Men have a better sense of direction than women, a Norwegian study has found.
Men consistently performed better than women during way-finding tasks in a virtual environment which they had just learned.
Using fMRI brain-scanning, the researchers saw that men in the study took several shortcuts, oriented themselves more using cardinal directions and used a different part of the brain than the women in the study.
To find out if the difference was down to cultural factors or sex-specific hormones, the researchers gave some of the women a small dose of testosterone under their tongue. Several of them were then able to orient themselves better in the four cardinal directions.
“Men’s sense of direction was more effective. They quite simply got to their destination faster,” says Carl Pintzka, a medical doctor and PhD candidate at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)’s Department of Neuroscience.
Eighteen men and 18 women first took an hour to learn the layout of a maze before the scanning session began. In the MRI scanner, they were given 30 seconds for each of the 45 navigation tasks. One of the tasks, for example, was to “find the yellow car” from different starting points.
The men solved 50 per cent more of the tasks than the women.
Pintzka concludes that women and men have different navigational strategies. Men, he found, use cardinal directions during navigation to a greater degree.
“If they’re going to the Student Society building in Trondheim, for example, men usually go in the general direction where it’s located. Women usually orient themselves along a route to get there, for example, ‘go past the hairdresser and then up the street and turn right after the store’,” he says.
The study shows using cardinal directions is more efficient because it is a more flexible strategy. The destination can be reached faster because the strategy depends less on where you start.
The fMRI brain images showed both men and women using large but different areas of the brain when they navigate. The men used the hippocampus more, whereas women used their frontal areas to a greater extent.
“That’s in sync with the fact that the hippocampus is necessary to make use of cardinal directions,” says Pintzka.
Depressingly, he has to explain his findings in evolutionary terms. He suggests:
“In ancient times, men were hunters and women were gatherers. Therefore, our brains probably evolved differently.”
What if our brains were designed differently by Almighty God and that men and women have simply decided to do those things for which we are better suited for our mutual benefit?
It is surely less plausible that our brains followed our activities than that our activities followed our brains.
Interestingly, other researchers have documented that women are better at finding objects locally than men. “In simple terms, women are faster at finding things in the house, and men are faster at finding the house,” Pintzka says.
The results support the Biblical model that men and women have complementary strengths and work together rather than the feminist doctrine popular in government and the broadcast media that the sexes have identical abilities and are in competition with each other.
The directional sense findings are part of Pintzka’s doctoral thesis on how the brain functions differently in men and women. Let’s pray his funding continues.
It takes a smart brain to read about this research casually in a newspaper and then find a religious message in it ! Like with so much of this kind of scientific work, it seems scarcely necessary, because we all know that women are no good at reading maps (which seems to have been necessary here too) and to have “no sense of direction”. But many of them can manage very nicely. People vary.
God gave women brains which would just be adequate for blackberrying, following a hedge and then returning home along the same hedge. He gave men brains which would direct him quickly to the sound made by an edible animal, and enable him to bring it home quickly even though he had been pursuing it all round the countryside for some time before he killed it. The woman’s brain was then ideal for cooking it while he had a well-earned snooze.
So can God be expected to adapt both kinds of brain now to working a computer in an office, and heating up ready meals in a microwave ? There isn’t so much call now for dealing with sabre-toothed tigers, and a lot of people would rather eat a supermarket yoghurt than their local blackberries. Who is going to avoid heavy traffic to get quickly to the supermarket ? Perhaps women shouldn’t be allowed to drive ….
God adapt both kinds of brain? No, but we need to work with what we have been given by God. Our governments should realise that men and women are different and if girls don’t want to do techie jobs, and boys don’t want a career in child care, don’t force them. I could get onto leadership and support roles, but we’ll leave it there for now!
What about the poor old sabre-tooth tiger ? Was it not bright and beautiful enough to survive ? God had to balance up very carefully men’s ability to exterminate animals, with the animals’ ability to escape. And that goes for women too, if they want fur coats. Altogether, God had an awful lot to think about that week.
These things go in fashions. I remember that when it was quite avant-garde for a girl to yearn to be a manager, I would quite like to have been a secretary, but nobody ever thought of demanding women’s jobs for boys. Nowadays I suppose you could be a “personal assistant” as readily as you could be a nurse, and the top secretaries to really important people have always been male without question.
Knowing what I am like, perhaps it would be better to say *most* men have a sense of direction.
Social science is all about averages, John!
Perhaps you were really intended to be a woman and should have corrective surgery ? Only joking.
Of course you are right, and some women do a splendid job of leading rambling clubs or school parties across moor and mountain without mishap, sometimes navigating by the stars. (You’ll have to excuse me, the Christmas spirit is beginning to kick in ) .
It’s clearly about time I posted up my newletter article on Germaine Greer’s attitude to transgenders and ‘corrective surgery’.
That sounds fun.