Women’s brains are wired differently to men’s, according to new research. 
The study, published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, has found striking differences between the way that men’s and women’s brains are wired to work, the Irish Independent reports.
Many gender theorists deny that there are any innate differences between men and women, claiming that apparent differences are socially constructed.
However, the study, carried out by the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine on almost 1,000 people, found significant hardwired differences between the sexes in terms of their neural connections.
Professor Ragini Verma, a radiology department professor at Perelman who worked on the study, said that the study showed that female brain connections link the left hemisphere, which is associated with logical thinking, with the right, which is linked with intuition.
“Intuition is thinking without thinking. It’s what people call gut feelings. Women tend to be better than men at these kinds of skills which are linked with being good mothers,” Professor Verma said.
Researchers believe the physical differences between the two sexes in the way the brain is hardwired could play an important role in understanding why men are in general better at spatial tasks involving muscle control while women are better at verbal tasks involving memory and intuition.
The study scrutinised the “connectomes” that link different parts of the brain.
A total of 949 individuals (521 females, 428 males) aged between eight and 22) underwent diffusion tension imaging (DTI), a sophisticated water-based imaging technique that can highlight and map out the fiber pathways of the brain.
The study found a greater degree of neural connectivity from front to back within one hemisphere in males, suggesting brains were wired to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action.
Women’s brains meanwhile were wired between left and right hemispheres, indicating they facilitated communication between the analytical and intuition, the study found.
“These maps show us a stark difference – and complementarity – in the architecture of the human brain that helps provide a potential neural basis as to why men excel at certain tasks and women at others,” said Professor Verma.
The study reported that on average men are more likely better at learning and performing a single task, such as navigating.
Women meanwhile were likelier to have a superior memory and social cognition skills – making them better equipped for multi-tasking and creating solutions which could work for a group.
A special brain-scanning technique called diffusion tensor imaging, which can measure the flow of water along a nerve pathway, established the level of connectivity between nearly 100 regions of the brain, creating a neural map of the brain called the “connectome”, Professor Verma said.
“It tells you whether one region of the brain is physically connected to another part of the brain and you can get significant differences between two populations,” Professor Verma said.
Meanwhile, the Catholic bishops of Slovakia have warned that the family in Europe is under threat from “gender ideology”.
In a pastoral letter for Advent, they said that, while the family couldn’t be entirely destroyed, those who were promoting a “culture of death” were atacking the family in Europe.
And they pointed out those who promoted such an ideology misused the term “gender equality”.
They wrote: “When somebody encounters this term for the first time, he or she may think it favours equal rights and equal dignity attributed to all men and women.
“However, these groups intend something totally different when using the term ‘gender equality’.
“They attempt to convince us that no-one naturally exists as man or woman, ie they want to deprive man of his identity as man, woman of her identity as woman and the family of its identity as family, so that man may no more feel as man, woman as woman and so that marriage shall no longer be an exclusive communion between man and woman.”
