Do Women and Left-Handed People Have Better Memories?
Who has a better memory: men or women? What about left-handed people? Musicians? Let’s look at the results from evidence-based studies.
Sabrina Stierwalt, PhD
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Do Women and Left-Handed People Have Better Memories?
As many families and friend groups across the globe gather to celebrate the holidays and to reminisce about the past, there is a recurring argument that is likely to come up. Who remembers that past more accurately? Your older brother swears he would never have left you alone as a kid to go hang out with his friends, but you remember it differently. So, who is right? And what about your mother: will she ever forget the time she caught you sneaking out of the house? Will she ever remember that lasagna isn’t actually your favorite, its your cousin’s?
We are always looking for ways to improve our memory—vitamins? crossword puzzles? more sleep?—and that desire is reflected in the large number of scientific studies looking for links between characteristics like age or gender and memory performance. Researchers have even looked at brain size, body weight, and hair coloropens PDF file to ask, who has the better memory? Let’s take a look at some of the answers to that question that are on the firmest scientific footing.
Do left-handed people have better memories?
You’ve probably heard the conventional wisdom that people are either left brained (driven by logic and reasoning) or right brained (driven by creativity and intuition) depending on which side of their brain is dominant. Although the evidence-based research suggests that people don’t necessarily fit so rigidly into one box, or brain hemisphere, the two sides of the brain are found to be more strongly linked in left-handed people. This greater communication can help with certain types of memory.
In a 2001 study, two scientists asked 62 people to watch as 55 different words flashed on a screen and then, after a delay of a few minutes, to write down what words they could remember. Â Now, they did not have enough left-handed people in their study to compare how your dominant hand affects your memory. (Left-handed people make up about 10-15% of the population.) So instead they compared participants who had left-handed relatives against those only related to right-handed people. The scientists found that, whether the participant was left-handed or not, as long as they had left-handed relatives, they on average outscored those from purely right-handed families by a significant margin.
Thus left-handed people, and those of us related to lefties who may have similar brain characteristics, tend to have better episodic memory, the memory for specific events. We can better recall which words we saw a few minutes ago and, more importantly, the events that make us who we are today. No such lefty advantage was seen when the researchers tested factual or semantic memory, or the things you “just know” and don’t always remember learning.
Do musicians have better memories?
There have been a number of studies investigating whether musicians do better than non-musicians when it comes to memory tasks. In a meta-analysis of 29 studies that included 53 different memory tasks, researchers found that musicians showed better long term memory (memory for things that happened more than a few minutes ago), better short term memory (memories kept only for a few seconds like a phone number you’ve just been told to write down), and better working memory which is related to short term memory but specifically suggests more manipulation of that information.
In particular, when it comes to short term and working memory, musicians have the clearest advantage in those memory tasks with a stimulus or trigger that is tonal as opposed to verbal or visuospatial.
And in case you are a musician who has always suspected your superior abilities, research also suggests that musicians have better mathematical and language skills as well.
Do women have better memories?
Research has also begun to address the long-standing debate of who has a better memory: men or women. In a 2016 study focused on people between the ages of 45 and 55, the memories of 212 men and women were tested using the Face-Name Associative Memory Exam and Selective Reminding Test which is specifically designed to assess episodic memory (again, the memory for specific events) and associative memory. Associative memory reflects our ability to learn and then remember connections between separate, unrelated items. The researchers further went on to test semantic memory (those things we know but don’t necessarily remember learning), executive function, and verbal intelligence as related to memory.
The results were clear: women outperformed men in all types of memory test. The researchers further tested the women’s memories relative to their stage in life and found that premenopausal and perimenopausal women were better at learning new things and recalling previously remembered information than women who were postmenopausal, suggesting a link between declining estrogen levels and weakening memory. The ability to store and consolidate memories, however, remained the same in the different female groups. Women don’t win every hand in the memory deck of cards, however. Women are at higher risk for memory impairment and dementia later in life.
The study of memory is a fast-progressing and rich field with new results and connections being made all the time. Several recent studies, for example, even showed that a more active sex life can give you a better memory.
There are many theories as to why one group of people may be more skilled with a certain type of memory than another. For example, if left-handed people are better at recalling events, and the two hemispheres of a left-handed person’s brain are more connected, then perhaps the type of memory that deals with events requires the use of both sides of the brain. I had a professor in college who was convinced that the fact that women had better memories than men derived from our time as nomadic peoples when women had to remember to bring the children along on every trip. Subjecting different groups of people to memory tests is fairly straightforward. (You do have to design a proper experiment, however, that controls for the characteristics you’re not testing for.) But the details of why one person’s memory may work better than another’s are far more complex. We still have a lot to learn about how memory works.
Until next time, this is Sabrina Stierwalt with Ask Science’s Quick and Dirty Tips for helping you make sense of science. You can become a fan of Ask Science on Facebook or follow me on Twitter, where I’m @QDTeinstein. If you have a question that you’d like to see on a future episode, send me an email at everydayeinstein@quickanddirtytips.comcreate new email.
Image courtesy of shutterstock.
