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Brain Differences in Thinking Between Men and Women

Men and Women Think Differently

New research led by Psychology professor Richard Haier of the University of California, Irvine with colleagues from the University of New Mexico have shown that differences in how men and think are as different between white and gray.

Their research, published in online version of the journal NeuroImage, has found that men think with think more with their gray matter, and women think more with white. As an overall factor, men have 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to intelligence compared with women.

In comparison, women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence compared to men. The scientists emphasized that even though the two sexes think differently, this fact does not affect intellectual functioning. Instead, they commented that human evolution simply created two types of brains designed for equal levels of intelligence.

In human brains, traditional thinking has proclaimed that gray matter represents information processing centers, whereas white matter works to network these processing centers. However, more current research (see The Amazing Human Brain – New Discoveries About the Brain’s White Matter) has found that white matter has a wider range of functioning.

The results of this published study may help explain why men and women perform better at different types of tasks. For example, men usually do better at skills requiring more localized processing, such as mathematics. On the other hand, women usually excel at integrating and assimilating information from distributed gray-matter regions of the brain, which aids language skills.

In light of documenting these brain differences, the scientists are amazed to acknowledge that even though men and women use two very different activity centers and neurological pathways, they perform equally well on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as intelligence tests.

In addition to the differences in white and gray matter, 84 percent of gray matter regions and 86 percent of white matter regions involved in intellectual performance are located in the frontal lobes in women, while the percentages of gray matter regions in a man’s frontal lobes are 45 percent and white matter regions are zero.

This research also gives insight to why different types of head injuries are more disastrous to one sex or the other. Clinical data shows frontal lobe damage in women to be much more destructive than the same type of damage in men.

Sex Differences

Research published in the online journal BMC Biology reports that due to different social and competitive demands, brain structures have developed different in men and women. In study 21 primate species (including chimpanzees, gorillas, and rhesus monkeys), scientists found that male-on-male competition correlated with brain structures regulating autonomic functions, sensory-motor skills and aggression.

On the other hand, the average females in a social group were directly relative to the size of the telencephalon (or cerebrum), which is the largest part of the brain that includes the neocortex (responsible for sensory perception, generation of motor commands and spatial reasoning). These areas of development reflect the difference between competitive demands on males and social demands on females. These differing profiles of brain types suggest that the behavioral distinctions between anthropoid primates might very well be a similar factor in humans also.

Sexual Attraction Factors

In a BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) survey among men and women who were asked to rank the importance of 23 traits, the results showed that both sexes agreed on the top nine traits: intelligence, humor, honesty, kindness, good looks, facial attractiveness, values, communication skills, and dependability.

Although there was a definite difference in the order of these rankings, with men ranking good looks and facial attractiveness higher and women ranking honesty, humor, kindness, and dependability higher.

These differences in the importance of one’s companion’s looks were extremely consistent over 53 nations, which seems to imply a biological component at work. Whereas, the different in men's and women's rankings of a mate's honesty, humor, and kindness varied across nations, suggesting these desired traits depended more on cultural factors.

Another cultural factor was intelligence. In richer nations, men valued a mate's intelligence more than women did, but the reverse was true in poorer nations. Also, those of economically developed nations assigned more importance to a mate's niceness than those of economically undeveloped nations did.

Brain Functions

One surprising finding of the same BBC study: as women get older, their brains show less of a reduction in functioning than do men’s brains. Subjects were tested in four types of tests, with two favoring men’s skills (mentally rotating objects and matching line angles), and the other two favoring women’s skills (remembering the location of objects and coming up with synonyms for a target word).  Regardless of whether the tests favored men or women, the men’s scores registered a greater decline than the women’s.

Sex Drive and Sexuality

Richard Lippa, professor of psychology at Cal. State University, published research (in the April 2007 issue of the Archives of Sexual Behavior), reporting that the more testosterone present in both men and women (known to produce a higher sex drive), yielded different results. For most men, a higher sex drive intensified their existing sexual orientation. However for women, (who seem to be more intrinsically bisexual), it resulted in the women seeking more of both sexes.

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Sources: Sex Differences in Regional Gray Matter in Healthy Individuals Aged 44-48 years: a voxel-based morphometric study NeuroImage 2007 Jul 1;36(3):691-9 Sex Differences in Brain Gray and White Matter in Healthy Young Adults: correlations with cognitive performance Journal of Neuroscience 1999 May 15;19(10):4065-7 Males and Females Differ in Brain activation During Cognitive Tasks NeuroImage 2006 Apr 1;30(2):529-38 Evolving Knowledge of Sex Differences in Brain Structure, Function, and Chemistry Biological Psychiatry 2007 Oct 15;62(8):847-55 The Relation Between Sex Drive and Sexual Attraction to Men and Women: A cross-national study of heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual men and women Archives of Sexual Behavior 36, 209-222

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