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Original title: "do men naturally have a better sense of direction than women?" Ancient humans millions of years ago gave the answer. "

(photo source: Pxhere) now, look up!

Can you tell exactly which direction you are facing, east, south, west and west?

With the increasing complexity of urban road construction, people's travel is also more dependent on navigation, but there are gender differences when dealing with the same navigation tasks. In other words, men and women may have different abilities in finding their way.

Over the past few decades, many scientists have repeatedly proved that men have obvious advantages in solving mazes, finding routes and reducing spatial memory errors by designing experiments.

For example, the Galea team had male and female subjects look at a fictional town map and track a new route through the town. They found that men made fewer mistakes in learning new routes and were better at remembering the geometric features of maps, while women were better at remembering landmarks.

A recent study by researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) not only confirms this through new techniques, but also tries to explore the underlying reasons behind "men are indeed better at navigating and finding directions than women."

Figure A shows the simulated maze seen by the subjects | Ref. [1] the researchers recruited 18 men and 18 women and used 3D glasses to show a maze. After the subjects spent an hour learning the layout of the maze, they needed to solve 45 navigation tasks, each with only 30 seconds to complete. Tasks include finding specific objects or locations from different starting points in the maze, such as finding a "red car" from different starting points. During this period, the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to continuously record the brain activity of men and women.

FMRI images show that both men and women use large areas of the brain when doing tasks, but the use areas are different. Men use more of the hippocampus, while women use more of the frontal lobe.

The hippocampus is associated with long-and short-term memory and spatial positioning. Publicdomainvectors researchers found that men complete 50% more tasks than women, and men are more likely to use basic direction to locate themselves, with a stronger sense of direction, allowing them to reach their destination faster. For example, if they are going to the student union building in Trondheim, men usually quickly process three-dimensional information, locate the location, and go straight in its direction.

Women, on the other hand, will know more about the local environment, remember the specific route to the destination, and follow the given route to the destination. For example, you need to pass a barber shop in front of the student union building in Trondheim, then go straight down the street, turn right when you meet the store, and then walk about 200 meters until you see the red building.

The researchers believe that using basic directions to find your way is a more flexible way, because it doesn't depend on where you start.

These lines show how men and women go to their destination, with blue lines representing women's routes and red representing men | NTNU to further verify that researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) decided to inject testosterone into women (previous studies have shown that endogenous testosterone is associated with activation of the hippocampus, which is a key part of the brain It is closely related to identifying space and preserving memory) and test how they complete pathfinding tasks in a virtual environment. The researchers recruited 42 women and divided them into two groups of 21 each. Half took testosterone and half took a placebo.

The results of this experiment showed that although women did not perform more tasks better than the first experiment, and the effect of sex hormones on women's 3D spatial cognition was limited, the sex hormone group significantly increased the activity of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) associated with successful navigation and had a better understanding of the layout of the maze.

MTL activation during successful navigation of the sex hormone group | Why is there such a difference in Resources [1]?

The researchers think it may all start with ancient humans-with the way the brains of men and women evolve.

In the ancient times of hunting and gathering, men were hunters and women were gatherers. Due to the different spatial tasks faced by tracking prey and collecting plants, men and women have developed different adapters of spatial ability due to the division of labor.

When men go out hunting, they need to focus on a longer distance and a more concentrated area in order to find the prey and keep an eye on the target all the time. and according to the relative position of the object and the place to determine their own position, the use of vision and derivation and other ways to return to the cave smoothly.

So men who go out hunting must not be road nerds! Otherwise, you will lose yourself by hunting. | when Flickr women stay at home or go out to collect, they need a wider perspective, always pay attention to all kinds of movements in the cave, maintain awareness of the surrounding environment, or need to recognize and recall the spatial outline of objects when collecting.

When pointing directions, women tend to use more specific markers, while men tend to use more abstract location words, such as "south" and "north". To put it simply, women can find things in the house faster, while men can find a house more quickly.

Men are better at finding objects that are far away, but they often turn a blind eye to what is in front of them. Flickr recognizes that there is a relationship between navigation ability and gender differences, which may also help us to understand the disease from another perspective.

"almost all brain-related diseases are different between men and women, both in terms of the number of people affected and in terms of severity, such as twice as many women as men with Alzheimer's disease." "there may be some sex hormones associated with navigation that affect the incidence of Alzheimer's disease, because disorientation is one of the first symptoms of Alzheimer's disease," Pintzka said. "

He hopes that understanding how men and women use different brain regions to navigate can improve understanding of the disease and help people fight the disease.

(Pxhere) it is said that friends in the north like to talk about east, west, north and south when they give directions, while friends in the south prefer to go around. Have you ever encountered it?

Cover source: Pxiabay

Reference:

[1] C, Carl W. S. Pintzka A, et al. Changes in spatial cognition and brain activity after a single dose of testosterone in healthy women [J]. Behavioural Brain Research, 2016 (Pt B): 78-90.

[2] Adam J. Toth, Mark J. Campbell. Investigating sex differences,cognitive effort,strategy,and performance on a computerised version of the mental rotations test via eye tracking. Scientific Reports, 2019; 9 (1).

[3] Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Men have better sense of direction than women, study suggests: Different approaches to the same navigational tasks underscore sex-linked differences. ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 7 December 2015.

[4] Why do men have better sense of direction than women?.Medicalxpress.December 7, 2015

This article comes from the official Wechat account: take Science Home (ID:steamforkids), author: everything, author: a Xian, revision: Ziv

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