Phluck said:

They do have some math skills that tend to be superior to men, they generally have an easier time interpreting formulas and things of that nature. Kind of a language skills thing, I think.

In the studies where the found the female brain was more receptive to facial/social cues, they also found that these traits vary a lot. There are lots of men who have these abilities at the same level or higher than most women, and vice versa, so when you look at the data as a whole, it's a matter of odds. There is a higher probability that the sexes will adapt certain traits, but it is still extremely common for someone to be skilled at things that the opposite sex more commonly can do better.

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Phluck said:

Well, we still get little clues as to how our brains grow and develop, but it's dangerous to use this information to try and explain the everyday behaviour of men and women, as it'll lead to so many false assumptions about people and why they're acting certain ways.

The thing that worries me the most is people using this information to try and justify sexist stereotypes, or "so that's why my ex-girlfriend wouldn't shut up and couldn't handle simple math", that kind of thing, which would be a pretty big misinterpretation of the data.

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Phluck said:

That's a good point, which might not be so much a difference in brain structure as...it could just be more testosterone.

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The nature of men wanted to pursue things might be based entirely on wanted to show one another up. Looking at it from an evolutionary perspective, it's fairly evident that women are attracted to men who do well competitively, and it would make sense that they would pass on their genes, and these traits, creating men that had the desire to achieve various things.

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It's hard to say how much of it is social, and how much is biological, as people also tend to emulate the sexual choices that are normal in society.

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But it's kind of strange to think that maybe the reason art, science, athletics, etc... exist as they do today because they got our ancestors laid.

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FreeLaws1_6 said:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/24/science/24women.html?pagewanted=1&th&oref=login

Here's an article about the difference between men and women's brain! It is really interesting. It is from the Ney Work Times so you may need to login to see it (i would suggest doing it anyway, you can sign up for a free electronic newsletter. It has some pretty interesting stuff)

But if you dont want to do that I took some excerpt I thought were interesting to post here. And if you want the full story PM me and I will copy and paste it for you!



?For example, neuroscientists have shown that women's brains are about 10 percent smaller than men's, on average, even after accounting for women's comparatively smaller body size.?


?A century ago, the French scientist Gustav Le Bon pointed to the smaller brains of women - closer in size to gorillas', he said - and said that explained the "fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason" in women.?

?Overall size aside, some evidence suggests that female brains are relatively more endowed with gray matter - the prized neurons thought to do the bulk of the brain's thinking - while men's brains are packed with more white matter, the tissue between neurons.?

?Men, they said, appear to devote 6.5 times as much of their gray matter to intelligence-related tasks as do women, while women rely far more heavily on white matter to pull them through a ponder.?

?The modest size and regional variability of the sex differences in math scores, as well as an attitudinal handicap that girls apparently pack into their No. 2 pencil case, convince many researchers that neither sex has a monopoly on basic math ability, and that culture rather than chromosomes explains findings like the gap in math SAT scores.?

?For Dr. Summers and others, the overwhelmingly male tails of the bell curve may be telling. Such results, taken together with assorted other neuro-curiosities like the comparatively greater number of boys with learning disorders, autism and attention deficit disorder, suggest to them that the male brain is a delicate object, inherently prone to extremes, both of incompetence and of genius.?

?In many formerly male-dominated fields like medicine and law, women have already reached parity, at least at the entry levels. At the undergraduate level, women outnumber men in some sciences like biology.?

?Dr. Urry cited a 1983 study in which 360 people - half men, half women - rated mathematics papers on a five-point scale. On average, the men rated them a full point higher when the author was "John T. McKay" than when the author was "Joan T. McKay." There was a similar, but smaller disparity in the scores the women gave.?

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Sorry to say this, but this BS. Whoever wrote this article doesn't know shit about neuroscience.

Articles like this pop up every now and then. It's best to ignore them. 

ummikko said:

Sorry to say this, but this BS. Whoever wrote this article doesn't know shit about neuroscience.

Articles like this pop up every now and then. It's best to ignore them. 

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Morrowind said:

After warning about the dangers of explaining every day occurances with nuerological research, you do it yourself :p . I have found that women who understand their social stigma are FAR more amibitious and hardworking than most people in general, male or female.

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some evidence suggests that female brains are relatively more endowed with gray matter - the prized neurons thought to do the bulk of the brain's thinking - while men's brains are packed with more white matter, the tissue between neurons

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Men, they said, appear to devote 6.5 times as much of their gray matter to intelligence-related tasks as do women

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while women rely far more heavily on white matter to pull them through a ponder.

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WTF? Women think with their axons, men think with cell bodies and dendrites??