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Two years ago, a study came out that seemed to reinforce some pretty questionable stereotypes. It was a brain study, and it showed that men have more interspherical connections in their brains, where men have intraspherical connections.
This meant, according to the study, that men were better at certain things, like directions, and women were better at intuiting.
Of course, this was met with lots of scrutiny, with many scientists saying that differences in brains between the sexes was practically negligible.
It could be societal pressures on the participants, some said, or at least overblown.
Now, the same research team has released a new study, which says almost the exact same thing, just with different procedures to dinf that out.
They not only did brain scans, but also did performance tests on the participants—all aged between 9 and 22.
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What they found? Men performed better at spatial and motor skills, and women were better at nonverbal reasoning and recognizing emotion.
“Taken together,” say the researchers, “these data provide novel evidence that the divergent patterns of cognition seen in males and females are reflected on a neural level in differential patterns of brain connectivity.”
This means that some of the differences in brain function come from gender, and aren’t the result of societal pressure. How many, though, is hard to determine.
Of course, it’s a study with results that need to be taken with a grain of salt. Especially since we live in a time when women are already underrepresented in executive positions, it’s dangerous to make overarching generalizations about what different genders can and can’t do.
In fact, in a not-as-well-advertised point in the research paper, researchers note that “while sex differences in connectivity, exist, on the whole connectivity patterns of male and female brains are more alike than different.”
