"Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus"? Lets Analyze it medically and physiologically!

I thought that after all the diets and labels, workouts and headaches, this seems to be a refreshing topic and of course ever so controversial and very interesting! What I really want to do here is to compare male and female brain anatomy, the reasoning behind certain difference between men and women and look into the skill sets performed by both sexes that we all have learned to identify the sexes with? 

I will try to keep it less medical and more informative but there is a lot of scientific date to analyze. The debate seems to be endless and I will not get biased and keep it very concise and objective. It may still to be disagreeable to a few so feel free to initiate the discussion with me, as always!

I am not sure how many of you have read this book "Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus" by John Gray published in 1992. His main theories are "that men complain about problems because they are asking for solutions while women complain about problems because they want their problems to be acknowledged". 

Here’s what Aristotle said "The female is softer in disposition, is more mischievous, less simple, more impulsive and more attentive to the nurture of the young…The fact is, the nature of man is the most rounded off and complete."

Stanley Hall, the influential American psychologist, says..."She works by intuition and feeling; fear, anger, pity, love and most of the emotions have a wider range and greater intensity. If she abandons her natural naiveté and takes up the burden of guiding and accounting for her life by consciousness, she is likely to lost more than she gains and that she who deliberates is lost”. All I can say to this is……WOW!!

The "father" of sociobiology, Edward O. Wilson, of Harvard University, said “human females tend to be higher than males in empathy, verbal skills, social skills and security-seeking, among other things, while men tend to be higher in independence, dominance, spatial and mathematical skills, rank-related aggression, and other strong characteristics”

So at first glance it looks like the old timer socio-biologist were kind of gender biased?

Apart from the visible anatomical sexual differences, scientists always knew that there are many other differences in the way the brains from men and women process language, information, emotion, cognition, etc. One of the most interesting differences appear in the way men and women estimate time, judge speed of things, carry out mental mathematical calculations, orient in space and visualize objects in three dimensions, etc. In all these tasks, women and men are strikingly different; as they are too in the way their brains process language. This may account, scientists say, for the fact that there are many more male mathematicians, airplane pilots, bush guides, mechanical engineers, architects and racecar drivers than female ones.

On the other hand, women are better than men in human relations, recognizing emotional overtones in others and in language, emotional and artistic expressiveness, esthetic appreciation, verbal language and carrying out detailed and pre-planned tasks. For example, women generally can recall lists of words or paragraphs of text better than men.

Back in 2001, MIT’s Quarterly Journal of Economics published a paper called “Boys Will Be Boys: The authors, Brad Barber and Terrance Odean, gained access to the trading activity in over 35,000 households, and used it to compare the habits of men and women. What they found, is that men not only trade more often than women but do so from a false faith in their own financial judgment. Single men traded less sensibly than married men, and married men traded less sensibly than single women: the less the female presence, the less rational the approach to trading in the markets. Hmmm... I guess men do need that lady luck on their side after all or maybe its lady's whip? to keep them in line?

Here is some focus on the anatomical differences: The brain is made primarily of two different types of tissue, called gray matter and white matter. In human brains, gray matter represents information processing centers, whereas white matter works to network these processing centers.

This new research reveals that men think more with their gray matter, and women think more with white. Researchers stressed that just because the two sexes think differently, this does not affect intellectual performance. "These findings suggest that human evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior," said Haier.

The results from this study may help explain why men and women excel at different types of tasks, said co-author and neuropsychologist Rex Jung of the University of New Mexico. For example, men tend to do better with tasks requiring more localized processing, such as mathematics, while women are better at integrating and assimilating information from distributed gray-matter regions of the brain, which aids language skills.

Scientists working at Johns Hopkins University, recently reporting in the "Cerebral Cortex" scholarly journal have discovered that there is a brain region in the cortex, called inferior-parietal lobule (IPL) which is significantly larger in men than in women. This area is bilateral and is located just above the level of the ears (parietal cortex)

Furthermore, the left side IPL is larger in men than the right side. In women, this asymmetry is reversed, although the difference between left and right sides is not so large as in men, noted the JHU researchers. This is the same area which was shown to be larger in the brain of Albert Einstein, as well as in other physicists and mathematicians. So, it seems that IPL's size correlates highly with mental mathematical abilities

In general, the IPL allows the brain to process information from senses and help in selective attention and perception (for example, women are more able to focus on specific stimuli, such as a baby crying in the night). Studies have linked the right IPL with the memory involved in understanding and manipulating spatial relationships and the ability to sense relationships between body parts. It is also related to the perception of our own affects or feelings. The left IPL is involved with perception of time and speed, and the ability of mentally rotate 3-D figures as in video games.

