differences between men & women

The differences between men and women are many & varied. Its amazing really that we manage to meet at all and somehow have relationships? Of course the differences are what brings the initial interest and fascination with each other. At the end it is also what drives us crazy about the other! Yin & yang!

In fact I have been researching the biological differences in our brains for a number of years since reading a book called ‘Brain Sex’ The real difference between men and women by Anne Moir, Ph.D. and David Jessel. A sample from this book:

“The differences are apparent in the very first hours after birth. It has been shown that girl babies are much more interested than boys in people and faces; the boys seem just as happy with an object dangled in front of them. Girls say their first words and learn to speak in short sentences earlier than boys and are generally more fluent in their pre-school years. They read earlier, too, and do better in coping with the building blocks of language like grammar, punctuation and spelling. Boys outnumber girls 4:1 in remedial reading classes. Later, women find it easier to master foreign languages, and are more proficient in their own, with better command of grammar and spelling. They are also more fluent: stuttering and other speech defects occur almost exclusively among boys.

Girls and women hear better than men. When the sexes are compared, women show a greater sensitivity to sound. The dripping tap will get the woman out of bed before the man has even woken up. Six times as many girls as boys can sing in tune. They are also more adept in noticing small changes in volume, which goes some way to explaining womens’ superior sensitivity to that “tone of voice” which their male partners are so often accused of adopting. Men and women even see some things differently. Women see better in the dark. They are more sensitive to the red end of the spectrum, seeing more red hues there than men, and have a better visual memory. Men see better than women in bright light. Intriguing results also show that men tend to be literally blinkered; they see in a narrow field – mild tunnel vision – with greater concentration on depth. They have a better sense of perspective than women. Women, however, quite literally take in the bigger picture. They have wider peripheral vision, because they have more of the receptor rods and cones in the retina, at the back of the eyeball, to receive a wider arc of visual input.

The differences extend to the other senses. Women react faster, and more acutely, to pain, although their overall resistance to long-term discomfort is greater than men’s. In a sample of young adults, females showed “overwhelmingly” greater sensitivity to pressure on the skin on every part of the body. In childhood and maturity, women have a tactile sensitivity so superior to men’s that in some tests there is no overlap between the scores of the two sexes; in these, the least sensitive woman is more sensitive than the most sensitive man.”

Referring to the Scientific American article ‘Sex Differences in the Brain’ by Doreen Kimura “The area in the brain that regulates female and male reproductive behavior is the hypothalamus. This tiny structure at the base of the brain connects to the pituitary, the master endocrine gland. It has been shown that a region of the hypothalamus is visibly larger in male rats than in females and that this size difference is under hormonal control. Scientists have also found parallel sex differences in a clump of nerve cells in the human brain–parts of the interstitial nucleus of the anterior hypothalamus–that is larger in men than in women. Even sexual orientation and gender identity have been related to anatomical variation in the hypothalamus. Other researchers, Jiang-Ning Zhou of the Netherlands Institute of Brain Research and his colleagues there and at Free University in Amsterdam, observed another part of the hypothalamus to be smaller in male-to-female transsexuals than in a male control group. These findings are consistent with suggestions that sexual orientation and gender identity have a significant biological component.”

Here’s a funny look at some of those differences from an Irishman. The Irish have a keen sense of humor which is fostered at a grass roots level from a young age! One of the things that I really miss about Ireland.

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