Brain maps confirm stereotypes about men and women, says scientists
Neural scans indicate women better equipped for social skills and multitasking while men wired for co-ordinated action and perception
Scientists have drawn on nearly 1,000 brain scans to confirm what many had surely concluded long ago: that stark differences exist in the wiring of male and female brains.
Maps of neural circuitry showed that on average women's brains were highly connected across the left and right hemispheres, in contrast to men's brains, where the connections were typically stronger between the front and back regions.
"These maps show us a stark difference - and complementarity - in the architecture of the human brain that helps provide a potential neural basis as to why men excel at certain tasks and women at others," said Ragini Verma, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States, who worked on the study.
Verma said the greatest surprise was how much the findings supported old stereotypes, with men's brains apparently wired more for perception and co-ordinated actions, and women's for social skills and memory, making them better equipped for multitasking.
"If you look at functional studies, the left of the brain is more for logical thinking, the right of the brain is for more intuitive thinking. So if there's a task that involves doing both of those things, it would seem that women are hardwired to do those better," Verma said.
"Women are better at intuitive thinking. Women are better at remembering things. When you talk, women are more emotionally involved, they will listen more." She added: "I was surprised that it matched a lot of the stereotypes that we think we have in our heads. If I wanted to go to a chef or a hair stylist, they are mainly men."
The findings come from one of the largest studies to look at how brains work in healthy males and females. The maps give scientists a more complete picture of what counts as normal for each sex at various ages.