One interesting study:
New research from the Indiana University School of Medicine on how men and women's brains differ (2001) Researchers found that "when they measured the brain activity of men and women as they listened to taped excerpts from a John Grisham novel: Listening resulted in increased blood flow in the left temporal lobes of the men's brains while, in women, both temporal lobes showed activity. In other words, men really do listen with just half their brains." http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1077/is_4_56/ai_69653972/
So far they don't understand what the results mean. So what does that mean about what is going on in the less active lobe of the brain?
More studies
Research from the elite Harvard Medical School in the U.S. shows the relative sizes of many of the structures inside the female brain are different from those of males.
Parts of the frontal lobe, which houses decision-making and problem-solving, are proportionally larger in women. More space is also devoted to short-term memory and spatial navigation.
Research from the University of California found the sexes use different sides of the brain to process emotions, with men choosing the left and women the right.
One rather amusing commentary says:
Let’s discuss men’s brains and women’s brains and how they are very, very different. Men’s brains are made up of hundreds of little boxes. We have a little box for everything. We have a box for our job, one for the car, one for the wife, one for the kids, one for the bills, one for the house, literally one box for anything and everything. Men also have one specific rule they live by as far as their brain is concerned and that is, the boxes DO NOT TOUCH. Never, ever. Whenever a man is required to discussion something he goes to that specific box, pulls it out, opens it and discusses ONLY what’s in that box. Nothing else. When the discussion is over, he closes that box and returns it being very, very careful not to touch any of the other boxes in the process. That’s how men’s brains work.
Women’s brains, on the other hand, are quite different. Women’s brains are made up of a big ball of wire in which everything is connected to everything else. The home, the car, the kids, the neighbors, the laundry, their mother, their husband, everything. All connected. Just like the internet. Women’s brains are powered by an energy known as emotion. That’s the reason women remember EVERYTHING. If you take an event and connect it with an emotion you’ll remember it forever and that’s exactly what women do.
Now the same thing happens with men that emotion thing, it’s just that it doesn’t happen very often because frankly, we don’t care. Women however, tend to care about EVERYTHING. Men have a special box in their brains that most women are not aware of. This box is empty and is called the nothing box. Of all the boxes in a man’s brain, this is his favorite. If given half a chance, men will go to this box every time. It is the nothing box that enables men to do something that appears to a woman to be totally brain dead for hours on end like, well, like fishing. The University of Pennsylvania actually did a study and determined that men have the ability to think about absolutely nothing for hours and still breathe on their own. Women can’t do this as their minds are always running, always processing and cross-referencing. Women just don’t understand the nothing box and it drives them crazy because nothing is more irritating to a woman than to witness a man doing NOTHING. http://hubpages.com/hub/Mens-Brains-Womens-Brains [bold is mine]
AND THERE IS IS Someone studied it and men really can think about nothing