Recent Studies Raise the Possibility That Male Brains Are Wired for Focus, Female Brains for Multitasking

Boys and girls brains start to differentiate in adolescence.

"Broadly speaking, women in their 20s had more connections between the two brain hemispheres while men of the same age had more connective fibers within each hemisphere. "Women are mostly better connected left-to-right and right-to-left across the two brain hemispheres," Dr. Verma said. "Men are better connected within each hemisphere and from back-to-front."

"That suggests women might be better wired for multitasking and analytical thought, which require coordination of activity in both hemispheres. Men, in turn, may be better wired for more-focused tasks that require attention to one thing a time. But the researchers cautioned such conclusions are speculative."

Differences in How Men and Women Think Are Hard-Wired
Recent Studies Raise the Possibility That Male Brains Are Wired for Focus, Female Brains for Multitasking
Robert Lee Hotz
Wall Street Journal
Dec. 9, 2013

So many things come down to connections—especially the ones in your brain.br/>
Women and men display distinctive differences in how nerve fibers connect various regions of their brains, according to a half-dozen recent studies that highlight gender variation in the brain's wiring diagram. There are trillions of these critical connections, and they are shaped by the interplay of heredity, experience and biochemistry.br/>
No one knows how gender variations in brain wiring might translate into thought and behavior—whether they might influence the way men and women generally perceive reality, process information, form judgments and behave socially—but they are sparking controversy.br/>
"It certainly is incendiary," said Paul Thompson, a professor of neurology and director of the University of Southern California's Imaging Genetics Center. He is directing an effort to assemble a database of 26,000 brain scans from 20 countries to cross-check neuroimaging findings. "People who look at findings about sex differences are excited or enraged," he said. br/>
Combined brain scans of 949 subjects, ages 8 to 22, show how neural connections differ by gender. Male brains, top, have more connections within hemispheres (blue lines). Female brains, bottom, have more between hemispheres (orange lines). Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences/University of Pennsylvaniabr/>
Researchers are looking at the variations to explain the different ways men and women respond to health issues ranging from autism, which is more common among men, and multiple sclerosis, which is more common among women, to strokes, aging and depression. "We have to find the differences first before we can try to understand them," said Neda Jahanshad, a neurologist at USC who led the research while at the University of California, Los Angeles. br/>
Dr. Jahanshad and her UCLA collaborators conducted a 2011 brain-imaging study of healthy twins, including 147 women and 87 men, to trace connections in the brain. She discovered "significant" sex differences in areas of the brain's frontal lobe, which is associated with self-control, speech and decision-making. br/>
In the most comprehensive study so far, scientists led by biomedical analyst Ragini Verma at the University of Pennsylvania found the myriad connections between important parts of the brain developed differently in girls and boys as they grow, resulting in different patterns of brain connections among young women and young men. br/>
The team imaged the brains of 949 healthy young people, 521 females and 428 males, ranging in age from 8 to 22. Like Dr. Jahanshad's team, Dr. Verma employed a technique called Diffusion Tensor Imaging to trace how water molecules align along the brain's white-matter nerve fibers, which form the physical scaffolding of thought. The study was reported earlier this month in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. br/>
Pairs of scan images show gender differences in brain wiring in childhood (1), adolescence (2) and young adulthood (3). Male brains are on left, female on right. University of Pennsylvania, Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences.br/>
The neural patterns emerged only when combining results from hundreds of people, experts said. In any one person, gender patterns may be subsumed by the individual variations in brain shape and structure that help make every person unique.br/>
Dr. Verma's maps of neural circuitry document the brain at moments when it is in a fury of creation. Starting in infancy, the brain normally produces neurons at a rate of half a million a minute, and reaches out to make connections two million times a second. By age 5, brain size on average has grown to about 90% of adult size. By age 20, the average brain is packed with about 109,000 miles of white matter tissue fibers, according to a 2003 Danish study reported in the Journal of Comparative Neurology.br/>
Spurred by the effects of diet, experience and biochemistry, neurons and synapses are ruthlessly pruned, starting in childhood. The winnowing continues in fits and starts throughout adolescence, then picks up again in middle age. "In childhood, we did not see much difference" between male and female, Dr. Verma said. "Most of the changes we see start happening in adolescence. That is when most of the male-female differences come about."br/>
Broadly speaking, women in their 20s had more connections between the two brain hemispheres while men of the same age had more connective fibers within each hemisphere. "Women are mostly better connected left-to-right and right-to-left across the two brain hemispheres," Dr. Verma said. "Men are better connected within each hemisphere and from back-to-front."br/>
That suggests women might be better wired for multitasking and analytical thought, which require coordination of activity in both hemispheres. Men, in turn, may be better wired for more-focused tasks that require attention to one thing a time. But the researchers cautioned such conclusions are speculative.br/>
Experts also cautioned that subtle gender differences in connections can be thrown off by normal disparities in brain size between men and women and in the density of brain tissue. Other factors, such as whether one is left- or right-handed, also affect brain structure. br/>
Also affecting results are differences in how computer calculations are carried out from one lab to the next. "With neuroimaging, there are so many ways to process the data that when you do process things differently and get the same result, it is fantastic," Dr. Jahanshad said.

