How different are women from men? So different, claims John Gray, an author and a relationship guru, that the two sexes seem to have come from different planets. His book “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” published in 1993 by HarperCollins, became a bestseller (more than 50 million copies sold) and has influenced how women and men view themselves and the opposite sex.

In the world according to Gray, when women bring up a problem in a conversation, for example, they merely want to talk about it and not necessarily to solve it. Men, on the other hand, are so eager to come up with solutions to the problem that they totally fail to listen. Then, she says “You don’t ever listen,” he responds with “you don’t understand,” and she concludes with “you don’t love me anymore.” He retreats to his man-cave (nowadays, the garage) while she remains yearning for connection. And things go south.

Some critics say that “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” is overly simplistic, excessively stereotypical, and based on opinions rather than on scientific research.

Does scientific research support the claims made in “Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus?” Professor Daphna Joel from Tel Aviv University and her colleagues looked at how different male brains are from female brains.

The authors looked at MRIs (Magnetic Resonance Imaging studies) of more than 1,400 human brains. Unlike researchers before them, Joel and her colleagues did not look at the difference between men and women in a single brain element. Instead, they identified 10 regions in the brain showing the largest sex differences.

They looked at the grey matter, white matter and at measures of connectivity between different brain areas. Looking at these regions, they found extensive overlap between the structures of the brain in men and women. They found that most brains were comprised of mosaics of features, some more common in men and some more common in women.

The authors also analyzed two large databases that included information on many psychological variables for a large number of subjects. These variables included measures of behavior, personality characteristics and attitudes. Using statistical analyses similar to the ones used to analyze data obtained from the MRIs, they identified seven variables with the largest sex difference. Again, substantial variability was evident in 59 percent of the study participants. Only a few study participants presented internal consistency (having either female or male features).

Joel and her colleagues concluded that although there are some sex differences in brain structure between men and women, brains do not fall into two classes of female or male brain and are not even aligned along a male brain – female brain continuum. “Each brain is a unique mosaic of features,” they claimed, “some of which may be more common in females compared with males, others may be more common in males compared with females, and still others may be common in both females and males.”

Similarly, their analyses of gender-related data revealed extensive overlap between females and males in personality traits, attitudes, interests and behaviors.

I wonder: does Joel’s study prove that men are not from Mars, women are not from Venus, and that they should just live happily thereafter here, on Earth? Perhaps the differences between the sexes are beyond the resolution of an MRI scan: a difference in how individual groups of brain cells work, in the way they communicate with each other, in the way they respond to the different hormonal environments in men and women. Similarly, could it be that the gender-related data that Joel’s study analyzed was not specific enough to identify the profound differences that make people believe that men are from Mars, women are from Venus?

In the Customer Review section on Amazon.com I read, with great interest a review by a man who holds a degree in rocket engineering and seems to be in dire need of a self-help book that will help him decipher the mysteries of the opposite sex. About Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, he writes: “The book is the equivalent to ‘Idiot’s guide to Listening, Respect and Communication, with Easy-to-Remember Examples.” And still, he recommends the book because “I don’t want to know the fundamentals of communications [nor does he want to count the ways the female brain anatomy is different, or similar to his], I just want to know why my last girlfriend got offended when I offered solutions when she was complaining about work.”

And if he would come to me for advice, I would simply say: “You have to listen, man, you have to listen!”

Editor’s note: Dr. Shahar Madjar is a urologist working in several locations in the Upper Peninsula.