- A new study claims to know why men and women think differently – are they right?
- Once again the newspapers try to oversimplify the story and get it wrong
- Multi-tasking or map reading? Let’s celebrate!
Whether it’s a problem with a car or the house the chances are that it will come down to the electrical wiring.
Headlights won’t work? Check the fuses and connections.
Failure in the boiler controls? Have the rats been at the wires in the airing cupboard again?
You know the type of thing…
…well it seems like the same could be true of us humans as well.
In particular a newly published bit of research has shown that men and women are actually wired up differently to each other.
Forget the old rhubarb about men being from Mars and women from Venus as a way of explaining why we think and act differently, it now appears that the functional variations may be more to do with a wiring change (or maybe not!).
Put simply men have straight connections between the front of our brains and the processing and action centres towards the back, whereas women have much more traffic between the emotional and reasoning centres at either side of the brain.
The team behind the research come from the University of Pennsylvania in the US were initially looking at how children learnt and developed, but then began to realise that they were observing real difference in the way areas of the brain were activated when completing tasks.
But could a purely anatomical difference explain why women and men seem to behave in differing ways?
We have all heard the generalisations that women can carry out many tasks at the same time but can’t work their way around a map – Indeed I may have been guilty of proposing such in the recent past, much to my dear beloved chagrin!
Undoubtedly there is a very powerful argument that the way we are brought up and the society we live in condition our sexually stereotypical behaviours, and indeed even the head of the research team said that they had found more in common with brain function in the sexes than were at odds.
The other problem with the findings of this study is the fact that the points of connection in our brains are constantly moving as we develop – often referred to as plasticity.
For instance, if you were unfortunate enough to loose an arm the area of the brain that was responsible for moving and sensing in the limb wouldn’t die off, it actually gets reused by other parts of the body to enhance their function.
Not quite so simple as Fleet Street would have you believe
This means that the brain is a much more complex organ than the study suggests, or at least how many of the daily papers reported upon it;
‘Men versus Women: Who’s best in the battle of the sexes?’ Daily Mirror
‘The hardwired difference between male and female brains could explain why men are ‘better at map reading’ The Independent
‘Brains of men and women are poles apart’ The Telegraph
You see they all seemed to jump to the conclusion that this discovery lay at the heart of the perceived way that our brains operate, and show why there is difference between the yin and yang.
Professor Ragini Verma who led the study is quoted as saying “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.”
But having read the study the actual findings are not so clear cut.
You see the study looked at the way the brain connected via the hard wiring, or neurons, that make up the physical interconnections in the brain, but they didn’t take account of other ways that information flows.
In particular the chemical messengers that carry a range of information and affect things like our mood and state of mind.
Dr Michael Bloomfield, Clinical Research Fellow at the Medical Research Council Clinical Sciences Centre in London commented on this;
“We think that there can also be differences in certain chemicals in the brain called neurotransmitters, for example, and so we need more research to fully understand how all these different aspects of brain structure and function work together to answer fundamental questions like “how do we think?”.
“One thing that remains unknown is what is driving these differences between the sexes. An obvious possibility is that that male hormones like testosterone and female hormones like oestrogen have different affects on the brain.”
So, it appears that it is too simplistic to take the results of the study and claim that we now know what makes the difference between the sexes when it comes to how our brains work.
Real life experiences – and reasons to be cheerful!
Far be it from me to venture the possibility that such differences are partly our genetic coding, partly the way we are brought up and partly the roles that life expects of us – but that would seem to make sense to me.
What is certain though is that give me more than two things to do at the same time and you will end up in a mess…
…and ask Lara to direct us to the University in Leicester and we will end up in a supermarket in Oadby!
These are inescapable truths I’m afraid and whether they are a matter of brain function or hormonal interference I know not – but I say – Let’s celebrate the difference!