Finding the exit from the mall
I never bought into the idea that men, because they were hunters in prehistoric times, have better spatial navigation skills—the ability to know where you are and how to get from there to somewhere else—than women. If that's the case, then explain this: why do my father, my husband, and my ex-husband have such a hard time finding their way out of the mall, even when it's one they go to often and always park in the same spot, while the female contingent of the family knows not only where the exit is but also which store is above which other store? Either it's a huge coincidence, or the story isn't quite right.
Years later, I discovered the answer in neuroscience: yes, there is a difference in the way men and women orient themselves in space—but neither are “more skilled.” They are just... different.
The difference lies in the regions of the brain's hippocampal formation that men and women prioritize when constructing a mental map of the space they navigate, a map that is consulted when heading to the exit, the restaurant, your favorite store, or your car in the parking lot. While men tend to use regions of the hippocampal formation that represent absolute distances and directions to form maps of space, women tend to recruit neighboring regions in the hippocampal formation that represent information such as visual landmarks: trees, signs, posters, and other signals and their relative position.
These are two complementary navigation strategies, neither intrinsically better or worse than the other. One forms mental maps that prioritize objects; the other forms maps that prioritize distances and directions. In practice, using one map or the other is like navigating the streets of São Paulo using cardinal points and the geometry of the roads or using the various towers and antennas, such as those on Paulista Avenue, as visual landmarks.
Why, then, do women (at least in my statistics!) do so much better than men when it comes to leaving shopping malls? I suspect it is because of the compatibility between the characteristics of shopping malls, full of different signs and shop windows, and the female tendency to prioritize visual landmarks. If distances and directions work well in the savannah or on country walks, inside a shopping mall there is nothing like a particular store to serve as a reference point. And, of course, there is nothing to stop men from making a little effort to find their way around the stores on their next visit to the mall!
Excerpt from Suzana Herculano-Houzel (2025) Neurociência da Vida Comum (Neuroscience of Everyday Life), originally published in Folha de São Paulo in March 2009