Basic HTML Version
It is often claimed that men are better than women at
reading maps. Scientists from the University of
California led by Dr. Francisco Ayala believe the
reason for this stems from their different roles in
evolution. Spatial awareness is governed by a part of
the brain called the parietal lobe: the left side, more
active in women, deals with closer range objects
which is ideal for foraging for food while the more
active side in men, the right, is responsible for
co-ordinates, the building blocks of navigation,
which enabled men to hunt. Dr. Ayala said:
"Women tend to be more aware than men of objects
around them, including those that seem irrelevant to
the current task, whereas men out-perform women in
navigation tasks."
Another study however, this time at the University of
Mexico, found that women are better navigators
because they remember landmarks and routes better
precisely because of their evolutionary role in food
gathering, This accounts for why women are much
better at supermarket shopping and it also explains that
rotten supermarket habit of changing the location of
key products to make us search about more and
hopefully buy additional items along the way.
So far there doesn’t seem to have been any academic
research into that
“did you get that”
phenomenon
whereby two people stopping to ask for directions will
always assume that the other person was listening and
remembering. Nor can I find any explanation as to why
women, when using a map, will tend to rotate it to
orientate it to the landscape they are looking at. And
what all these academic studies seem to ignore when
they focus solely on evolutionary reasons for skill
differences between the genders is that maps haven’t
The Signs of the Times