Does Size Matter? The Differences Between Male And Female Brains

It’s a question as old as time: Who is smarter, girls or boys?

AsapSCIENCE has a breakdown of what makes male and female brains different — and they say it’s not much. While it has been asserted that men have bigger brains and are thus smarter, that is only proportional to general body size. And size doesn’t matter: “Sperm whales, elephants and dolphins all have larger brains than humans and while they are smart, their cognitive abilities are less than our own.”

Read: Are Female Doctors Better than Males?

Some of the small variations are that men tend to have more connections within their brain hemispheres while women have more spanning the hemispheres, according to AsapSCIENCE. And even though their IQs are no different, females tend to have better verbal skills compared to male visual-spacial skills. They say that’s pretty much where the differences end and societal factors come into play — like cultural biases against girls, who as young as 6 years believe they are not as smart as boys.

Recent research has shown differences between male and female brains, but not necessarily in a way that’s related to intelligence. One study concluded that men have a harder time multitasking than women do, as evidenced during an experiment by their difficulty in performing two tasks that are controlled by the same brain region, compared to the female subjects’ ease handling those same two tasks.

Multitasking is a favorite topic in the battle of the sexes — another study found that while male surgeons are more likely to listen to music as they operate, women are less distracted by music than men are while trying to concentrate on a task.