14 DAY TRIAL // After countless jokes and studies regarding the differences in thinking and approach between men and women, a team of researchers at the University of Alberta, Canada, comes to explain once and for all the dilemma of sexes.
The new study showed that men and women used different parts of their brains to perform the same task.
"The results jumped out at us," said Emily Bell, a PhD student in psychiatry and lead author of the paper.
"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."
"It is widely recognized that there are differences between males and females, but finding that different regions of the brain are activated in men and women in response to the same task has large potential implications for a variety of different clinical situations," said Dr. Peter Silverstone, a psychiatrist and author of the study.
In order to reach this suspected, but unproven conclusion, researchers monitored with the help of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) the participants' brain activity while they were performing memory tasks, verbal tasks, visual spatial tasks and simple motor tasks.
In another study, this time carried out by University of California researchers, it was shown that while there is essentially no disparity in general intelligence between the sexes, the regions activated by this feature have a different structure.
The study shows women having more white matter and men more gray matter related to intellectual skill.
"[?] human evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior," said Richard Haier, professor of psychology and author of that study.
Generally, grey matter can be understood as the parts of the brain responsible for information processing; whereas white matter is responsible for information transmission.