h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I remember the BBC did a series on this
scientists have divided the brain into male and female sides but peoples brain's dominant side does not necessarily match either their sex or their sexuality
the whole division of the brain into male and female sides looked very arbitrary

I took the BBC quiz, and it seems to think I'm balanced between male and female. After further review, I think it just fails to accurately evaluate bright people. Just because I could spot some differences and come up with some words doesn't make my mind particularly female. It's all based on the results of average people, and I suspect that most above-average people will come up with a balanced result.

I took the quiz also, and came out as a score of 50% male--ie 75% male and 25% female. Although I find it very odd that I scored so low on the verbal test--I got a 3, which implies very silent and non-verbal, which does not describe me at all. (Love to write, 5 on AP Lang exam, 800 verbal SAT I and 800 writing SAT II, write poetry in spare time--not exactly your typical nonverbal "strong and silent" {I don't qualify for the strong half, either} type) So actually I probably should have come out a little closer to the middle than I did.


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Maybe.


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Possibly. Sort of like being ambidextrous--cool.

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Besides my unbelieveable verbal score, I also scored that I found masculine faces more attractive. Which is odd because (a) I couldn't tell the difference, they all looke the same to me and (b) I don't think I'm especially close to the gay side of the gay/strait continuum. Although since I seem to be pretty nearly asexual as far as I can tell, maybe I'm gay and never noticed.

>> And I actually would be surprised to find someone who was that large of a percentage heterosexual, since I think everyone's just about in the middle - though some are a little more to the left or right on the scale.

I assumed that too for years, but I am coming to the conclusion that some gay men really are as near as dammit 100% gay - which leads me to conclude that some straight men are presumably as near as dammit 100% straight.

Dunno about women. Really dunno about women.

Ben

"Maybe it's telling us that it doesn't really matter which way our brains function...?"

Nah, I reckon that's you telling us that .

@ B - I'm definitely 100% heterosexual. I admire some women's faces sometimes, but don't have any desire to have sex with them. Tee hee - don't desire to have sex with many men either, come to think of it. But...I am attracted to men in a completely different way to how I interact with women. Just trying to explain myself here, not very well. When I admire a woman it's more of an "I wonder if I could make my eyebrows/hair/make-up look like that" sort of thing. Probably the way a female monkey regards the alpha female

I notice too that I react to the smell of some men's sweat. I don't mean horrible nervous sweat, or haven't-washed for days sweat, but there's defn'y a reaction if it's an attractive bloke who's been doing physical exercise and smells of fresh sweat.

I'm afraid that I consider myself 100% hetrosexual as well - - it has been suggested that in my youth I was too interested in the female form, but I dispute that.

I did the brain-sex thing too and came out in the middle, again because I've read books.

What's the brain-sex thing? Got a link? Suspect I'd come out as male.

A link should be found near the bottom of the page before this one (this one being the page your post is on).

Ah, found it. Came out 50% male/female as well as a previous poster. I almost gave up when it came to the second test, though (the memory of where objects were placed) as I knew it would bugger up the overall test result. I have a kind of dyslexia (or SLD) connected with memory. It caused me terrible problems when I was in school, in fact I didn't know about it until it was diagnosed in my second daughter FINALLY when she was 17. No-one had ever picked up on fact that there was such a huge variance in her scores in various tests - up at the 97/98 percentile mark for some things, down at the 17 percentile mark for others.

I get really mad at people who scoff at the idea that 'dyslexia' exists. I spent my whole childhood trying to hide the fact that I was 'stupid', it was such a relief to me when my daughter was diagnosed and I realised that that was what was wrong with me as well. Her various schools had always maintained that her problem was that she wouldn't listen or concentrate. In fact, both of us have huge powers of concentration when it's our 'area' (for her, music, for me, art). But neither of us have a memory worth a damn

Surprising that everyone here seems to be coming out 50/50. At least I think it's surprising, maybe there's a logical reason I don't see.

BTW, a friend of mine who's not on H2G2 took the test, she came out 50% on the male side. She'd actually expected to be on the centerline, but seemed to think it hilarious that in most catagories she was apparently more male than me.

I was 25% male.


If you know what I mean...

*decides to actually do this thing and see*

It was the section with the pictures where you're supposed to remember where they are that told me the test was fairly useless. I have a terrible memory for that sort of thing, but I know it. So when the test came up, I found a way around it. I started locating similar items and drawing associations in my mind, drawing imaginary lines between stuffed animals, or triangles connecting teapot, teacup, and saucer. It was the associations that allowed me to score a 73% (or so), way above the female average. I have a hunch that my wife would score about the same as me, though she would do it through straight memory, without coming up with a strategy to cheat like I did. But next time I can't find my car keys, she'll be the one who knows where they are.

That isn't really cheating you know! It doesn't say *which* strategy you have to use to remember where things are. Those 'Improve your Memory in Just Onw Week' guys tell you to do exactly what you did - build a story to relate the items because we remember related things better than disconnected things.

I've always been good at that game though - for some reason it was called Kim's game and we used to play it at kids parties with a tray full of stuff. You'd look at it for a minute then some things would be taken out and others added.

Kelli You haven't read your Kipling have you.

Kims game is one of the things that was used to train the boy Kim in spycraft.

"Kelli You haven't read your Kipling have you"

No I haven't, but if his books are as good as his cakes then I must get right on to it now

Congratulations on those AP and SAT scores, RDO! I must say I'm wide-eyed with awe.

These results are really, really interesting. I wonder if it's something with this test - or maybe it's just the people. We're all really smart here, at least by normal standards, and that might have something to do with it. I'd like to take a random sample of my school's population and do a study. It would be fun, but I don't know how the hell I'd pull it off.

Could you propose it to one of your teachers as a group study, emr? The anonymous answers would fit into math (bell-curves, stats, etc).

B