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From: dmark@acsu.Buffalo.EDU (David Mark)
Newsgroups: sci.bio
Subject: Re: Men and women
Message-ID: <12114@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU>
Date: 21 Oct 89 17:29:07 GMT
References: <55243@tiger.oxy.edu>
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Reply-To: dmark@autarch.acsu.buffalo.edu (David Mark)
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In article <55243@tiger.oxy.edu> palosaari@oxy.edu (Jedidiah Jon Palosaari) writes:
>I heard somewhere that scientists have found in recent studies that there
>is a difference in the brain structure of men and women, in that women
>have a major connection between the right and left halves of the brain,
>whereas men do not.  I was also told that this means that women can use both
>sides of their brain at the same time, whereas men have difficulty doing
>that and can only concentrate on logic *or* emotions separately.  Men
>who do have this connection in the brain have dyslexia.
>     Does anyone know of the validity of this connection, and its probable
>effects on thought patterns?

A fairly-recent book by Diane Halpern has some interesting information related
to this topic:

Halpern, Diane F., 1986.  Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities.  Hillsdale,
  NJ:  Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

This book seems to do a very nice job of summarizing a wide variety of
results on differences in mental performance of various sorts of tasks and
activities that exist between male and female humans.  One very 
consistent difference is that males tend to perform better on "spatial"
tasks, and females to perform better on "verbal" tasks.  Halpern then
observes that there is also a persistent interaction effect with
handedness:  left-handed individuals "tend" to have spatial and verbal
abilities that are somewhat more like those of the other sex.  That is,
left-handed males tend to perform better on verbal and less well on spatial
tasks than do right-handed males, etc.  Halpern takes this to be strong
circumstantial evidence that there is a biological (brain function
differentiation) basis for the cognitive differences.  She also notes a lot
of sex differences in cognitive abilities that are almost certainly
attributable to "environmental" or "nurture" factors, differences in the
ways male and female children are treated, etc.

I recall hearing about 10 years ago about males having higher hemispheric
differentiation of brain functions, and of males tending to be better than
females on "single-minded" tasks, females better at performing integrative
tasks.  That's why so many of our top managers and politicians are
female.   :-)

I also recall hearing recently that the brain-function hemisperic different-
iation can now be studies using real-time monitoring of temperature in the 
brain.  You can give someone a mental task and see what parts of the brain
are activiated to solve the task.  And I recall (with less confidence) that
this was confirming the sex differences in brain function localization.

David Mark
Center for Cognitive Science
SUNY at Buffalo

dmark@cs.buffalo.edu