Men can't multitask and women have better memory because their brains are wired differently, a new study led by an Indian-origin scientist has found.
The research found striking differences in the neural wiring of men and women, which explains why males excel at certain tasks and females at others.
In one of the largest studies looking at the "connectomes" of the sexes, Ragini Verma, an associate professor in the department of Radiology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and colleagues found greater neural connectivity from front to back and within one hemisphere in males.
This suggests male brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action.
In contrast, in females, the wiring goes between the left and right hemispheres, suggesting that they facilitate communication between the analytical and intuition.
"These maps show us a stark difference - and complementarity - in the architecture of the human brain that helps provide a potential neural basis as to why men excel at certain tasks, and women at others," said Verma, who has a PhD in computer vision and mathematics from Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.
In the study, Verma and colleagues investigated the gender-specific differences in brain connectivity during the course of development in 949 individuals (521 females and 428 males) aged 8 to 22 years using diffusion tensor imaging.
DTI is water-based imaging technique that can trace and highlight the fiber pathways connecting the different regions of the brain, laying the foundation for a structural connectome or network of the whole brain.
Researchers found that females displayed greater connectivity in the supratentorial region, which contains the cerebrum, the largest part of the brain, between the left and right hemispheres.
Males, on the other hand, displayed greater connectivity within each hemisphere.
By contrast, the opposite prevailed in the cerebellum, the part of the brain that plays a major role in motor control, where males displayed greater inter-hemispheric connectivity and females displayed greater intra-hemispheric connectivity.
These connections likely give men an efficient system for coordinated action, where the cerebellum and cortex participate in bridging between perceptual experiences in the back of the brain, and action, in the front of the brain, researchers said in the journal Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.
The female connections likely facilitate integration of the analytic and sequential processing modes of the left hemisphere with the spatial, intuitive information processing modes of the right side.
The authors observed only a few gender differences in the connectivity in children younger than 13 years, but the differences were more pronounced in adolescents aged 14 to 17 years and young adults older than 17.
