It turns out there’s a reason why male drivers don’t stop to ask for directions, much to the chagrin of their female passengers. According to a new study from a team of Norwegian researchers, men tend to have a better sense of direction.
Published in the journal Behavioral Brain Research, the new study found that men tend to orient themselves around cardinal directions, where as women prefer to orient themselves based on a step-by-step route.
In another part of the study, researchers found men tended to use a different part of their brain than women while navigating a virtual maze. The study team also found that giving some women a drop of testosterone caused them to orient themselves based more on cardinal directions more than they normally would.
“Men’s sense of direction was more effective. They quite simply got to their destination faster,” study author Carl Pintzka, a neuroscientist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, said in a statement.
In the study, participants used 3D goggles and a joystick to navigate a virtual maze. Volunteers were allowed to orient themselves in the maze for an hour while functional images of their brains were recorded. Then, in an MRI scanner, participants were asked to complete 45 navigation tasks with 30 seconds to complete each one. One of the tasks, for instance, was to find the yellow car from various origin points.
The researchers found that men solved 50 percent more of the tasks than female participants. Sorry ladies.
“If they’re going to the Student Society building in Trondheim (Norway), for example, men usually go in the general direction where it’s located. Women usually orient themselves along a route to get there, for example, ‘go past the hairdresser and then up the street and turn right after the store’,” he said.
Cardinal directions are more efficient
The researchers said the use of cardinal directions was more efficient because it’s a more flexible strategy. Various destinations in the trial were reached more quickly because the directional strategy depends less on a starting point, the researchers said.
The researchers also found that men used their hippocampus more while navigating, while women were more likely to use frontal areas of their brain. “That’s in sync with the fact that the hippocampus is necessary to make use of cardinal directions,” Pintzka said.
The Norwegian scientist said there may be an evolutionary reason for these tendencies.
“In ancient times, men were hunters and women were gatherers. Therefore, our brains probably evolved differently. For instance, other researchers have documented that women are better at finding objects locally than men. In simple terms, women are faster at finding things in the house, and men are faster at finding the house,” Pintzka said.
In another part of the study, some women were given a drop of testosterone or a placebo under their tongue before being asked to solve the navigation puzzles. This part of the study was double-blinded so neither researchers nor the women knew who got what.
“We hoped that they would be able to solve more tasks, but they didn’t,” Pintzka said. “But they had improved knowledge of the layout of the maze. And they used the hippocampus to a greater extent, which tends to be used more by men for navigating.”
Pintzka said his team’s findings could be important with respect to Alzheimer’s disease—as one symptom of the cognitive disorder is the loss of a sense of direction.
“Almost all brain-related diseases are different in men and women, either in the number of affected individuals or in severity,” Pintzka said. “Therefore, something is likely protecting or harming people of one sex. Since we know that twice as many women as men are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, there might be something related to sex hormones that is harmful.”
—–
Feature Image: Thinkstock
Comments