A simple experiment with a computer screen showed that women are noticeably less responsive to movements and are slower to recognize them than men. Scientists who have published an article in the journal Current Biology write about this.
“We made this discovery quite by accident, and it surprised us a lot. Before that, there was no hint in the literature that the low-level processing of visual information in the brains of men and women may differ, especially as much as our experiments indicate, said Scott Murray of the University of Washington in Seattle. USA).
In recent years, scientists have been actively trying to understand whether there are physiological, evolutionary or chemical features in the work of the body of women and men, or whether all the differences in our behavior are due to upbringing, hormones and cultural traditions.
For example, in December 2013, biologists from the United States found out that some parts of the brain in men communicate with each other differently than similar regions of the nervous system in women and vice versa. A few years ago, molecular biologists discovered that the stronger and the weaker sex perceive pain differently, and found hints that men are "programmed" by evolution to die before women.
Murray and his colleagues unexpectedly found another similar difference between the sexes, trying to understand whether autistic people actually respond faster to various visual stimuli than other people, which is what ordinary people often talk about.
In the course of these experiments, scientists displayed several fast-moving stripes on a computer screen, which disappeared from the display after a few moments. Autistic and healthy people participating in the experiments had to determine where these lines flew, and do it as quickly as possible by pressing one of the buttons on the keyboard.
While studying the results of these tests and the brain activity of their charges, Murray's team drew attention to one unusual thing that has nothing to do with the presence or absence of autism in volunteers.
It turned out that all men reacted to the movement of lines much faster than women. On average, it took them about 0.1 seconds to press the correct button, while their rivals took from 0.125 to 0.175 seconds. This was especially true for high-contrast pictures, which require a minimum of processing time.
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Having received similar results, scientists did not believe them, suggesting that the differences could be due to the fact that they came across men with a particularly fast visual cortex. They tested whether this was actually the case by conducting three new experiments with new groups of volunteers, observing their brain activity using magnetic resonance imaging machines.
These experiments showed that individual differences in the speed of the visual cortex were not associated with how quickly men and women responded to the movement of the stripes. This confirmed the initial conclusions of the experiments and indicated that the representatives of the weaker and stronger sex really perceive the world in different ways.
Interestingly, the reason for these differences is still a mystery to researchers. These same observations of the visual cortex show that this part of the brain works in about the same way in men and women. Scientists hope that subsequent experiments will help them understand where these differences lie and what they may be associated with in terms of human evolution.
