barryg@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Lee Gold) (09/28/85)
According to Science (I think it was Science 85 but it may have been 84), men tend to have more specialized left brain-right brain function than women. This is one reason women seem to recover more easily from strokes: more functions are duplicated in both lobes so that if a stroke knocks out an area of the brain, a back up area in the other lobe may take over. The article also mentioned that Japanese tend to have less specialized lobal division than Americans. My own hypothesis is that it's related to time spent in puberty, since women tend to top out faster than men, Japanese faster than Americans. (So the taller you are, the more lobally specialized you are.) A Scientific American article of the late 50s reported that a study done on a number of boys showed a strong correllation between the independence they were allowed by their parents and their creativity, ability to recognize embedded figures, and willingness to differ from perceived group opinion. My own guess is that parents allow girls far less independence than boys on the average, so all these factors would show up later as apparently innate male-female differences. Somehow I don't expect they'd affect physiological factors like lobal specialization, but I'm willing to defer to expert opinion.