Tom Purcell: Men and women, a biological no-brainer

Get this: Men’s and women’s brains are different.

Using a powerful, first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence model, Stanford Medicine was able to determine with a 90% success rate whether an MRI scan of human brain activity was coming from a male brain or a female brain.

“The findings, the investigators suggest, help to resolve a longstanding controversy about whether reliable sex differences exist in the human brain,” Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News reports.

Controversy?

I grew up an only boy with five sisters. My father and I figured out more than half a century ago that men and women have innately different brains.

However, before about 20 years ago, according to Stanford Medicine Magazine, the neuroscience community thought the difference in male and female brains was due to cultural influences.

You know, the old argu­ment that boys like toy trucks because toy trucks are pushed on them as children and little girls like dolls because dolls are pushed on them.

But in the early 2000s, those claims were disabused by a variety of studies, according to Psychology Today, that, put simply, showed the circuitry in male and female brains is wired differently and these innate differences result in different behavior.

It’s not to say a male brain is better than a female brain, or vice versa.

But Stanford Medicine Magazine says women generally have greater reading and writing abilities than men.

They’re also better at retrieving information from their long-term memory — especially everything we’ve done wrong since the moment we met them.

A 2014 University of Pennsylvania study found females routinely use both sides of their brains in a highly coordinated manner, whereas men often use only one.

Women would be shocked if they knew how many things we use only half a brain to do.

For example, one study found the male brain doesn’t pick up as many sensory cues as a woman’s.

When a man walks into his home, for example, he isn’t likely to notice dust — which, I’m told, consists of fine, dry particles that settle on furniture.

That’s one reason men do one-third as much housework as women, according to Fast Company — and also why, according to the great humorist P.J. O’Rourke, we clean our place about once every girlfriend.

The male brain also has superior visual-spatial awareness. We’re better at navigation, creating and using tools or understanding abstract concepts, such as geometry.

Our noggins are wired for larger spaces, such as the garage, the backyard, the golf course or, some ancient time ago, hunting woolly mammoths.

Sure, some men are neat freaks and homebodies and some women are sloppy and couldn’t care less about the inside of their homes.

But on average, where biology is concerned, it’s clear male and female brains are different.

For instance, notes Stanford Medicine, women are more prone to suffering depression, while men are twice as likely to have issues with drugs and alcohol and 10 times more likely to suffer dyslexia.

Personally, I think a man is at his best when he finds a lifelong companion whose female brain is strong in multiple ways in which his is weak.

Surely we can all agree we don’t need an MRI to know that men and women have different ways of thinking.

To borrow from legendary humorist Dave Barry, we all know which parent is more likely to drive off from the supermarket with the baby still in the baby seat he had set on the roof of the car.