Brain Facts:
Male-Female Differences

Brain Shrinkage Male/Female

For unknown reasons, male brains undergo more changes with aging than women’s. Indeed, in a brain-imaging study of 330 healthy people ages sixty-five to ninety-five. Dr. Edward Coffey, chairman of the psychiatry department at the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit, found that men’s brains shrink faster with age than women’s brains. One possible reason: Estrogen may protect women’s brains. Dr. Coffey also said that doesn’t mean men show increased cognitive decline, because brain shrinkage does not necessarily mean significantly lower intellectual functioning.

Female Brain
—Extreme

The most extreme “female” brain excels at empathy and understanding others’ thoughts and feelings. Those with this pattern shine at callings like teaching and counseling; as psychotherapists, they are wonderfully empathic and attuned to the inner world of their client. But those with the ultrafemale pattern have grave difficulties with systematizing, be it applying directions to that fork in the road up ahead or studying theoretical physics. They are in “systemblind.”

Male Brain
—Extreme

The extreme male brain has no clue when it comes to mindsight; its circuitry for empathy remains stunted. But that deficiency comes paired with intellectual strength, like the mind boggling laser-focused abilities of savants who can solve complex math problems at rates matched only by computer. Although mindblind, such hypermale brains can be gifted when it comes to understanding systems, such as the stock market, software, and quantum physics.