Brain- the only organ to have named itself. It is a mess inside the brain with all the different neuron connections and various structures mashed together- but still, the brain seems to be the key player in making us who we are, whoever that may be. You might have heard of the saying that ‘males are from mars and females are from venus’. In reality, are male and female brains that different? Do males have bigger brains? Are women better at multitasking? Why are men better at navigating? Are women more prone to anxiety and depression? Well, here are your answers.
Before we start, there is no ‘male brain’ or ‘female brain’ in nature, it is always a mixture of both. In other words, the brains of women might have some common features as opposed to that of males. But there are individual differences as well. If I provide you with a human brain, you wouldn’t be able to tell if it is Jaseel’s or Jaseela’s. But are there some differences between the two? Yes, there is. And without advanced technologies like MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging), we probably might not have discovered this.
Do males have bigger brains? As a matter of fact, they do. Most of the studies suggest that males have about 10% bigger brains than females. But this doesn’t mean males are in any way intellectually superior to women. Some neurologists are of the opinion that the bigger size of brains in males could be relative to their other body parts. And there is hardly any concrete evidence suggesting a correlation between brain size and intellect.
But there are some other differences between an average brain of both sexes that explain why at times males and females behave differently. Men tend to have more grey matter in the brain whereas women have about 10 times more white matter than men. This could be why men are more task-focused and women have a better capacity to multi-task. Some studies also point out that women have more neural connections from one hemisphere to another. At the same time, men dominate in the number of neural connections within a hemisphere. This makes men have greater synergy between perception and action. It also explains why women are more inclined to combine logic and intuition. Women also seem to have a larger (by a very small percentage) hippocampus, helping them express themselves emotionally. On the other hand, Amygdala Is larger in men. Maybe that is why men tend to respond to emotional stress physically. And some studies show that the blood flow to particular regions is greater in women making them more empathetic and caring and also more vulnerable to psychological difficulties like depression and anxiety.
The above mentioned are only some anatomical features that differ in both sexes. There are quite a few cognitive aspects that make males different from females as well. Yes, they are different. But that doesn’t mean one is better than the other. Well, if you take a closer look, there is a balance between these differences. When the ‘male brain’ scores one point in football, the ‘female brain’ scores one in cricket, and so on. So, there is no point in saying that one sex is better than the other. Maybe one sex is better at doing something better than the other. But this statement might also go wrong a number of times because of the individual differences between people. In conclusion, there are no two boxes names ‘male’ and ‘female’ where we can dumb our brain, rather there are as many boxes as the number of the brains, with our name on it. I guess the God, or whoever created us, wasn’t sexist after all.
