Now, There’s Proof: Men, Women Different

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.

After analyzing magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs) of 23 men and 10 women, the team found that the sexes use different areas of the brain even when working on exactly the same task.

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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.

“The results jumped out at us,” said Emily Bell, one of the researchers. “Sometimes males and females would perform the same tasks and show different brain activation. And sometimes they would perform different tasks and show the same brain activation.”

Similar research also reinforces differences in the brains of men and women.

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“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.

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