A group of researchers from a renowned local university say they have evidence to show that Koreans' heads have grown by an average of six percent over the past 40 years.
Our Kim Dami on more on how and why it seems to have happened.
Thanks to a better quality of life and proper nutrition, Koreans are getting taller and bigger… and so is their head size.
Researchers at Korea University College of Medicine ran magnetic resonance imaging scans on 115 Koreans born in the 1930s and 1970s and reconstructed their craniums into three-dimensional images.
Korean men born in the 70s have an intracranial volume, the volume inside the skull, that's on average 90 milliliters larger than those born in the 1930s.
That's a 9% increase in four decades… which is a dramatic growth rate compared to western countries where similar increases took one or two centuries.
"From the 1970s, Korea experienced rapid economic growth, and its earlier liberation from Japan allowed for socioeconomic growth, leading to a noticeable change in head size in such a short period of time."
But the changes in skull size also differed between males and females.
Only the height and breadth increased in females, whereas all cranium measurements expanded in males, which proves that physical developments also vary between the sexes.
So do bigger heads mean smarter brains?
Experts say that such a hypothesis isn't necessarily supported by the recent findings.
"Koreans are considered to have the biggest heads in the world, but that doesn’t mean Koreans are the smartest. So it’s far too early to conclude that bigger head size means more intelligence."
"Whether the head size of future generations of Koreans continues to get bigger depends on lifestyle changes and socioeconomic growth.
Kim Da-mi, Arirang News."
