A friend of mine told me that women generally have higher perception when it comes to the 5 senses. I’ve heard that blind and deaf people have better perception with their senses, but that is to make up for their hearing/eye sight. Is there any truth to this? I know I could post this question in “My Humble Opinion,” but I would rather have a scientific answer to it.
Thanks.
I couldn’t find anything addressing your question directly, but I did find an article that may have bearing. This BBC article discusses the advantages of having 2 X chromosomes versus having one. one interesting paragraph read
This quote is about intelligence rather than the senses, but perhaps the same can be said for the senses.
I disagree.
Men are usually in the Hunter role, & thus gain advantage from keener senses, assuming that the sensoria are gender-linked at all.
Nothing to do with genetics, but I would expect that workplace-related hearing and vision loss are much more common in men.
Color blindness is also more common in men.
That would be a societal trend; not a biological one. Women can hunt just as good as men since humans rely mostly on intellegence and tools for catching other animals.
The only anecdote I can add is that in learning colourimetry for chemical water testing that women are said to be more accurate in seeing the slight colour changes than men (this is using simple eye tests rather than a spectrophotometer) and thus tend to do it better. I don’t know where that supposed fact came from or if it’s true, but I do know that nobody actually cares or takes it seriously.
There was a recent article in Newsweek after that Harvard guy’s comment about women scientists, that covered what differences have been observed between men and women. And it did mention that women, IN GENERAL, were able to distinguish finer differences in colors. Not necessarily “better vision”, but finer resolution in color differences. The article also mentioned something about sense of smell as well. I can’t remember if it was more sensitive (could smell fainter scents), or something along the lines of “smell resolution” as well.
Some studies have shown women have a better sense of smell than men (http://www.sirc.org/publik/smell_diffs.html). I have no trouble believing this, my mom could identify smells when she was three floors away from the source.
Overall, there very little evidence that the genders differ in their basic sensory sensitivity - at least in terms of detection thresholds and the like. However, there is evidence of gender differences in the reporting of some types sensory intensity (e.g., reporting how intense heat or cold pain feels). Having said that, intensity ratings can be subject to various difficulties in interpretation.
The ‘finer resolution of color differences’ noted above is very vague, and I’m not sure what exactly is meant by the phrase. I very much doubt that women in general are better at conventional colour discrimination tasks. However, there is evidence that some women have 4 classes of retinal (cone) photoreceptors, as opposed to the usual 3 and in this case, these individuals appear to have a different, richer, colour experience.
Women apparently see colours slightly differently - some women are tetrachromatic. As for the hunter role, women are apparently better at multi-tasking - consider a cavewoman sorting beans or whatever while looking after children - whereas men are better at concentrating on one single thing. As for intelligence, I’ve heard it said that while the average intelligence of men and women is the same, men have a greater variance - that is they’re more likely to be more stupid or more intelligent. I can’t give cites, however.
I’d give women – experienced Moms and female elementary school teachers in particular – the benefit of the doubt in being generally more attuned or aware of certain odd smells, strange sounds, changes in temperature, missing household items. Some of that might be attributed to keener senses, but I’m thinking it’s a matter of being aware of things amiss. I can tune things out pretty quickly and thoroughly if I want to.
One of the ‘warning’ signs of pregnancy is a heightened sense of smell. Wine companies higher pregnant women because their sense of smell is so much greater than the average person’s. This change seems to be due to sexual hormones since there are no differences in olfactory receptors between the sexes and the woman’s sense of smell increases during ovulation and pregnancy.
The BBC reports on the sense of smell and says that women are better then men.
I don’t know that women actually have better senses, per se, but IME women do seem to pay more attention to and place more importance on finely differentiated sensory input. If the subtle differentiations don’t make what they perceive as a material difference, men tend to ignore the differentiations. You show my dad or brother or husband three swatches in fuschia, rose, and vermillion, and they’ll all tell you they’re all pink. They can see the difference just fine, they just don’t care. The tone of the pink is unimportant, so it’s all just pink.
I’ve actually heard a wild-assed and probably sexist evolutionary psychology explanation of this phenomenon based on the role of women as gatherers in hunter gatherer societies. The idea is that since they had to distinguish which plants were edible or ripe they needed finer distinctions of color and smell. Like many other evolutionary psychology speculations, this sounds as much like a Just So Story as a scientific theory.
Has anyone else heard this or whether there’s any evidence to support this notion?