SCIENCE has already proven what women have known for a long time - that men are not as good at multitasking as the female gender - but until recently no one has understood why.
Now Russian scientists have shown that when it comes to switching tasks, men basically have greedier brains that require more energy than women's brains - at least until they reach their 50s after which it seems to make no difference.
Regardless of gender, task switching always involves activation of certain areas of the brain - bilateral activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal areas, inferior parietal lobes and inferior occipital gyrus.
The researchers from the Higher School of Economics Neurolinguistics Laboratory in Moscow recruited 140 healthy volunteers (69 men and 71 women) aged 20-65 and had them perform a variety of tasks, including those that required them to sort objects according to shape (round or square) or number (one or two), in a pseudo random order. Brain activity was monitored by MRI.
The researchers found that gender differences in brain activity when switching between tasks only occurred in people younger than 45-50.
While the study has confirmed that younger women tend to cope with attention switching better than young men, the researchers say it is barely noticeable in real life except "it might make a difference in really stressful circumstances or in critical situations which require frequent switching of attention" according to researcher Svetlana Kuptsova.
However, science still can't explain the exact reason for the difference.
There is a popular hypothesis by American psychologist Jerre Levy as to why men have better spatial skills while women are often better at verbal tasks. According to Levy, these differences are caused by both evolutionary and social factors.
In ancient times, men spent their time hunting, which required good spatial abilities, while women were caring for children and thus needed good communication skills. In the course of evolution, these survival skills have been passed down the generations.
"We could continue with the same logic and assume that homemaking and caring for children historically required women to be good at multitasking, but there is no hard evidence to support this theory," Ms Kuptsova said.
