Male Brain Excels in Navigation Study

N E W   Y O R K, March 20 -- Men are generally better than women at finding their way in unfamiliar settings, and use different parts of the brain to do it, a study suggests.

As for why men can’t seem to ask for directions, however, thatwill have to await another study.

The findings add a biological counterpart to prior research thatindicated men and women tend to use different strategies tonavigate.

In the newer experiment, researchers scanned the brains of 12men and 12 women as they tried to escape a three-dimensionalvirtual-reality maze. The volunteers pushed buttons to move theirvirtual selves left, right or ahead.

Results Fit With Previous Studies

In the real world, that might be like trying to find a specificplace in an unfamiliar city, said neurologist Dr. Matthias Riepe ofthe University of Ulm in Germany.

The men got out of the maze in an average of 2 minutes and 22seconds, vs. an average of 3 minutes and 16 seconds for thewomen. That fits with previous studies in animals and people thatsuggest males navigate better in an unfamiliar environment.

The brain scans found that while both sexes used some of thesame parts of the brain for the task, there were also somedifferences. Riepe and colleagues describe the results in the Aprilissue of the journal Nature Neuroscience.

One difference involved the hippocampus, a banana-shapedstructure deep in the brain that is crucial for navigation. Justlast week, other scientists reported that male London taxi driversshow structural changes in the hippocampus, apparently because oftheir professional experience.

People have a hippocampus in each side of the brain. Riepe’sstudy found that both sexes used the right hippocampus innegotiating the maze. But only men used the left hippocampus.Conversely, women used an outer part of the brain called the rightprefrontal cortex, while men in the study didn’t.

That might reflect differences in how men and women handleinformation about the space around them, Riepe and colleagues said.