Men MUCH More Forgetful Than Women. Much, much more.

Men forgetting anniversaries or birth dates is a cliché of cliché's in life as in fiction.  Unlike many givens based on common experience, this tendency is now validated by research out of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.  To put it in simplest terms, whether due to hereditary or enculturation, men are far more forgetful than women.  Much more forgetful.  Much, much more.  All  men.  Across the board.
The perfect gift for
the man in your life.
Before you kill him.
This explains why we men can never find our keys.  It's a wonder that we can find our way home after work.  Yet I can tell you who threw the key block on Cowboy's defensive tackle Jethro Pugh that sprang Packer quarterback Bart Starr for the winning touchdown in the historic 1966 Ice Bowl football game.  Center Kenny Bowman and right guard Jerry Kramer.  Go figure.  Where are my car keys?  Another question.

 What were we talking about?  

 Right.  

 Forgetfulness in men.  Here's the research report:

If your husband is absent-minded, forgets your wedding anniversary or the name of your new neighbor, don't worry. You are not the only one with a forgetful man in the house. Even researchers were surprised by how much men forget.

"It was surprising to see that men forget more than women. This has not been documented before. It was also surprising to see that men are just as forgetful whether they are 30 or 60 years old. The results were unambiguous," says Professor Jostein Holmen, of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, published in BMC Psychology in late 2013.

What did I do one year ago?
Holmen and his co-workers asked nine questions about how well people think they remember as a part of a large longitudinal population health study conducted in mid-Norway called HUNT3.  HUNT3 is one of the largest health studies ever performed, with answers from over 48,000 people as part of the research material.

The participants were asked how often they had problems remembering things, whether they had problems with remembering names and dates, if they could remember what they did one year ago and if they were able to remember details from conversations. Men reported the most problems for eight out of nine questions.

"We speculated about why men report more frequent problems with remembering than women do, but have not been able to find an explanation. This is still an unsolved mystery," says Holmen.

Higher education associated with better memory
Women have the same problems with remembering as men do, but to a lesser extent. Names and dates are also hardest to remember for women.

These problems accelerate with age, but to a much lesser extent than the researchers believed before.

  • Women forget just as much whether they are 30 or 50 years old. 
  • People who are more highly educated forget less than those with less education. 
  • People who suffer from anxiety or depression forget more than other people do. This is true for people of both sexes.

Importance for dementia
Memory problems begin to accelerate overall in the 60-70 year-old group, the researchers found.  Holmen wants to see whether people who self-reported problems with remembering at a younger age are also at a higher risk of developing dementia.

"That was the reason why we included these questions. It is important to emphasize that we still don't know what clinical importance these problems with remembering have. But we might know this in a few years. Problems with remembering at a younger age might not have any importance either. I know this from my own experience, but now I know that I am not alone," Holmen says.

Holmen, by the way, was born in 1947.
*  * * * *  

Story Source:  Jostein Holmen, Ellen Langballe, Kristian Midthjell, Turid Holmen, Arvid Fikseaunet, Ingvild Saltvedt, Kristian Tambs. Gender differences in subjective memory impairment in a general population: the HUNT study, Norway. BMC Psychology, 2013

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lucrezia Borgia, Adulteress, Poisoner, Entrepreneur

Image
W ho was Lucrezia Borgia?  Tradition has it that she may have poisoned her second husband, Giovanni Sforza.  Rumor of the day had it that Lucretia had incestuous relations with both her father, Rodrigo Borgia, later Pope Alexander VI, and her brother, Cesare Borgia.   What is know for certain is that Lucretia was the illegitimate daughter of Rodrigo, then a cardinal of the Catholic Church, and his mistress,  Vannozza dei Cattanei.  It is known that she was married three times, the first being annulled as never being consummated (despite her giving birth a few months after the annulment).  The second marriage ended in the death of her husband, Giovanni, and her third to  Alfonso d'Este, son of the powerful Duke of Ferrera.  This was also to be Alfonso's third marriage, which ended when Lucrezia dies ten days after she gave birth to a stillborn daughter.  She also had affairs (as did her husbands) with several political figures of the day, and even gave birth to the dau
Read more

How the brain listens to literature

Image
Results of the localizer scans: Whole-brain analysis results for the action localizer scan in yellow and for the mentalizing localizer in blue. How do people understand fiction?  What happens in their brains when either reading or listening to a piece of fiction?  And why do some people prefer character based works, and others action adventure?  From this study, it seems there may be a genetic basis for these choices rather than the preference being learned.  It probably explains why some writers prefer creating character based fiction and others action based.  As we're discovering, "we're born this way," to quote Lady Gaga, and free will has little to do with it.   This research shows that some people primarily get involved in the action, visualizing the story line as it progresses as shown by the portions of the right and left hemispheres of the brain as shown above.  For others, the reading or listening experience activates different portions of the r
Read more

For Men, Online Generosity is a Competition

Image
Credit: Raihani et al./Current Biology 2015 In competitive helping donations made to online fundraising pages, males respond competitively to donations made by other males, but only when giving to an attractive female fundraiser. Female donors do not compete in this way. These findings suggest a role for sexual selection in explaining conspicuous generosity. A recent SNfW post, Would You Kill Hitler if You Could? Men Say Yes. Women Say No. Why? , has drawn more than a few comments on Stage32, a social network website for people in the film industry.  Here are just a few of the comments: "Even that title is pigeon-holing people. Some men say Yes, Some women say no... although I read the link and it is wrong on so many levels."  ~ S.B. "The gender stereotyping does a disservice to men and women." ~ K.R. "This article takes an exaggerated, grandiose, hypothetical situation with layers and layers of complexities, and whittles it all down in
Read more

Archaeologists unearth new evidence of Roman, medieval Leicester

Image
Credit: University of Leicester   Archaeologists excavate large areas of medieval and post-medieval pitting in the backyards of properties running along Southgates. Archaeologists from University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS) have unearthed new evidence of Roman and medieval Leicester after recently completing the excavation of two areas at the former Southgates Bus Depot, on the corner of Southgates and Peacock Lane in the centre of Leicester. Archaeologists, led by John Thomas and Mathew Morris of ULAS, have been investigating a series of medieval and post-medieval backyards dating from the 12th century through to the 16th century. These are likely to be associated with densely packed houses and shops which would have once fronted onto the important medieval street of Southgates. Evidence recorded includes stone-lined pits (possibly storage pits or cisterns), rubbish pits, latrines, wells, boundary walls and a possible late 15th or 16th century cellar. Such
Read more

Mood Instability and Your Characters

Image
You're putting together a character who's mood simply bounces all over the place, happy one moment, in a fit of rage the next.  Researchers at King's College London note that this sort of mood instability is part of a number of mental health disorders.  So how do you structure the personality and behavior of a character like this?  Below is the King's College report, along with a brief description from mentalhealth.com, of typical behavior, sometimes in the extreme, of a person who is very emotionally unstable.  This is offered strictly as a guide for crafting character in fiction - and NOT for the amateur diagnosis of the state of someone's mental health.  That is always best left to trained professionals. Another note about emotionally unstable behavior:  as any parent will tell you, this is how adolescents and teen-agers often behave.  It's a normal part of growing up - but it is a matter of degree .  In the extreme, however, this behavior can be diag
Read more