Finally – why women can’t read maps

Hmmm …

Finally – why women can’t read maps
news.com.au From correspondents in New Mexico
January 24, 2005

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. Advertisement:

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.