LONDON: Women have sharper memory while
men coordinate things better.
An Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi alumni
has created the first ever map of neural
circuitry inside a human brain which has
confirmed that women's brains are designed
for social skills and memory while men's are
for perception and co-ordination.
However, there is one field in which women
beat men hollow - multitasking, finds the study
that looks at brain connectivity.
A new brain connectivity study from Penn
Medicine published on Monday has found
striking differences in the neural wiring of men
and women that's lending credence to some
commonly-held beliefs about their behaviour.
In one of the largest studies looking at the
"connectomes" of the sexes, Ragini Verma, an
associate professor in the department of
radiology at the Perelman School of Medicine
at the University of Pennsylvania found greater
neural connectivity from front to back and
within one hemisphere in males, suggesting
their brains are structured to facilitate
connectivity between perception and
coordinated action. In contrast, in females, the
wiring goes between the left and right
hemispheres, suggesting that they facilitate
communication between the analytical and
intuition. Ragini who completed her masters in
mathematics and computer applications
followed by a PhD in computer vision and
mathematics from IIT Delhi says "These maps
show us a stark difference — and
complementarity — in the architecture of the
human brain that helps provide a potential
neural basis as to why men excel at certain
tasks, and women at others".
According to Verma, on average, men are more
likely better at learning and performing a
single task at hand, like cycling or navigating
directions, whereas women have superior
memory and social cognition skills, making
them more equipped for multitasking and
creating solutions that work for a group. In
the study, the researchers found that females
displayed greater connectivity in the
supratentorial region, which contains the
cerebrum, the largest part of the brain,
between the left and right hemispheres. Males,
on the other hand, displayed greater
connectivity within each hemisphere.
By contrast, the opposite prevailed in the
cerebellum, the part of the brain that plays a
major role in motor control, where males
displayed greater inter-hemispheric
connectivity and females displayed greater
intra-hemispheric connectivity.
These connections likely give men an efficient
system for coordinated action, where the
cerebellum, which involves perception, and the
front of the brain, which involves action, are
bridged together, according to the authors.
The female connections likely facilitate
integration of the analytic and sequential
processing modes of the left hemisphere with
the spatial, intuitive information processing
modes of the right side.
The authors observed only a few gender
differences in the connectivity in children
younger than 13 years, but the differences
were more pronounced in adolescents aged 14
to 17 years and young adults older than 17.
Past studies have shown sex differences in the
brain, but the neural wiring connecting regions
across the whole brain that have been tied to
such cognitive skills has never been fully
shown in a large population.
In the study, Verma and colleagues
investigated the gender-specific differences in
brain connectivity during the course of
development in 949 individuals (521 females
and 428 males) aged 8 to 22 years using
diffusion tensor imaging (DTI).
DTI is water-based imaging technique that can
trace and highlight the fibre pathways
connecting the different regions of the brain,
laying the foundation for a structural
connectome or network of the whole brain.
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