Why Women Can't Read Maps
http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/package.jsp?name=fte/women
maps/womenmaps

There is a reason why many women (not all! but many) have
trouble reading maps. The brains of men and women function
in markedly different ways, which means they really do think
differently, according to researchers from the University of
California, Irvine and the University of New Mexico.

The human brain is composed of two types of tissue--gray matter
and white matter. While men and women have about the same
amount of gray matter and white matter, men appear to use more
gray matter, while women use more white matter. Before we
proceed further, it's important to note that while the two genders
may think differently, this does not affect their intellectual
performance or overall intelligence.

The study: Using magnetic resonance imaging equipment, the
researchers performed a series of brain scans on 26 female and 22
male volunteers, all of whom were in good health and had no
history of brain injury. The average IQ scores of the two genders
were similar. The brain scans occurred while the volunteers
carried out tests designed to assess their general intelligence.

The results: The human brain--male or female--is composed of
about 40 percent gray matter and 60 percent white matter. When
given intelligence tests, men used 6.5 times more gray matter than
women, while women used nine times as much white matter.

What is the difference between gray matter and white matter?
Gray is central to processing information and plays a vital role in
aiding skills such as mathematics, map-reading, and intellectual
thought. White matter connects the brain's processing centers and
is central to emotional thinking, use of language, and the ability to
do more than one thing at once. Because women use less gray
matter--critical to map-reading--they tend to have more difficulty
with this skill than men.

"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," co-study author
and neuropsychologist Rex Jung of the University of New Mexico
told the Daily Telegraph. "These two very different pathways and
activity centers, however, result in equivalent overall performance
on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as those found on
intelligence tests."

This isn't the first study to assail women's map-reading skills.
Previous research has also shown that women have weaker spatial
awareness than men, which makes it more difficult for them to
read maps. But women outshine men when it comes to
vocabulary. In childhood, girls' vocabulary develops more quickly
than that of boys; by adulthood, women can speak 20,000 to
25,000 words a day compared to a man's 7,000 to 10,000.

"These findings suggest that human evolution has created two
different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior,"
co-author and psychology professor Richard Haier of the
University of California, Irvine told MSNBC.

The study findings were published in the online edition of the
journal NeuroImage.