Beyond the media hype …

… Getting in a Tangle Over Men's and Women's Brain Wiring - Wired Science.

The way Verma and her colleagues have arrived at the idea that their results support gender stereotypes about map reading, and so on, is via a logical mistake known as “reverse inference”. They looked at where in the brain they found wiring differences and then they’ve made assumptions about the functional meaning of those differences based on what other studies have suggested those brain regions are for. Unfortunately, Verma and co did this in an unsophisticated way. They dredged up old ideas about the left brain hemisphere being for analytical thought and the right hemisphere being intuitive. And the one brain region where men supposedly had more cross-hemisphere interconnectivity than women – the cerebellum – the researchers linked purely with motor function, which they said supports the idea that men are wired for action. Maybe they don’t realise, but modern research has shown that the cerebellum is involved in lots of other functions too. Writing an authoritative review in 2009, Peter Strick and his colleagues explained: “The range of tasks associated with cerebellar activation is remarkable and includes tasks designed to assess attention, executive control, language, working memory, learning, pain, emotion, and addiction.”

Of course, it would be nice if reporters would do some homework before they go running with stuff like this.