The brain scans which reveal why men REALLY don't understand women

Male test subjects better at guessing 'mood' of men in pictures
Linked to activity in amygdala - a portion of brain involved in emotion





MRI scans have found men are able to 'read' other men better
It is often said that men struggle to understand women.
Now it seems experts may have found a scientific reason why men understand other men better than the female of the species.
Researchers at LWL-University Hospital in Bochum, Germany discovered male volunteers looking at photographs of human eyes were better at guessing the 'mood' of the person in the picture, if the person in them was also male.
The study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, took 22 male volunteers - all single and all between the ages of 21 and 52.
Each was asked to look at photographs showing just the eyes of a person, while undergoing an MRI scan.
The gender of the people in the photographs was split 50/50 and each displayed an emotion that was considered to be positive, neutral, or negative.
As the volunteers viewed the pictures they were asked to choose between two words given to them that best described the mood of the person they were looking at. No other information was given.
The researchers found that the volunteers were better at sensing the mood of the person in the picture if that person was male.


They also found that when looking at a pair of male eyes, the amygdala - a portion of the brain that has been found to be involved in emotion - was more active than when looking at the women's eyes.
Other brain areas tied to emotion didn't light up as much when looking at women's eyes as they did for males either.


Because scientists believe that emotional reading happens mostly through the eyes, the researchers suggest that their results show that men are better at reading the emotional state of their fellow men, than they are at doing the same with women.
It is not the first study to draw the conclusion.
One conducted at Indiana University found that men tend to misinterpret positive signals from women, often mistaking friendliness for sexual attraction.
In this new effort, the researchers attempted to gather actual physical evidence to gain more insight into what goes on in the minds of men as they attempt to decipher the moods of women.