in brief: women predisposed to multitasking, finds study

Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have compared hundreds of people’s brains, arriving at the conclusion that the female brain is predisposed to be better at multitasking than the male brain.

In contrast, men’s brains have been found to be much better at concentrating on single complex tasks.

After scanning the brains of 949 men and women, using MRI imaging, the scientists then proceeded to map the connections between different parts of the brain.

The study, which is the biggest investigation of its kind to date, has found that women have far better connections between the left and right sides of their brains, while men have bursts of intense activity within individual parts of their brains.

This means that men are generally better at activities that require them to quickly perceive information and use it to immediately carry out a task, for example, learning to swim.

On the other hand, women are much better at making connections in different parts of their brains, causing them to be more able in tasks like remembering faces and names of people they meet.

Dr Ragini Verma, who carried out the study, said that it has been known for a while that abilities can differ greatly by gender, but that the study has showed that these differences are “hard wired” into our brains.

The findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The report says ‘the results showed fundamental sex differences in the architecture of the human brain’.