Âé¶¹´«Ã½

Humans

You're holding the map upside-down…

By Alison Motluk

24 August 2002

AS ANYONE who has travelled with someone of the opposite sex knows, probably to their cost, men and women navigate in different ways. But an attempt to uncover the reason behind this has thrown up a strange result.

It’s known that women tend to use landmarks and relative directions such as “left” and “right”, while men tend to think more in distances and “east” and “west”. Brain imaging has even shown that the two sexes use different parts of their brains when navigating (Âé¶¹´«Ã½, 25 March 2000, p 13).

The sexes also fare differently on pencil and paper…

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