And Now for Your Gender-Biased Brain Science Update

This just in: Men’s and women’s brains are different. Like, structurally different. A crack team of scientists from the University of Pennsylvania carefully scanned the brains of a test pool of some 1,000 male and female humans and extrapolated wildly from their findings.

Or maybe that last bit is more the job of journalists tasked with making sciencey stories sexier for public consumption. We wouldn’t dream of contributing to that sort of thing, so let’s let the BBC have a go at it instead:

Male brains are wired front to back, with few connections bridging the two hemispheres.

In females, the connections criss-cross between left and right.

These differences might explain why men, in general, tend to be better at learning and performing a single task, like cycling or navigating, whereas women are more equipped for multitasking, say the researchers in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The same volunteers were asked to perform a series of cognitive tests, and the results appeared to support this notion.

–Posted by Kasia Anderson