Interesting study mentioned in Daily Telegraph re grey matter

[TylerDurden]

Northerners' brains are bigger, scientists find
Good news for our readers from the north: you are likely to have a bigger brain than your southern counterparts.

By Nick Collins, Science Correspondent

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, published in the Royal Society's Biology Letters journal, 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.

[sabertooth]

I am still not convinced that the sole reason northerners developed larger brains was just to be able to cope with lower levels of sunlight.

Not only would the optical sense organs have to work harder in the lower light of the north, but the other more critical thinking portions of the brain would also have to work harder to cope with freezing winter. The need to develop skills to survive the perils of the ice ages would be the primary driving force behind the larger brain adaption.

Perhaps even metabolic adaptions to the cold weather could be indirectly responsible for larger brains . In colder climates our ancestors began to use more fat as a primary food source, from the mega fauna that were abundant during the exodus from Africa period. Perhaps the bodies of those early mammoth hunters became more capable of storing and using fat, and larger brains were just some unintended side effect of extra fat consumption, seeing that the brain consist mainly of fat.