A friend told me about the YouTube video "Nothing Box" today. There are several related ones actually and they are about the difference between the brains and thinking habits of men and women. Mark Gungor, a speaker on marriage, gives his take on the minds and personalities of men and women. According to his explanation, men tend to keep ideas and topics in separate boxes and focus in their thinking on one box at a time. One of the boxes in their brains is the Nothing Box. When their minds are in the Nothing Box, they are basically thinking about and doing nothing. Women, on the other hand, keep everything connected to everything else and that is why women remember everything.
One of the basic facts about any difference between the sexes, as far as I am concerned, is that women tend to live longer than men. A biology professor told me once that there is also a difference between the longevity of females and males in other mammal species, too, such as deer and wolves. I have heard that various multiple choice tests have shown some advantage men have in mathematics and spatial reasoning while women have an advantage in language and emotional sensitivity.
I am a fan of simple, regular practice of meditation since I think it feels good and there is a growing mountain of evidence that meditation is good for you. The result of keeping one's attention on a specific anchor is that when the mind takes one of its inevitable drifts or jumps to some other topic, the meditator can notice the change. The noticing increases the awareness of what one is thinking about, an awareness often called "mindfulness". I have wondered if the sexes differ in their ability to meditate or their willingness to do so.
Gungor says that men like to be in their Nothing Box and do nothing and think nothing. I haven't heard of that happening but I don't know one way or the other. Since women seem to live busy lives, they may resist practicing meditation. For either sex, interest in meditation and experiencing it as a valuable practice may tend to be related to age. I had not heard of meditation before the age of 34 and I didn't practice regularly nor investigate the topic before the age of 54. There are many people who think that meditation should be taught to children and be made a part of their lives. I am not sure about that and I am not convinced that there is any difference between the sexes in how much meditation seems to fill a need for them. There is a great deal of fairly empty or contradictory chatter about men this and women that.
In this age of research and "research", when we can find statements that "studies show" just about anything and its opposite, it can be helpful to take things with a grain of salt, that is, to be slow to accept this principle or that idea. One of the best reviews of research and "research" that I have seen lately are the opening chapters of "The Bad Food Bible", in which Dr. Aaron Carroll, a researcher and research mentor at Indiana University, emphasizes the need to study research reports carefully before swallowing conclusions being offered.
