gray matter
7
4.1
- noun
- /ɡreɪ ˈmætər/
- Specialized
:
materia gris
- People who have grilled or baked fish once a week have more grey matter in their brain.
So having less grey matter is kind of not good.
- So having less grey matter is kind of not good.
- People who have grilled or baked fish once a week have more grey matter in their brain.
- Multi screen use has been shown to reduce the grey matter in our brains.
- This woman is not taking hormones and we are looking at the brains Gray matter right now.
- We talked extensively about how TikTok is making children's brains into Gray matter.
- So we we if we, if we focus on the structural studies and the amount of grey matter and white matter the brain contains.
Examples
-
How would this fit with your thoughts on gray matter vs. white matter?
Blog text (15) -
One fundamental difference between the male and female brain is gray matter.
Blog text (15) -
Women have more gray matter.
Academic text (1992) -
There was plenty of gray matter left for abstract thought.
Fiction book (2000) -
Several major, well-funded studies have shown that people with chronic pain lose gray matter twice as fast as people without chronic pain.
Blog text (17) -
We speculate that having more gray matter in these key areas results in having more resources to work on a problem, and this results in those areas working less hard or more efficiently.
Academic text (2008) -
Human cortical mid-frontal gray matter tissue was isolated from frozen brain tissue blocks.
Academic text (2018) -
Because you don't have two ounces of gray matter bouncing around inside that hollow melon on top of your shoulders.
-
Research shows that people who regularly exercise have more gray matter in their brain.
-
The study revealed a correlation between education and the amount of gray matter in participants' brains.
Synonyms
Part of the brain and spinal cord that contains nerve cells and processes information
A gray part of the brain and spinal cord that contains nerve cells
Antonyms
- Specialized
7
5.0
Tissue in the brain and spinal cord that carries messages between different brain areas
How Intelligent
Surface Forms
Morphology
The primary anatomical meaning (‘the darker tissue of the brain’) is directly and compositionally derived from 'gray' (a color) + 'matter' (substance), so a B1 learner who knows both words can infer the literal sense. The extended informal meaning 'intelligence' is a motivated metaphor based on the literal brain tissue sense and is therefore largely inferable from the constituents and cross-linguistically familiar.
Etymology
The noun gray matter names the darker part of the brain and the words gray and matter give the image of brain 'stuff' that looks gray. Because this part does the thinking, calling someone's gray matter means their 'intelligence' or 'brainpower'.