Other researchers, led by Dr. Bennett A. Shaywitz, a professor of Pediatrics at the Yale University School of Medicine, discovered that the brain of women processes verbal language simultaneously in the two sides (hemispheres) of the frontal brain, while men tend to process it in the left side only and it proves why women have better language skills.

According to the Society for Neuroscience, the largest professional organization in this area, evolution is what gives sense to it. "In ancient times, each sex had a very defined role that helped ensure the survival of the species. Cave men hunted. Cave women gathered food near the home and cared for the children. Brain areas may have been sharpened to enable each sex to carry out their jobs".  The advantage of women regarding verbal skills also makes evolutionary sense. While men have the bodily strength to compete with other men, women use language to gain social advantage, such as by argumentation and persuasion, says Geary, which many men seem to link to "nagging"

Author Deborah Blum, who wrote "Sex on the Brain: The Biological Differences Between Men and Women" has reported the current trend towards assigning evolutionary reasons for many of our behaviors. She says: "Morning sickness, for example, which steers some women away from strong tastes and smells, may once have protected babes in-utero from toxic items. Infidelity is a way for men to ensure genetic immortality”. Interesting, so women should not blame men for being "players". It’s just how the nature made them!

Jameson et al. suggest that there may be two (or more) different modes of seeing color, each processed differently in the male and female brain. Which determines why men cannot perceive the wide spectrum of colors and that’s why a man's closet usually have the basic colors like black, blue grey etc and they have no clue when asked about colors like ....azure, coral, magenta rose, fuchsia and viridian etc, Are these even real colors? or just the usual trick questions for men? 

What I have concluded is that male and female brain just can't be generalized but they need to be considered as entirely different organs! They are practically just as different as reproductive organs in males and females! Men and women are made different, think different and can act entirely differently in the same situation. So if the men are not paying attention to garbage, cleanliness, organization and being a couch potato or are late to react to a baby's crying then I guess there is proof in the studies that they are wired differently than the women. Women sure are wired anatomically to be the person in the household to be empathetic, caring, loving, even more emotional and impulsive too! This still does not mean that we can't find women who are experts in math and also language skills or men who are multi lingual and also great "home makers" Its only when we do a research using a large group is when these facts are seen!

We can now understand why a lot of women often complaint that the "men just can't seem to grasp the perpetual and evidentiary simple facts at times" and we also understand why women draw an almost blank when it comes to video games and then they just shrug it off by saying "its just so boring"! 

That's just how nature has made us and we have evolved as species. As always feel free to send me emails and other meaningful research articles so I can improve these blogs in future.

~Dr V

Thanks to....

Sabbatini, R.M.E.: The PET Scan: A New Window Into the Brain
Gattass, R.: Thoughts: Image Mapping by Functional Nuclear Magnetic Resonance
Cardoso, S.H.: Why Einstein Was a Genius?
Sabbatini, R.M.E.: Paul Broca: Brief Biography
Sabbatini, R.M.E.: Mapping the Brain

References

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2. Geary, D.C. Chapter 8: Sex differences in brain and cognition. In "Male, Female: the Evolution of Human Sex Differences". American Psychological Association Books. ISBN: 1-55798-527-8 [AMAZON].
3. Harasty J., Double K.L., Halliday, G.M., Kril, J.J., and McRitchie, D.A. Language-associated cortical regions are proportionally larger in the female brain. Archives in Neurology vol 54 (2) 171-6, 1997 [MEDLINE].
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5. Bishop K.M. and Wahlsten, D. Sex differences in the human corpus callosum: myth or reality? Neuroscience and Biobehavioural Reviews vol 21 (5) 581 - 601, 1997.
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See also: LeVay, S.: "The Sexual Brain". MIT Press, 1994 [AMAZON]
7. Shaywitz, B.A., et al. Sex differences in the functional organisation of the brain for language. Nature vol 373 (6515) 607 - 9, 1995 [MEDLINE].
8. Rabinowicz T., Dean D.E., Petetot J.M., de Courten-Myers G.M. Gender differences in the human cerebral cortex: more neurons in males; more processes in females. J Child Neurol. 1999 Feb;14(2):98-107. [MEDLINE]
9. Schlaepfer T.E., Harris G.J., Tien A.Y., Peng L., Lee S., Pearlson G.D. Structural differences in the cerebral cortex of healthy female and male subjects: a magnetic resonance imaging study.Psychiatry Res. 1995 Sep 29;61(3):129-35 [MEDLINE].
10. Wilson, E.O. - "Sociobiology". Harvard University Press, 1992 [AMAZON].
11. Moir A. and Jessel D. - "Brain Sex". 1993 [AMAZON] See also: Excerpts from the book
12. Blum, D. - "Sex on the Brain: The Biological Differences Between Men and Women". Penguin, 1998 [AMAZON]
13. Kimura, D. - "Sex and Cognition". MIT Press, 1999 [AMAZON]