Now, there’s proof: Men, women different

Here’s a shocker! In spite of the above mentioned DUH! factor, there are some interesting points here, and some great grist for the conversational mill:

Attention, Dr. Frankenstein, and maybe Gloria Steinem: There are girl brains, then there are boy brains. But there’s not one generic human brain, no matter what hand-wringing feminists may insist in their quest for sexual equality. Some stark new clinical evidence shows that men and women are just not the same upstairs. “The comedians are right. The science proves it. A man’s brain and a woman’s brain really do work differently,” a research team from the University of Alberta in Canada announced yesterday.

As a biology major I remember getting feminazi fellow students torqued off by telling them that there absolutely HAD to be underlying differences, based on the differing biochemical environment caused by hormonal differences. They didn’t appreciate that bit of scientific knowledge one little bit, which of course only increased the Chief’s enjoyment of the experience. (It was ALMOST as good as telling them that they were self-selecting as being biologically unfit if they decided not to have children, since biological fitness is defined as being able to successfully pass genes on to succeeding generations…but I digress.)

“The larger implications of this work is that we may increasingly find out that there are differences in the ‘hard wiring’ of male and female brains,” said study author Dr. Peter Silverstone, a psychiatrist. Though Dr. Silverstone hopes that these revelations will lead to more innovative ways to treat depression and other mental illnesses, these findings might one day explain certain persistent behaviors that make for a more lively existence.

Here’s where the differences come up. Not a huge surprise at these:

Why do men, for example, refuse to ask for directions while women are busy peering at maps and landmarks during the same automobile journey? Why do women cry and men sleep through a sappy movie? Could it be that old hard-wiring? During the Canadian study, volunteers were given memory, language, spatial and coordination tests while their brains were monitored through the MRIs. The patterns revealed that men and women clearly met the challenges differently.

Similar research also reinforces differences in the brains of men and women. Psychiatrists at the Stanford University School of Medicine announced Nov. 7 that the sexes have different senses of humor as well. Using MRIs to monitor the brains of 10 men and 10 women as they scanned the newspaper cartoons, researchers found “sex-specific differences in the brain’s response to humor.”

So THAT’S why Mrs. Chief doesn’t always like the Chief’s forays into humor!

The sexes also differ in the intelligence department. “Human evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior,” said psychologist Richard Haier of the University of California at Irvine upon releasing his study of male and female brains in January. Again using MRIs, he found that men have more than six times the amount of gray matter — which controls information processing — in their brains as women do. But females have 10 times the amount of white matter, which controls networking abilities. The findings “may help explain why men excel in tasks requiring more local processing (like mathematics) while women tend to excel at integrating and assimilating information … such as required for language,” the study found.

Remember folks! Just because they’re different, doesn’t (necessarily) mean they’re wrong, which is particulary nice to lead in to one further set of conclusions (other than the one that not all behavior scientists have skulls full of marshmallow):

There’s some reassuring common ground, though. A study of almost 700 adults released yesterday by Cornell University found that men and women are happier with each other, rather than alone. And the stronger the relationship’s commitment, the greater the happiness and sense of well-being of the partners, the analysis found. “Being married is associated with higher self-esteem, greater life satisfaction, greater happiness and less distress, whereas people who are not in stable romantic relationships tend to report lower self-esteem, less life satisfaction, less happiness and more distress,” sociologist Claire Kamp Dushsaid yesterday.

Awwwwwwwwww! The tradional way, IS the best way. You heard it here, first!