As Super Bowl mania descended upon America at the end of last month, sports fanatics everywhere geared up to watch and experience the game with an exceptional ferocity.
Sports have the unique ability to band together zealous fans across social, religious, and age differences because they run deeper than brackets, into that primal place where man’s psychology is hidden. In fact, man’s love affair with sports was first recorded some 2,000 years ago when ancient Rome’s gladiatorial arena drew tens of thousands of viewers to watch animals fight to their deaths.
Though today we are removed from the brutality of gladiators, conquerors, knights, and pirates, and more civilized than Neanderthal man hunting for his own survival, our commitment to sports as vested observers may find explanation on a chemical level, and may even explain some differences between how men and women think.
While there are always exceptions to gender stereotypes, men, more so than women, are drawn to the salaciousness of battle. Some scientists posit that since man has always needed to fight for his own life, modern day sports have precipitated to fill that need in a civilized world.
In fact, neuroscientists study this relationship and the male brain in general to elucidate these trends and explain why men are more likely to act as the male stereotype and why women as the female stereotype.
In the journal Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, men, on average, were found to have larger total brain volumes than women by about 8-13%. Further, these differences were accounted for in several regions, particularly in the limbic system and language system.
In a recent study conducted on how men and women process language, men only used the left hemisphere of their brains while female subjects showed activity in both the left and right hemispheres. As a result, girls outperform boys in the use of language, but boys rank higher in their use of fine motor skills, explaining why boys are so likely to engage in sports from an early age and excel at it.
Further, the greater size of male brains, comprising more grey matter, which is often called the “thinking matter,” is where logical processes and strategic reasoning reside. Women, on the other hand, have nine times more white matter and high levels of organization in the frontal and temporal areas of the cortex. This difference results in greater language skills and more social, communicative relationships with others.
In addition, males and females have evolved to use their respective skills to their advantages, especially in competition. One neurobiologist says that “females use language more when they compete,” manipulating information or even gossiping as a way of aggression. However, women also use language to build relationships, which perhaps results from an evolutionary adaptation as well, since organizing relationships by exaggerating language in pre-modern times could have strengthened bonds and communities.
These respective strengths are also telling of the way male and female brains identify and control emotions. Women are “faster and more accurate at identifying emotions,” says Ruben Gur of the University of Pennsylvania. Studies have been conducted to show that women are better at decoding facial differences and vocal intonations than men are. Thus, brain variation between males and females is a reality, and is probably for the best.
Most scientists agree that our differences are complementary. As Gur concludes, these differences “increase the chances of males and females joining together,” benefitting the entire human species and propagating some comic relief in the hackneyed stereotypes which, though often exaggerated, hold truth in the way of evolution from our Neanderthal days.