News Flash: Men and Women Are Different

A study published on Dec. 2 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that men have more neural connectivity from the front to back of their brains and within each of the hemispheres than women. Theoretically, this means their brains are more adapted towards tasks involving perception and coordinated actions. In other words, men and women are programmed differently. Yes, Virginia, there is a difference! And as those French rascals used to say, “vive la différence!” Of course this isn’t news to most husbands. We know all too well that our brains are hardwired differently from that of our beautiful spouses; for one thing they are always telling us so. “You stupid men are all alike!”

The pioneering study has shown for the first time, according to scientists, that the brains of men and women are wired up differently which could explain some of the stereotypical differences in male and female behavior. Uh, oh! This will no doubt come as unwelcome news to liberal academics in women’s studies throughout our universities and colleges. The same people who have been saying for years that, except for the plumbing, there are no appreciable differences between the sexes. You really have to have a post graduate degree in feminism to buy into that claptrap, but millions of our young women are taught that today by feminist professors who live in the Land of Oz.

But getting back to the real world, these researchers found that many of the connections in a typical male brain run between the front and the back of the same side of the brain, whereas in women the connections are more likely to run from side to side between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. This difference in the way the nerve connections in the brain are “hardwired” occurs during adolescence when many of the secondary sexual characteristics such as facial hair in men and breasts in women develop under the influence of sex hormones, the study found.

The researchers believe the physical differences between the two sexes in the way the brain is hardwired could play an important role in understanding why men are in general better at spatial tasks involving muscle control while women are better at verbal tasks involving memory and intuition. That old expression “a woman’s intuition” is true it seems. Ragini Verma, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia said, “Intuition is thinking without thinking. It’s what people call gut feelings. Women tend to be better than men at these kinds of skills which are linked with being good mothers.”

Men tend to outperform women involving spatial tasks and motor skills – such as map reading – while women tend to better in memory tests, such as remembering words and faces, and social cognition tests, which try to measure empathy and “emotional intelligence.”

Remember a few years ago when former Harvard President Lawrence Summers was roundly castigated and forced to step down from his university position when he said that innate differences between men and women might be one reason fewer women succeed in science and math careers? The feminists went ballistic but the fact is an area of the brain called the inferior-parietal lobule is typically significantly larger in men, especially on the left side, than in women.

This section of the brain is thought to control mental mathematical ability, and probably explains why men frequently perform higher in mathematical tasks than do women. Interestingly, this is the same area of Einstein’s brain that was discovered to be abnormally large.

Maybe this new study will finally put to rest all politically correct debate on the subject, but somehow I doubt it. Ideologues will never waver from their “sexual equality feelings” no matter how many facts and studies you put in front of them.

Many previous psychological studies have revealed significant differences between the sexes in the ability to perform various cognitive tests. A separate study published last month found that the genes expressed in the human brain did so differently in men and women. Post-mortem tests on the brain and spinal cord of 100 individuals showed significant genetic differences between the sexes, according to scientists from University College London.

But you don’t have to perform exhaustive studies to determine that men and women are different, just remember this; a man has six items in his bathroom – a toothbrush, toothpaste, shaving cream, razor, a bar of Dial soap, and a towel from the Holiday Inn. The average number of items in the typical woman’s bathroom is 437. I rest my case. Man and women are different!