You can now blame your gender on your inability to remember things. According to researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, men have worse memories than women.
“It was surprising to see that men forget more than women,” said Jostein Holmen, a NTNU professor. “This has not been documented before. It was also surprising to see that men are just as forgetful whether they are 30 or 60 years old. The results were unambiguous.”
More than 48,000 Norwegian people took part in a longitudinal study, and nine questions dealt with memory. The results—published in BMC Psychology—show that “subjective memory impairment” was reported by half the participants, with men reporting the most problems for eight out of the nine questions. Remembering names and dates were the most common problems. And your education level matters. Those more highly educated have better memories , and those who are more often anxious or depressed have memory problems.
“We have speculated a lot about why men report more frequent problems with remembering than women do, but have not been able to find an explanation,” Holmen said. “This is still an unsolved mystery.”
(photo credit: Rusty Clark via photopin cc)