Parents need to teach estimation--and it can be part of Halloween fun. (Teachers are too busy teaching computation.)

Here's a great way to lower math anxiety, and give your child a big boost in understanding math concepts.

Estimating with Halloween Goodies
Inner Child Learning
October 14, 2013
by Leann

Halloween can be a fun time of year, filled with pretend play, decorating, and an over-abundance of candy. Why not put the candy to use, with a little learning exploration? Here’s a fun estimation activity that you do can do with just a bag (or two) of Halloween candy and a few glass jars.


Materials needed:

different types of candies or other related goodies
4 glass Mason jars
4 small jars or containers

The set up:

Start by putting different candies or goodies into each jar. I choose chocolate eyes and pumpkin candies, Halloween sweet tarts, and a bag of spider rings from the dollar store.

Count out a designated amount of items and place them into the small containers. I would recommend starting with containers that have the same width as the bottom of the Mason jars, so the kids can easily estimate using the height of the container (or height of the items).

How to teach estimating:

To begin, state how many items are in the small container. Try to keep it simple, by starting with simple multiples that they can count by. (We started with groups of 10 items.) Point out the height of the items in the small container. Then speculate “how high” the large jar is in comparison to the height you measured in the small container.

When we did this activity, I actually measured the height of the small container using my fingers. Mimicking me, my son did the same. He then easily count the height of the mason jar, and then count by 10′s to get to the approximate answer.

For example, I started by telling my son that there were 10 pumpkins in the small container. I pointed out how tall the container was with 10 pumpkins, and then showed him that I could estimate that 3 and a half more containers stacked up would equal the height of the large Mason jar. So, that would mean 10+10+10+5=35 would be how many were in the Mason jar.

After we made our predictions on the numbers in the jar, we then poured them out and counted them together. Amazingly, our predictions were almost exactly the number in the jar!

If this seems to be a little easy, then try a different approach — use 25 items rather than 10 in the small container. Or change up your containers so that they have a different width compared to the Mason jars. We also tried this, and it was equally as fun to try to guess the number, by trying to estimate how many might be inside. Another idea, which also builds “number sense,” is to make the questions multiple choice…. “Here’s 10 items. Do you think there are 50, 100, or 500 inside the jar?”

Female teachers may pass on math anxiety to girls, study finds

This story strikes me as true. As an elementary teacher I heard women teachers at several schools actually brag about how they couldn't do math. I didn't quite understand why this was a favorite bonding topic, and teachers who were good at math would hang their heads in shame. I remember one female teacher saying, "None of us teachers could do these (4th grade test) problems." This comment obviously included men. Being bad at math seems to be an membership requirement to be accepted into elementary teacher cliques.

Female teachers may pass on math anxiety to girls, study finds
By Karen Kaplan
LA Times
January 26, 2010

After a year in the classroom with female teachers who say they are anxious about math, girls are more likely to share that attitude -- and score lower on tests, researchers say.

Girls have long embraced the stereotype that they're not supposed to be good at math. It seems they may be getting the idea from a surprising source -- their female elementary school teachers.

First- and second-graders whose teachers were anxious about mathematics were more likely to believe that boys are hard-wired for math and that girls are better at reading, a new study has found. What's more, the girls who bought into that notion scored significantly lower on math tests than their peers who didn't.

The gap in test scores was not apparent in the fall when the kids were first tested, but emerged after spending a school year in the classrooms of teachers with math anxiety. That detail convinced researchers that the teachers -- all of them women -- were the culprits.

"Teachers who are anxious about their own math abilities are translating some of that to their kids," said University of Chicago psychologist Sian Beilock, who led the study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences...