- Agh!
My male brain is having
a bit of difficulty
with these Ikea instructions.
Or is it?
Maybe I need to look at
some recent study findings
on the differences
between the male and female brain.
It's confusing because in 2008
German Ikea head Petra Hesser
claimed that women are better than men
at assembling flat pack furniture.
Hey, sounds reasonable to me
I certainly assembled
my share of backwards
(speaks foreign language)
But hold on,
a group of Norweigein psychologists
just published a study
and applied cognitive psychology
putting this statement to the test.
They had forty men and women assemble
an Udden kitchen trolley,
some with the instructions
and some without.
They found that the men were faster
and more accurate in their construction,
while the women benefited
more from the instructions
than the men.
Perhaps, as the researchers suggest,
it all comes down to sex difference
in mental rotation ability.
Or hey, maybe it's just
a super small study
and the men were overly competitive
about the whole thing.
Either way,
it's far too easy to take the findings
and jitteralize ad nauseum
about the furniture building prowess
or men and women.
This especially rings true
given the recent study,
Sex beyond genitalia:
The human brain mosaic,
publshed in the journal
Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences.
As that tantalizing title suggests,
the researchers found
that while there certainly
are sex and gender differences
in brain and behavior,
each human brain is a
unique mosaic of features.
Some of these features
are more common in females of the species,
other are more common in males,
and some are common in both.
In other words,
there's no typical male or female brain
and there's no sliding
male female continuum,
for you to rank your head cheese on.
It all backs up a long understood fact,
you will find more brain
variation within a given sex
than between the two.
The researchers analyzed MRIs
of more than 1,400 human brains
from four separate data sets.
Then they corroborated the data
with a personality behavior analysis
of more than 5,500 individuals.
They did not, however,
rule on how my own particular brain
manage to assemble an inside out Dagstorp.
So what's your take on
these brain studies?
Let me know,
and if you crave more
weird science goodness
be sure to visit
now.howstuffworks.com
each and every day.
