It's all in your head. A new study of the human brain, conducted at the University of Ulm in Germany and published in the April issue of Nature Neuroscience, suggests that males who get lost have an easier time finding their way out of unfamiliar territory than females. But we can't just jump on the bandwagon. The males escaped the maze in an average of 2 minutes and 22 seconds, nearly a minute faster than the average of 3 minutes and 16 seconds for the females. As much as some fellows might like to think otherwise, the study's results don't mean that men are any sharper than women.
Females just seem to use their noodles differently in relating to their surroundings.
Only the men used the left hippocampus. And the women used the right prefrontal cortex, an outer part of the brain, while the men didn't. Researchers said the results raised the possibility that men and women use different cognitive strategies to solve spatial navigation problems. The men's activity in the hippocampus might reflect the geometric approach, whereas the cortex activity in the women could be a display of keeping landmarks in mind. But no one really knows.