Study Shows Women’s Brains Are Smaller Than Mens… But Does Size Matter?

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Well, here’s another one that’s sure to be used for fodder in the ongoing battle of the sexes. As it turns out, a woman’s brain is actually about 8 percent smaller than a man’s. But before you go getting all smug and shit, you should know that just because yours is bigger doesn’t mean you’re any better at using it.

This article’s going to be full of cheap little jokes like that, by the way. I’m gonna go ahead and apologize in advance.

The University of California and some of their friends in Madrid have conducted a study to find out why a woman’s teensy-tiny little brain works just as well as the great big throbbing organs men carry around in their skulls. The study focused on the hippocampus, which is this seahorse-looking part of the brain with responsibilities that include spatial reasoning and…um…wait, don’t tell me…oh yeah, memory.

Basically, what they found out is that men have more neurons in their hippocampi, but women have more connections between the ones in theirs. If you’re a man, the bigger your hippocampus is, the better because…okay, look, I’m going to have resist some of these jokes or we’re never going to get through this. You can go ahead and finish that one yourselves.

In all seriousness, though, it is nice for a guy to pack a big fatty in his head because it suggests higher intelligence. Something else for us to measure, I suppose. But a woman’s brain actually works better with a smaller, more compact hippocampus. She also works better with a small, compact back-end in my book, but that’s just one man’s opinion.

What this translates to in the real world is that men and women are smarter at different things. Men, for example, prove to be better at spatial reasoning, which means we know exactly how to put what where. I’ll opt to forgo the obvious sexual joke here and instead refer to how terrible women are at packing suitcases. What do they do exactly? Just open a drawer and dump it all in there? I mean, Jesus.

So, maybe they’re not great packers, but they are much better at inductive reasoning and tracking a changing situation than men are. This should come as no surprise at all to any man who has ever been in a relationship with a woman, because inductive reasoning means relying on information that could be true, but doesn’t have to be true. See, men are hindered by the need to rely on actual facts to get them from point A to point B. Women can just use their imaginations. They don’t need hard evidence; all they need is the idea of evidence. So as you can see, it’s actually scientifically impossible to win an argument against a woman. But at least we can beat them in Tetris.

And that’s pretty much it. Honestly, I don’t know why this subject needed looking into, and nothing I’ve seen or read about this study suggests that it carries any significant academic weight with it. It was only conducted on a 104 people—59 women and 45 men between the ages of 18 and 27, which doesn’t sound super-comprehensive, if you asked me. And some dude at Cambridge seemed to respectfully dismiss the results, saying they should be looked into a little more. But whatever, it’s the scientific study of the week, I guess, so lets give it its due.

All it really confirmed is that a woman’s brain works differently than a man’s. File that one under “No Shit.”