Whether an individual finds the route to a specific destination sooner or later depends on several factors, including their gender. Science has shown that the popular belief that men are better than women when it comes to orientation is not entirely far-fetched. Or that, at least, they do it faster. Specifically, the neurologist Matthias Riepe, from the University of Ulm (Germany), scanned the brains of a dozen men and a dozen women while looking for a location in an unfamiliar space. And he observed that while they took an average of 2 minutes and 22 seconds, it took them 3 minutes and 16 seconds to find the same path.
The main difference, according to Riepe, lay in the areas of the brain that each group had used. Men used the right and left hippocampus , while in women only the right hippocampus was activated. In addition, the women turned on neurons in the prefrontal cortex, which were not activated in the male brain . The authors attribute it to the fact that women look at the milestones and marks of the path to orient themselves, while men focus on the geometry of the space they have traveled . For the same reason, they add, women tend to remember better the location of objects within a room or where they have left the keys.
