NEWCASTLE University, United Kingdom scientists
have discovered that as the brain reorganises
connections throughout our life, the process begins
earlier in girls, which may explain why they mature
faster during the teenage years. It was reported in the
Science Daily.
As we grow older, our brains undergo a major
reorganisation reducing the connections in the brain.
Studying people up to the age of 40, scientists led by
Dr Marcus Kaiser and Ms Sol Lim at Newcastle
University found that while overall connections in the
brain get streamlined, long-distance connections that
are crucial for integrating information are preserved.
The researchers suspect this newly-discovered selective
process might explain why brain function does not
deteriorate -- and indeed improves -during this pruning
of the network. Interestingly, they also found that these
changes occurred earlier in females than in males.
Explaining the work, which is being published in
Cerebral Cortex, Dr Kaiser, Reader in Neuroinformatics
at Newcastle University, says: “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. 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.”
The researchers at Newcastle, Glasgow and Seoul
universities evaluated the scans of 121 healthy
participants between the ages of four and 40 years as
this is where the major connectivity changes can be
seen during this period of maturation and improvement in
the brain. The work is part of the EPSRC-funded
Human Green Brain project, which examines human
brain development.
Using a non-invasive technique called diffusion tensor
imaging – a special measurement protocol for Magnetic
Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanners – they
demonstrated that fibres are overall getting pruned that
period.
However, they found that not all projections (long-
range connections) between brain regions are affected
to the same extent; changes were influenced differently
depending on the types of connections. Projections that
are preserved were short-cuts that quickly link different
processing modules, e.g. for vision and sound, and
allow fast information transfer and synchronous
processing. Changes in these connections have been
found in many developmental brain disorders including
autism, epilepsy and schizophrenia.
The researchers have demonstrated for the first time
that the loss of white matter fibres between brain
regions is a highly selective process – a phenomenon
they call preferential detachment. They show that
connections between distant brain regions, between brain
hemispheres, and between processing modules lose
fewer nerve fibres during brain maturation than
expected. The researchers say this may explain how we
retain a stable brain network during brain maturation.
Commenting on the fact that these changes occurred
earlier in females than males, Ms Sol Lim explains:
“The loss of connectivity during brain development can
actually help to improve brain function by reorganising
the network more efficiently. Say instead of talking to
many people at random, asking a couple of people who
have lived in the area for a long time is the most
efficient way to know your way. In a similar way,
reducing some projections in the brain helps to focus on
essential information.”

SOURCE- http://tribune.com.ng/news2013/index.php/en/component/k2/item/29478-new-research-discovers-why-girls-mature-faster.html

Ohhh, interesting. Based on these findings, I bet girls develop language earlier than boys too. Babies, in general, are very intuned with language right from birth though. Kids' brains are much more plastic than adults anyway and they've an early abundance of synaptic connections, which explains why they recover from brain disorders like aphasia and damages to the left hemisphere much better than adults. It's funny how women still live longer than men.

Yield: Ohhh, interesting. Based on this findings, I bet girls develop language earlier than boys too. Babies, in general, are very intuned with language right from birth though. Kids' brains are much more plastic than adults anyway and they've an early abundance of synaptic connections, which explains why they recover from brain disorders like aphasia and damages to the left hemisphere much better than adults. It's funny how women still live longer than men.

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