Why do men have better sense of direction than women?

"But when women got a drop of testosterone under their tongue, several of them were able to orient themselves better in the four cardinal directions.

"Men's sense of direction was more effective. They quite simply got to their destination faster," says Carl Pintzka, a medical doctor and PhD candidate at NTNU's Department of Neuroscience.

The directional sense findings are part of his doctoral thesis on how the brain functions differently in men and women."

The lines show how men and women navigated a route. The blue lines are the women's routes, and the red lines are the men's. The lines show that the men arrived faster and solved more tasks. Credit: NTNU