from the age of the "passport".
Neurophysiologists conducted an experiment in which 205 people (121 women and 84 men) participated in the age from 20 to 82 years. A computer algorithm was trained to determine the age of the brain in men based on the metabolic rate. It corresponded to the real age. But when it came to processing the data of beautiful women, it turned out that the brains of women were younger than their "passport" age by an average of 3.8 years.
Of course, there will be angry people who will say, "Their brains are younger because they rarely use it!" And they will be wrong. We condemn such statements, because envy is a bad feeling. And there is something to bite your elbows. Time, as you know, does not spare anyone. Over the years, the breast of a beautiful virgin can lose elasticity. The beauty's waist strives to lose its former subtlety, and the buttocks - to acquire cellulite. But in old age, a woman is better at retaining a sharpness of mind than a man. However, the difference manifests itself not only in old age.
“The female brain appears to be younger throughout adulthood,” says one of the study's authors, Markus Reichel. - Girls have less loss of cerebral blood flow after puberty and a higher rate of glucose breakdown during reproductive age. And this sets the stage for different trajectories of brain aging in different sexes. The female brain is more resistant to age-related changes. There is evidence that their hippocampus atrophies to a lesser extent (it is responsible for the transition of short-term memory to long-term memory), respectively, aging women have better memory than men.
Perhaps the metabolic youthfulness of the female brain is associated with female longevity, which is observed throughout the world. For example, representatives of the stronger sex in Russia die 12 years (!) Earlier than women. However, we hussars shouldn't get too upset either. The preservation of mental abilities with age is a very individual matter. Some people experience a rapid decline, others remain sages until the very end. But it is worth considering the proverb that says that a man is certainly a head! But the cunning female “neck” turns this “head”, whose intellectual potential we often underestimate.
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YAROSLAV KOROBATOV