The eyes have it: Men do see things differently to women

The way that the visual centers of men and women’s brains works is different, finds new research published in BioMed Central’s open access journal Biology of Sex Differences. Men have greater sensitivity to fine detail and rapidly moving stimuli, but women are better at discriminating between colors.

  • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    17 days ago

    ok so, here’s my theory. The obvious answer here is that this is obviously “for hunting” or something. But evolution doesn’t really work that way.

    So my take on this is that this is actually an evolutionary adaptation to the different structure of the male body, as well as it’s general abilities, and how they have been used throughout humanity. If men are generally stronger, taller, and faster runners, wouldn’t it make sense that the visual processing would be adapted to be more responsive to these use cases?

    this seems like the only realistic answer to me. Something about men must be different enough, or at the very least, have been used differently enough at some point in time for a long enough period of time, that it has to have been an evolutionary adaptation.

    • Fedizen@lemmy.world
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      17 days ago

      I was thinking it was more to do with dancing, possibly even music. It could even be something really weird.

      Usually the way to identify if its about hunting/war or not is to find the exceptions and links: do hunters that perform really, really well have 3x the visual cortex neurons? Is it a socialization thing where doing certain tasks results in higher brain differentiation?

      There’s a lot of questions

      • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        17 days ago

        hmm, that’s definitely interesting.

        Usually the way to identify if its about hunting/war or not is to find the exceptions and links: do hunters that perform really, really well have 3x the visual cortex neurons? Is it a socialization thing where doing certain tasks results in higher brain differentiation?

        yeah, this is why i think it’s more of a secondary adaptation, as opposed to something directly evolving from the needs of hunting for example. Something like this is generally broad, and generally applied, usually. So i would think the cause would as well.

        One thing that i thought of was a nightwatch position, the heightened visual acuity would be highly valuable in a low visibility environment. So maybe it’s something like co-evolution? Where females developed more accurate color perception, while males developed more accurate movement perception.

        we’re probably thinking too hard about it, and it’s probably just evolution trolling us and giving us the best of both worlds because we are in fact a socialized species. So this could stem from our social aspect, not directly, but the benefit of it in a social aspect is vastly more impactful, leading to more socialization, and further development of this adaptation.

      • Shou@lemmy.world
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        16 days ago

        Women do prefer men who show attention to detail. It’s why men’s attire meant to look good, often contains buckles, buttons and pins that give it a slight touch of detail.

    • flashgnash@lemm.ee
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      16 days ago

      Not sure what your mean by it doesn’t work that way

      If men were predominantly doing the hunting, women would be more likely to choose a more successful hunter (more likely to pass on their genes if they have a better mate)

      Also in general the ones who were better at hunting and their mates would be more likely to survive long enough to have children