Wow! Over the past several decades, emancipated women have fought for their rights with such enthusiasm that practically no one has any doubts that women and men are absolutely equal. And then - bam, like a bolt from the blue! - Experts from the University of Pennsylvania said that the brain in men and women is designed in completely different ways.
From this followed an even more disappointing conclusion that everyone should mind their own business. They say that representatives of the beautiful half of humanity are better at raising children, handicrafts, playing music, cooking. For men - well, everything else …
WE ARE SO DIFFERENT…
American scientists have studied the work of the brain in the most thorough way. To do this, they invited a thousand volunteers from among men and women of different ages. In their work, they used the method of magnetic resonance imaging.
So, MRI showed that the so-called brain circuits of men are directed from the front of the brain to the back and form the so-called direct longitudinal connection. But their left and right hemispheres are practically not connected with each other.
The only area in which there were many connections between the right and left hemispheres in men was the cerebellum. He is responsible for traffic control. Perhaps this is why it is easier for men to manage transport and outdoor sports. According to scientists, men master one thing better, fully concentrating on solving a specific problem.
In women, experts found a cross-connection of the hemispheres. And they immediately concluded that thanks to this, it is easier for the ladies to perform several simultaneously, but less significant tasks. For these very cross-links, experts attributed the ladies' tendency to frequent mood swings and inconsistency in their actions.
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In order not to be unfounded, scientists double-checked the results of their research using tests. Men and women were given the same tasks and saw how they would solve them. Representatives of the sterner sex easily processed spatial information, made progress in creativity and demonstrated excellent creativity in thinking in a specific direction. They also had the best sensory-motor speed. And the ladies showed good results in tests for attention, the formation of social skills, memory for words and faces.
TO EACH HIS OWN
As a matter of fact, the conclusions of scientists only confirmed what has long been known. Men perceive information better and perform coordinated actions in one direction, and women easily cope with several tasks at the same time.
The fact is that the left hemisphere of the brain is responsible for logical thinking, and the right for intuitive thinking. If a task involves both types of thinking, women are more likely to do better. In addition, women have better developed intuitive thinking.
The results of the study also explain the fact why gender still influences the choice of profession. Because men and women tend to be very successful in different specialties.
But this does not mean that people of different genders cannot do the same work. Life has shown that women are quite successful in showing themselves in men's professions, and vice versa. This is also due to the fact that each person has an individual type of thinking. There are women with a purely masculine character and a masculine type of thinking, and vice versa.
Take chefs, for example. Recently it became clear that there are more and more male chefs, and they cope with their duties brilliantly … Although, it would seem, cooking borscht and porridge, baking pies and cakes is a purely female occupation.
TO WHOM - DEPRESSION, TO WHOM - PARKINSON'S DISEASE
Scientists are sure that the differences in the brain activity of men and women can explain not only their behavior, choice of profession and hobby. They are directly related to the occurrence of certain neurological disorders. And this clear relationship between a person's disease and his sex is very interesting for researchers. Indeed, it is no secret that men are more likely to suffer from neurological diseases such as Parkinson's disease, and women are more prone to spleen - they are twice as likely to survive severe depression than representatives of the strong half of humanity.
However, everything is not so simple. After all, the human brain in its modern form was formed 300 thousand years ago, and the social environment and living standards began to change relatively recently. Historically, the roles in the tribe were distributed as follows: men went hunting and spent most of their time away from the settlement, while women stayed at home with small children. Accordingly, the men did not communicate much with each other, because during the hunt it was necessary to observe silence, and the women constantly chatted with each other and did several household chores at the same time: they watched the children, cooked food, arranged their life. Social roles have changed these days. Men and women live in the same conditions, learn the same professions, lead a similar lifestyle, but the brain continues to work according to the same principles as it did 300 thousand years ago. Too little time has passed for any evolutionary changes to begin.
It is with a change in the socio-cultural environment that psychotherapists associate the increase in the number of psychosomatic disorders. It's just that the brain works according to outdated principles that no longer correspond to the new reality.
By their nature, men and women are approximately equally prone to psychosomatic diseases, experts say. If earlier, with a clear distribution of roles, each member of society understood his place in it, now everything is mixed up, and people often simply cannot find themselves, understand what they want from life and what functions they need to perform in the changed world. In addition, life is becoming more dynamic. Hence the stress, and, as a consequence, the development of psychosomatic diseases.
However, it is rather difficult to adequately assess the picture of nervous disorders depending on gender. The fact is that because of their emotionality and sociability, women more easily share their experiences, more often turn to specialists for help, and therefore, one gets the impression that they are more ill. On the other hand, the representatives of the stronger sex are often silent about their problems, keep everything to themselves, less often seek help. It is believed that a man is ashamed to admit that he has depression. By the way, the habit of keeping their experiences to themselves becomes one of the reasons why men die earlier.
FOR A PURITY EXPERIMENT
On the other hand, it is important to understand what comes first: the structure of the brain or the conditions in which people live. After all, if a person is assigned certain tasks, then precisely those areas of the brain that are necessary in a particular case will be involved in their solution.
For example, now women have to simultaneously solve many diverse tasks: to build a career, provide for a living, raise children - and more often without the help of a man. But even in complete families, in most cases, the man has one task - to provide for the family, which he does, that is, he concentrates completely on one business. Of course, in such situations, the brain will work differently.
Professor Heidi Johansen-Berg, a British neurology expert at Oxford University, believes that the human brain is too complex for such generalizations. In his opinion, for the purity of the experiment, it would be nice to analyze the work of the brain of people who live outside the stereotypes habitual in society. But this, most likely, will be a new stage of research …
Sergey SHAPOVALOV
