Replies

"That's not an asset - it's a debit. Focusing on the task at hand requires attention to detail and the ability to distance critical thinking/problem-solving logic from emotion.

Using both sides of the brain simultaneously is one step away from attention deficit disorder...and that, friend, is a fact."

Sorry, but ADD is not caused by using both sides of the brain simultaneously.

Btw, I think what she's talking about is a rather large PET scan study that was done that showed that woman have the advantage in the verbal/language arena bcse they process those tasks using more of both sides of the brain, while men's verbal/language center is more confined to one side. The purpose of the study was to explore why women lose less verbal ability after strokes. They concluded that, in women, the diffusion of the verbal/language center allowed the hemisphere not affected by the stroke to pick up the slack. Not the case with men. Oddly, similar brain differences were found in another study that had another purpose: to determine whether the notion of 'female intuition' had any validity. They concluded that it did. It seems women accessed certain 'emotional centers' in the brain that men didn't in tasks that required subtle judgments about the motives of others.

I don't doubt that in general men are better in math/spatial tasks and women better in verbal/language tasks, but I know many people, male and female, who don't fit that mould.

Regardless, faster processing is only an advantage if the end result of said processing is correct. You don't just have to think fast in life; you have to think right.