Although male brains are physically larger than female brains, this isn’t actual proof that men are “smarter” than women.

University of California Irvine (UCI) study has found significant differences in brain areas where males and females exhibit their intelligence.

Richard Haier, professor of psychology in the Department of Pediatrics of UCI and longtime human intelligence researcher, writes that human evolution is responsible for creating two physically distinctive brains designed for equal intelligence.

Studies say that, in general, men have approximately 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence than women. As for women, they have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence than men. Gray matter represents the information processing centers in the brain, and white matter represents the connections between these processing centers.

Rex Jung, a neurophysiologist of the University of New Mexico and co-author of the study, writes that this can possibly be the explanation as to why men tend to excel in tasks requiring more local processing, such as mathematics. Women, on the other hand, tend to excel at absorbing in information from distributed gray-matter parts of the brain, such as required language facility.

Regional differences are identified in the study, stating that the gray matter driving male intellectual performance is distributed throughout more of the brain. 84 percent of gray-matter regions and 86 percent of white-matter regions involved with intellectual performance in women were found in the brain’s frontal lobes, compared to 45 percent and zero percent for males.