The Wireless

Venus and Mars

07:54 am on 4 December 2013

Researchers say men and women's brains are connected in different ways which may explain why the sexes excel at certain tasks, the BBC reports.

A US team at the University of Pennsylvania scanned the brains of nearly 1,000 men, women, boys and girls and found striking differences.

Male brains appeared to be wired front to back, with few connections bridging the two hemispheresIn females, the pathways criss-crossed between left and right.

These differences might explain why men, in general, tend to be better at learning and performing a single task, like cycling or navigating, whereas women are more equipped for multitasking, say the researchers in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

But experts have questioned whether it can be that simple, arguing it is a huge leap to extrapolate from anatomical differences to try to explain behavioural variation between the sexes. Also, brain connections are not set and can change throughout life.