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Where Men See White, Women See Ecru Neuroscientists prove what we always suspected: the two sexes see the world differently
By Libby Copeland SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE If you’ve ever found yourself at a paint store with a member of the opposite sex trying to decide between, say, “laguna blue” and “blue macaw,” chances are you’ve disagreed over which hue is lighter or looks more turquoise.
Women’s Brains Age Faster than Men’s, Thanks to Stress Facial Features of Men and Women Got More Similar? Take comfort in the fact that the real blame lies with physiology: Nero-scientists have discovered that women are better at distinguishing among subtle distinctions in colour, while men appear more sensitive to objects moving across their field of vision.
Scientists have long maintained that the sexes see colours differently. But much of the evidence has been indirect, such as the linguistic research showing that women possess a larger vocabulary than men for describing colours. Experimental evidence for the vision thing has been rare.
That’s why Israel Abramov, a psychologist and behavioural neuroscientist at CUNY’s Brooklyn College, gave a group of men and women a battery of visual tests. Abramov has spent 50 years studying human vision–how our eyes and brain translate light into a representation of the world. He’s curious about the neural mechanisms that determine how we perceive colours.
In one study, Abramov and his research team showed subjects light and dark bars of different widths and degrees of contrast flickering on a computer screen. The effect was akin to how we might view a car moving in the distance. Men were better than women at seeing the bars, and their advantage increased as the bars became narrower and less distinct.
But when the researchers tested colour vision in one of two ways–by projecting colours onto frosted glass or beaming them into their subjects’ eyes– women proved slightly better at discriminating among subtle gradations in the middle of the colour spectrum, where yellow and green reside. They detected tiny differences between yellows that looked the same to men. The researchers also found that men require a slightly longer wavelength to see the same hue as women; an object that women experience as orange will look slightly more yellowish to men, while green will look more blue-green to men. This last part doesn’t confer an advantage on either sex, but it does demonstrate, Abramov says, that “the nervous system that deals with colour cannot be wired in the exact same way in males as in females.” He believes the answer lies in testosterone and other androgens. Evidence from animal studies suggests that male sex hormones can alter development in the visual cortex.
While Abramov has an explanation for how the sexes see differently, he’s less certain about why. One possibility–which he cautions is highly speculative–is that it’s an evolutionary adaptation that benefited hunter-gatherer societies: Males needed to see distant, moving objects, like bison, while females had to be better judges of colour when scouring for edible plants.
Someday, further studies could reveal whether these traits could have implications for how men and women perform in fields such as the arts or athletics. At the very least, Abramov says, women probably have an edge nabbing the ripest banana on the shelf"
Also explains why untrained female's don't see the offside ball, clearly moving too fast for the visual cortex :-)
Stayed over at the Holiday Inn at Bexleyheath (Black Prince) on Friday night and the Walsall FC players Team bus turned up to stay overnight in preparation for their match at Charlton. Really great bunch of lads, very friendly lot. Watched some of the Brighton game with them. They think they have a decent shout at the playoffs. When I mentioned I was a Town fan strangely all they wanted to talk about was Norwich and the sacking of Alex Neil...... well there's footballers for you.
Listened to it recently and loved it. Played it in the local Pub and I was immediately offered alternative "gay music" to put on. Whatever happened to the name Gaye..... For those who don't know Clifford T Ward he was a musical genius of an equal to Paul McCartney , decided not to become famous, decided not to tour, wrote for others sadly died of MS in 2001. Great song by a genius..
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