Great Minds Think…Different?

It is known fact that there are two sides of a brain. However, recent studies have suggested that there may be a variation in how the female and the male brain function. According to a study led by cognitive scientists, Douglas Burman and James Booth at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, “girls rely more on universal language-processing machinery that operates regardless of how they receive the information, whereas boys process information depending on the sensory mode”. To rationalize this phenomenon, a study manipulating the presentation of words was conducted to a group of children aged 9 to 15, half of whom were girls:

Paired words were either flashed on a screen or spoken, and subjects had to judge whether they rhymed, for example...The researchers found that girls showed significantly greater activation of the language areas of the brain than did boys. The boys showed greater activation of the specific sensory brain areas--visual or auditory--required by the task.

Monitoring the subjects’ brain activity by measuring the blood flow in various parts of the brain through the mechanism of functional magnetic resonance imaging, researchers realized that whereas girls had a higher percentage of brain activity in the language processing centers, which allows them to more easily decode abstract information, boys are were likely to excel in language when material is presented orally or visually, since most of the brain activity was founded to be centralized in the auditory and visual sections of the brain. In other words, boys in a classroom setting were found to pick up linguistic information more efficiently through the use of textbooks and lectures, whereas girls could essentially process the same information by either means.

Another sense of classification of the male and female brain is by the E-S system. In this feat to separate the logic of how the female and the male brain work, the E system is defined as the brain of the empathizer, or “female brain”, and the S system is defined as the brain of the systemiser, or the “male brain”. The empathizer is usually characterized by traits that function to understand and realize how people are feeling, and is driven by the intuition to figure out what the best means of reacting to the particular situation is. The systemiser is intuitively driven by the need to understand the processes behind a system, and is usually compelled to figure out the mechanisms to construct a system/solution for any particular situation.

In general, however, the association of the male brain as the systemizing type and the female brain as the empathizing type is just a product of averages of data from various experimental studies. Because the functional schism between the male and female brain is still in the process of development, it is concluded at the moment that either gender can be seen as either an empathizer or a systemizer, or even as an “balanced” individual that shows equally strong aspects in both qualities. For the moment, the information is most strongly promoted by stereotypes.

Posted by: Helen Thi