Why the Brains of Men and Women Developed Differently

October 1, 2009

cavemen An essential part of understanding the basic principles of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus is an acceptance of the idea that the structure and nature of the male and female brains exhibit certain striking differences. Fifty years ago that claim was mostly subjection, but that is certainly not the case today. Now, thanks to the tireless research of modern neuroscience, a number of ways that male and female brains differ have been mapped and measured.

One of those notable differences is that a woman’s brain has a larger corpus callosum, the bundle of nerves that connect the right and left hemispheres. This link, which produces cross-talk between the hemispheres, is 25 percent smaller in men. In practical terms, this means that men do not connect feelings and thoughts as readily as women do. In a very real sense, women have superhighways connecting their feelings to speech, while men have back roads with plenty of stop signs.

This stronger connection between different parts of the brain increases a woman’s ability to multitask. When she is listening , she is also thinking, remembering, feeling and planning all at the same time.

By contrast a man’s brain is highly specialized, using a specific part of a single hemisphere to accomplish a task. A woman’s brain is more diffuse, using hoth hemispheres for many tasks. This neurological difference allows men to focus and to block out distractions for long periods of time. On the other hand women tend to see things in a broader context, from a larger vantage point.

There are various theories that attempt to answer the question: How and why did the male and female brain grow so differently? The most apparent answer to this question is found in the behavior and lives of our ancestors, who for thousands of generations lived the lives of hunters and gathers. And beyond our species of homo sapiens, the larger view of our primate relatives, chimps, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans, arguably the closest of human relatives, are an important part of this equation.

Most of us tend to look back on biblical times, five thousand plus years ago in the time of Abraham and Moses, or two thousand years ago in the time of Christ, and think of that as our distant past. In truth, in terms of our biological clock and its impact on our brain differences, the days of the Roman Empire occurred just a few weeks ago.

In an age where dinner is caught at the supermarket, and safe shelter is secured with the help of a realtor and a home loan, it’s very hard to imagine the lives of nomadic tribesmen surviving on the barest of margins. People living, perhaps 25 or 30 years, and dependent on the success of the next hunt to fend off the ever-present threat of starvation.

The male’s hunting instincts, evident in modern man, include strengths in spatial issues and most notably in long periods of concentration. Rather than intensely focusing on the movements of a wholly mammoth, modern man spends countless hours following a ball in a variety of sports. The hunt for large game often went on for days and was conducted mostly in silence. Would those differences have been so distinct if humans like many other varieties of great apes, had been plant eating creatures? Probably not. But then again human migration, would not have extended from the African Savanna to the Arctic Circle surviving on plant food alone.

As for females, the ability to communicate and multi-task, talents that were most likely honed during the long days and nights that women spent managing homes and offspring while men vanished for several days in search of big game, are all evident in the brain composition of modern women.

Finally it’s not just this division of labor that most likely created these male/female brain differences, it was also the driving force and distances of time that are the hallmarks of the human evolutionary clock. It’s believed that the earliest homo sapiens emerged 400,000 years ago, that’s 20,000 generations ago. By comparison Christ cleared the Temple of money-changers a mere 100 generations ago, Columbus set sail 25 generations ago, and the modern industrial age began a mere eight generations back.

In reality our lives are a flash in time, we have 20,000 generations standing between us and early humans and tens of thousands more generations if you consider the full span of primate history. So of course these notable brain differences had ample time to evolve into what we know today. Perhaps in the year 222,009 these distinctions will be far less notable than they are today. That will be interesting to see in just 10,000 generations from now!

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