differences between male and female brains

snorlax

women talk too much and can't read maps...

men have tunnel vision...

read this recently in a book, any thoughts or ideas on the subject from a scientific perspective?

POLO9N

i agree woman had a bad sense of directions in general, and tunnel vision what exactly does that mean? please give some examples.

blackhead

Could you possibly generalise anymore?? Since when can women not read maps?:mad:

I agree women talk more than men, I don't think that's a bad thing.
Maybe if men spoke more about how they felt there wouldn't be as high a rate of male suicide.:(

Also men are incapable of asking for directions and never admit when they are lost.

JuliusCaesar

blackhead wrote:

Could you possibly generalise anymore??

Also men are incapable of asking for directions and never admit when they are lost.

These generalisations have to be taken with a huge pinch of salt, just as the average family you know does not tend to have 2.4 children. There are differences in the brain - men tend to have heavier brains - which was taken for years to indicate that they were 'brainier' & not that it's bigger because their bodies (and skulls) are bigger. I'm a female who is very good at parking and very good with maps. I'm also good at fixing things. But don't you start imagining that i'm some sort of square-built hairy brute brimming with male hormones beacuse I also exhibit female traits such as talking etc. Just remember the normal distribution! We're much more like each other than we are different.

taztastic

I'm a female who is very good at parking and very good with maps. I'm also good at fixing things.

For the love of God stop talking or my boyfriend will leave me!

blackhead wrote:

I agree women talk more than men, I don't think that's a bad thing. Maybe if men spoke more about how they felt there wouldn't be as high a rate of male suicide.:(

As far as I know the differential rates of suicide between the sexes are more to do with the different methods used by men and women, when you look at hospitalisation rates for attempts they are actually much higher for women.
And if anyone mentions the words "cry for help" I'll put my head on the table and cry.

John

taztastic wrote:

For the love of God stop talking or my boyfriend will leave me!

No I won't

And if anyone mentions the words "cry for help" I'll put my head on the table and cry.

For help?

There aren't any gross anatomical differences between the sexes (as far as I know, a quick scan of my neuroanatomy book makes no references to sex differences) but there are functional differences. Off hand I know of an fMRI study where male and female subjects were played an audio recording of a conversation. Males showed activation in the temporal lobe on their dominant side of the brain whereas females showed activation in the temporal lobe in both hemispheres. This isn't to say that women are better listeners per se but that they process the information differently (I would argue that men just cut out the crap ).

I've seen when scanning through abstracts for articles on spatial memory (my field, so to speak) that there have been studies done on sex differences. I can't find any good ones now but as far as I remember, women tend to process allocentric spatial information (information that is static in the environment) slightly differently to men. I don't recall seeing a difference in egocentric spatial learning (information obtained from internal body movements, vestibular information, procedural memory, etc.).

Myksyk

Hmm .. vague recollection of data that show that females are better at correctly identifying the emotion associated with a facial expressions shown in photographs. The area of the brain, which escapes me, was shown to be more neuronally dense in women than in men.

Thomas_S_Hunterson

I think this uber-scientific diagram sums it up really