Posted on 01/24/2005 9:01:14 AM PST by Rodney King
MEN frequently despair at women's map-reading skills - or rather their lack of them. Now scientists believe they have pinpointed the reason for this conflict between the sexes.
Researchers say it is all down to differences in the reliance of the sexes on either grey matter or white matter in their brains to solve problems. They found that in intelligence tests men use 6.5 times as much grey matter as women, but women use nine times as much white matter.
Grey matter is brain tissue crucial to processing information and plays a vital role in aiding skills such as mathematics, map-reading and intellectual thought.
White matter connects the brain's processing centres and is central to emotional thinking, use of language and the ability to do more than one thing at once.
Professor Rex Jung, a co-author of the study at the University of New Mexico, said: "This may help explain why men tend to excel in tasks requiring more local processing, like mathematics and map-reading, while women tend to excel at integrating information from various brain regions, such as is required for language skills.
"These two very different pathways and activity centres, however, result in equivalent overall performance on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as those found on intelligence tests."
Previous studies have shown that women have weaker spatial awareness than men, making it harder for them to read maps.
Research has also found that in childhood, girls' vocabulary develops more quickly and that in later life women can speak 20,000 to 25,000 words a day compared to a man's 7000 to 10,000.
For the study, published in the online edition of the journal NeuroImage, researchers performed a series of brain scans on 26 female and 22 male volunteers using magnetic resonance imaging equipment.
All the volunteers were in good health, had no history of brain injury and the average IQ scores of the two sexes were similar.
Their brains were scanned while they carried out tests designed to assess their general intelligence.
Researchers then created a map of a brain showing the varying levels of activity in the brains of men and women. About 40 per cent of the human brain is grey matter and 60 per cent white matter
Why use 2 words when a thousand will do.
Sort of like people who get upset when a cat gets "stuck" in a tree. I know that I've yet to see a dead cat in a tree.
Mark
See my note about yahoo maps!
Mark
To be fair, I also know a couple women with advance degrees in GIS.
It looks like I'm not normal!
Darn blow that study out of the water!
Or why they wait to start writing that check, or for that matter, won't dig said checkbook out of the morass of the giant pocketbook until presented with a total.
Conversely, this may explain why men are reluctant to ask for directions.
Research has also found that in childhood, girls' vocabulary develops more quickly and that in later life women can speak 20,000 to 25,000 words a day compared to a man's 7000 to 10,000.
Oh, to find a woman with nothing to say...
I just sent her this article, we'll see what she thinks of my humor later! ahhaha
I can read maps just fine. I just have a problem figuring out which direction is north or south or east or west! LOL
How do men and women cope...or do they both say "sh**"? Do fathers apologize to the kids in the backseat for using a bad word or do just mother's do that?
I need a GRANT. We may be nearing a breakthrough on several differences.
I'm thinking men have more "football matter" and less "figure skating matter". Women are vice-versa.
My husband and I boat extensively on the Great Lakes and I do all the chartplotting, mapping, and GPS work. Without me he would be, well let's just say..... lost.
My middle daughter is the best at math and worst at map-reading and spatial relationships and always gets lost. At sunset on a clear day she can't figure out which way is West. My youngest daughter is 2d best at math but never gets lost, always knows how to come and go from places she has never been before.
I'll bet that the average home-schooled boy has many the vocabulary of a girl of the same IQ from the public uneducation system. Let me pick the sample group and the test method and I'll produce any statistic that will get me funding to do more research.
I'm inclined to think that the brain develops according to what we are taught, tempered by what we like. "WE drive the brain, the brain doesn't drive us".
My prediction? Somebody will demand that Budweiser pull that absolutely wonderful ad about the referee and his amazing tolerance for abuse from the coaches on the sidelines.
"Ummm... Take it from a guy who'se wife once drove 150 miles north when she should have been going east... There is something to this. :) "
Similar situation:
The wife was supposed to drive on a business trip to Orlando and wound up in Sarasota....... :-)
Ok, time to reveal a secret to women. There is a very good, logical reason why men don't want to ask for directions. It's because we can't trust another man to give correct directions. Let me explain. If a man and his friend are on the side of the road and a car pulls up and someone asks them how to get to, let's say Highway J, the man and his friend will start giving directions.
Even if they have no idea how to get to Highway J.
You see, they aren't going to admit that they don't know where Highway J is from that point. So, as long as they send the car away, they are happy.
The man driving knows this and isn't going to "just stop and ask someone". When he finally needs to know, he will likely stop at a truckstop or a busy gas station so he can have the highest possibility of getting correct instructions.
See, logical.
And still not say a damn thing...
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