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
My 1st ex-wife & I once stopped at a highway rest area in North Carolina. She pointed to the center of the map on the wall and asked: "So, that's North Carolina, right?" I said, "Yep." Then, she pointed to Virginia: "Well, then that must be South Carolina....."
Sigh. What was I thinking..
They never fail. :)
Then I must be some kinda transvestite freak with a dual-processing flaw in my grey/white matter differentiation zone.
I'm a highly-proficient linguist, musician, AND map reader.
And I watch the Lifetime Man-Bashing Network too - to ogle the women though.
Of course, you can only look at Meredith Baxter so long before you go blind, but.....
...what was I saying?
Never!!
There is no difference between grey and white.
Or men and women.
I'm so upset I can't breath and I have to leave.
Yeah, what-up with that?
Ever see a woman try to "straighten" a picture hanging on the wall?
See #20
I don't get the linguist thing, but I am a musician as well and I have always thought of it as mathematics to a certain degree.
ROFL. Yeah.
You married her because "she wrote small checks"? Was it just a trick?
I do know that there are major differences in men and women. But this one never made sense to me, maybe because it's something I'm good at. You too it seems. All the women in my family can read maps, but then, so can the men. This has never been an area where I see a gender difference. Sounds like for a "chick," you know plenty! But shssh! Men apparently don't want to realize that! LOL!!
Every single couple I know falls into this Mapquest usage: The women print out the instructions, the men print out the map.
That is no joke. I always find myself doing the "leaned-forward-rolling-my-hands-in-front-of-my-chest" thing trying to get my wife to get to the point.
Me, too.
I have a horrible sense of direction, and would not consider going out the front door without a map.
I have to stop and make a conscious effort to remember which way is north on our property -- and we've lived here 10 years.
Now that you mention it, I love maps too. If I had the funds, I would collect antique ones.
It's a generality, like, generally speaking, men are taller than women, women have bigger breasts, men have more muscle mass.
I am a man and I am a talker - and listener.
Nope. Not a myth, but a statistic. You and your daughter are merely closer to the end of the bell curve.
My lovely wife who is much smarter than me (just ask her) was looking at an aerial photo of our place last night. It was oriented north on the page. "This is kind of backwards, isn't it?" she said. This is because she normally drives south to get here.
No I married her despite her check writing habits. Goes to show how much I love her, I guess.
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