The brain, like every other part of the body, is molded partly by sex hormones, which affect its functioning throughout life. These hormones are at least in part responsible for the differing ways in which I and women remember things.
If a man describes the way to somewhere, the chances are that he provides a verbal route map: road numbers, distances, junctions, left and right turns. A woman, however, is more likely to use landmarks: right at the green gate, carry on to the thatched cottage, left at the little wood…
This difference reflects a general tendency for women to pay attention to, and therefore remember, specific features – a ‘ what?’ rather than a ‘ where?’ approach. In contrast, men are more aware of the lie of the land – a ‘ where?’ rather than a ‘ what?’ approach. These two ways of mapping the world occur because visual information is processed via two different pathways in the brain. There is some evidence that the’ where?’ pathway, which distinguishes distance and position, is stronger in the right hemisphere, while the ‘ what?’ pathway is stronger in the left and travels into the region of the brain where long-term. Memories are stored. This allows new information to be compared with existing knowledge and recognized. The product of both pathways is brought together in the front of the brain and allows us to be conscious, simultaneously, both of where and what something is. Every normal brain uses both pathways to arrive at a full picture of the world, but the amount of information fed in from each hemisphere differs according to which side of the brain is most actively engaged. The left hemisphere specializes in processing detailed information, while the right hemisphere takes in the whole picture. Brain studies suggest that when men learn and recall things, they tend to use the right hemisphere more, which gives a slight advantage in spatial memory. Women rely more on the left hemisphere pathway, which may account for why they are, on average, better than men at recalling details. For example, studies show women to be faster than men at identifying small changes in tests like ‘spot the difference’ and faster and more accurate than men at recognizing plants.
One theory is that these gender-based abilities may have evolved because early men needed good orientation skills in order to hunt over large areas. In contrast, women were responsible for foraging, which required close attention to detail to select the right plant. A similar evolutionary pressure perhaps resulted in women being better than men at recalling faces. The face recognition area of the rain is situated along the left hemisphere pathway, and it is possible that the female emphasis on left-brained recollection helped women to develop important social skills in early tribal existence.
The hormone factor
These subtle gender differences in the brain are partly the result of hormone action. Before birth, the periodic doses of testosterone that help to form male characteristics briefly inhibit growth in the left brain hemisphere. As a result, boys tend to have increased activity in the right hemisphere.
While testosterone inhibits left hemisphere processing, the female hormone estrogen boosts it. In the middle of the menstrual cycle, when estrogen levels are high, a woman may have a more distinct advantage over a man in detailed memory tasks. Sex hormones also affect general memory. Pregnant women sometimes become startlingly absent-minded owing to the huge fluctuations in their hormone levels, and memory problems are also associated with the drop in estrogen levels during menopause. However, the memory differences between the sexes are tiny compared to the differences between individuals. A good memory depends far more on how we train our memory than on gender. What we remember is what we pay attention to – so to develop memory skills, we should observe both the’ where’ of things and the ‘ what.’
