1 week Ago By David Cox
Women are more generous with money, but men are better at reading maps. Here’s the science behind the brain battle of the sexes. The differences between the sexes is a topic of endless debate at the dinner party table, but the latest research reveals what many of us already suspected: that there are profound differences between the brains of men and women, and this governs everything from our decision-making and emotional responses, to our risk of certain diseases.
Last year a long-term study by Stanford Medicine used powerful “deep learning” computer algorithms to analyse brain-imaging data from more than 1000 men and women, aged 20-35. They discovered that the patterns of brain activity taking place in the average woman’s head is profoundly different to the type of activity taking place in a man’s brain. This has long been discussed in academic studies and is not just down to cultural differences or hormones.
Larry Cahill, a professor of neurobiology and behaviour at the University of California (Irvine), who has been studying this field for the past quarter of a century, also says that there are also key structural differences in how the brains of men and women are wired. As our ability to analyse the brain has advanced over the past two decades, studying these variations in brain structure gives us much more of an understanding as to why we behave in the different ways we do. Here are six of the most profound ways in which the brain differs between the sexes, and how ultimately this impacts our behaviour and the life choices that we make.
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