All the problems in the world

Why can't women read maps?

Lucy Campbell

While Ellen MacArthur will have something to say about that - the yachtswoman has shown herself to be a pretty useful navigator - to the delight of chauvinists up and down the country, there is a growing weight of scientific evidence confirming that the average female finds tasks like setting the video timer, parallel parking and map reading harder then men.

Simon Baron-Cohen, a professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge (and Borat's cousin) has identified distinct characteristics in the average male and female brains. Women, he says, have an extraordinary ability to empathise but an impaired ability to systematise, which is something men excel at. In one of Baron-Cohen's experiments, female babies looked longer at a human face, while boys were preoccupied with a mechanical mobile, suggesting our brains are wired differently from birth.

German scientists from the University of Giessen reckon spatial awareness is linked to antenatal testosterone levels. The longer your wedding finger, the handier you are likely to be with a map (since testosterone also affects digit growth).

If the human brain was a computer, how much data would it store?

Eason Davis

Professor Alan Dix, computer scientist at Lancaster University, is no stranger to comparing brains to machines, having written a paper on the subject. He explains, "Humans store data differently to computers - instead of using '0's and '1's, it's done chemically, via neurones. But even so, it's possible to reach a rough figure.

"The average brain has about 10bn neurones, with each one having connections with between 1,000 and 10,000 others. Each neurone represents about five bytes worth of data. Multiply five bytes by the 10,000 links, and then multiply that answer by 10bn, and you get your result: 500,000 gigabytes to store all our memories, thoughts and feelings". Put another way, the old grey matter has the capacity to store the contents of the entire World Wide Web - over 14bn pages of text, pictures and film clips.

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