Today.Az » Weird / Interesting » Northerners' brains are bigger, scientists find
27 July 2011 [18:53] - Today.Az
Good news for our readers from the north: you are likely to have a bigger brain than your southern counterparts.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t necessarily mean you are more intelligent than
people from the south – just that you have evolved to cope with the longer
winters and greyer skies in northern climes.
A study of populations across both hemispheres has shown people from countries
further from the equator have more grey matter and larger eyes than those
from sunnier parts.
This is because living in low light conditions means the eyes and brain need
to work harder in order to process images to a good level of detail, or
“high resolution”.
Researchers said the findings could theoretically even apply to different
communities within a particular country, meaning people in the north of
Britain might have larger brains than those in the south.
Northerly populations have evolved to cope with dull, cloudy skies and short
periods of daylight since migrating to Europe and northern Asia as many as
40,000 years ago.
/The Telegraph/
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