Who remembers best: women or men?

Women and men; two halves of the human organism who come together in love, passion, harmony, complementarity and unending competition. It says a lot about our respective psyches that a book such as Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus became a bestseller. Both sexes love the fact that we are different (vive la différence!) and based on that there is a (mostly) friendly rivalry. Enter to that rivalry a new study which sought to establish who has the better memory: women or men?

We already know that around 75 per cent of older adults report memory related problems. In addition to ageing in general, women report “brain fog” during menopause, but, overall, who has the better memory when it comes to middle age?

To study this, researchers gathered 212 men and women aged 45 to 55. The subjects were given tests to assess episodic memory (autobiographical who, what, when, where, why knowledge that is the collection of past personal experiences that occurred at a particular time and place), executive function (the mental processes that enable you to plan, focus attention, remember instructions and juggle multiple tasks successfully), semantic processing (encoding the meaning of a word and relating it to similar words with similar meaning) and verbal intelligence (the ability to analyse information and solve problems using language-based reasoning).

The results showed … drum roll … that women outperformed age-matched men on all memory measures. This is true even though premenopausal and perimenopausal women outperformed postmenopausal women in many key memory areas.

Looks like one that can be chalked up for women; but, never mind, the men will forget it soon anyway.

Source: Menopause

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