A yacht which was steered by a veteran captain was sailing across the sea, and it has never lost surprisingly. “I imagine I can soar in the sky, or run in the wild at times. But what I worried about only was I would be lost possibly.”my girl friend always say,”so I hope you can turn up there when I need you.”
It turns out to be scientific what she worried. Women are worse at reading maps but better at finding lost items, research has revealed. Scientists asked 10 men and 10 women to view a series of unfamiliar pictures. The participants were told to give their impressions of the images and whether or not they found them beautiful.The scientists also used a technique called magnetoencephalography (MEG) to measure changes in the magnetic fields generated by active neurons in the brain.
They discovered that a brain region called the parietal lobe, which governs spatial awareness, is active in both men and women when they admire a ‘beautiful’ picture or photograph.
But while neurons on both sides of the brain were stimulated in women, only those in the right hemisphere were activated in men.
The left side of the brain used by women is more involved in ‘categorical’ spatial awareness - assessing the position of objects in categories such as ‘above’ or ‘below’, ‘left’ or ‘right’.
It enable women more aware of objects around them even if they are irrelevant to the task at hand, and could explain why they are more likely to find those lost door keys.
Men meanwhile appear to focus on ‘co-ordinate’ spatial awareness, centred in the right side of the brain. This involves a more precise form of mental mapping using co-ordinates to fix an object’s position in space, like those used on a Ordnance Survey.
The difference probably arose early in the evolution of early modern humans.Hunting, traditionally done by men, required a ‘co-ordinating’ ability to track animals accurately while on the move. However, a ‘categorical’ spatial awareness was better suited to foraging for fruit, roots or berries, a job mainly carried out by women.
Women tend to be more aware than men of objects around them, including those that seem irrelevant to the current task, whereas men out-perform women in navigation tasks.
Men tend to solve navigation tasks by using orientation-based strategies involving distance concepts and cardinal directions, whereas women tend to base their activities on remembering the location of landmarks and relative directions, such as ‘left from’, or ‘to the right of’.