If
you are a man, perhaps you have wondered why your wife, girlfriend,
mother, sister and even a female friend remembers everything you said to
her or promised. You also may have been surprised why women are better
than men when it comes to memory tests.
If
you are female, chances are you have also wondered why men tend to
outperform women in spatial tasks and motor skills—such as map reading
or driving. Wonder no more. Scientists have found the answer.
A
pioneering study has shown, for the first time, that the brains of men
and women are wired differently—which could explain some of the
stereotypical differences in male and female behaviour, the United
Kingdom’s The Independent newspaper reported yesterday, quoting research by scientists.
According
to the newspaper, researchers found that many of the connections in a
typical male brain run between the front and the back of the same side
of the brain, whereas in women the connections are more likely to run
from side to side between the left and right hemispheres of the brain.
This
difference in the way the nerve connections in the brain are
“hardwired” occurs during adolescence when many of the secondary sexual
characteristics such as facial hair in men and breasts in women develop
under the influence of sex hormones, the study found.
The
researchers believe the physical differences between the two sexes in
the way the brain is hardwired could play an important role in
understanding why men are in general better at spatial tasks involving
muscle control while women are better at verbal tasks involving memory
and intuition.
Psychological
testing has consistently indicated a significant difference between the
sexes in the ability to perform various mental tasks, with men
outperforming women in some tests and women outperforming men in others.
Now there seems to be a physical explanation, according to scientists.
The
UK newspaper said, quoting Ragini Verma, a professor of psychology at
the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia: “These maps show us a
stark difference—and complementarity—in the architecture of the human
brain that helps provide a potential neural basis as to why men excel at
certain tasks and women at others.
“What
we’ve identified is that, when looked at in groups, there are
connections in the brain that are hardwired differently in men and
women. Functional tests have already shown than when they carry out
certain tasks, men and women engage different parts of the brain.”
The
research was carried out on 949 individuals—521 females and 428
males—aged between eight and 22. The brain differences between the sexes
became apparent only after adolescence, the study found.
A
special brain-scanning technique called diffusion tensor imaging, which
can measure the flow of water along a nerve pathway, established the
level of connectivity between nearly 100 regions of the brain, creating a
neural map of the brain called the “connectome”, Prof Verma said.
“It
tells you whether one region of the brain is physically connected to
another part of the brain and you can get significant differences
between two populations,” Prof Verma said. “In women, most of the
connections go between left and right across the two hemispheres while
in men most of the connections go between the front and the back of the
brain.”
Because
the female connections link the left hemisphere, which is associated
with logical thinking, with the right, which is linked with intuition,
this could help to explain why women tend to do better than men at
intuitive tasks.
Prof
Verma added: “Intuition is thinking without thinking. It’s what people
call gut feelings. Women tend to be better than men at these kinds of
skill which are linked with being good mothers.”
Many
previous psychological studies have revealed significant differences
between the sexes in the ability to perform various cognitive tests.
Men
tend to outperform women in tasks involving spatial tasks and motor
skills—such as map reading—while women tend to do better in memory
tests, such as remembering words and faces, and social cognition tests,
which try to measure empathy and “emotional intelligence”.