While it is common belief that girls think more maturely than boys, a new study gives evidence and explains the reason behind it.
Researchers from the Newcastle University of England led by Dr. Marcus Kaiser and Sol Lim may have discovered the reason girls mature faster than boys. According to the study, girls' brains begin brain connection recognition earlier than boys' brain and this could explain why girls mature faster than boys.
As part of their analysis, they examined 121 brain scans from participants that are 4 to 40 years old.
They found that as people grow old, the brain undergoes a process of reducing and reorganizing connections to update long distance connections which are important for retrieving and storing information. While both genders go through the same process, girls tend to have it earlier by an average of 10 years than boys.
The researchers demonstrated that as the brain sheds the white mass fiber between its regions, it is also performing a highly selective process called preferential detachment. The study also showed connections between brain regions that are distant, between the two hemispheres of the brains, and between processing modules.
"Long-distance connections are difficult to establish and maintain but are crucial for fast and efficient processing. If you think about a social network, nearby friends might give you very similar information -- you might hear the same news from different people," Dr.Kaiser said in a statement.
"People from different cities or countries are more likely to give you novel information. In the same way, some information flow within a brain module might be redundant whereas information from other modules, say integrating the optical information about a face with the acoustic information of a voice is vital in making sense of the outside world."
They also attempted to decide if selective process is the key why the brain function keeps on improving instead of deteriorating over the years.
The study was published in the online journal Cerebral Cortex.
