WOMEN, by common consent, cannot read maps. And nor, according to experiments, can gay men.

Presented with a map and asked to memorise a route, gay men used many of the strategies women do when navigating. Rather than orientating themselves by the points of the compass, as straight men tend to do, the gay men navigated by means of landmarks — “go past the church and then turn right” — the approach often used by women.

But gay men are not exclusively female in their map-reading techniques, say Qazi Rahman and colleagues from the University of East London in the journal Behavioural Neuroscience. They use other navigational strategies, suggesting that their brains adopt male and female traits. Dr Rahman investigated the map-reading ability of 20 straight men, 20 gay men, 20 straight women and 20 lesbians. He found that gay men used significantly more landmarks than straight men. In this, they were like women. It was unlikely that the differences were due to gay men being more verbose, as the study controlled for verbal ability. Lesbians were just like straight women. Dr Rahman believes that the hippocampus region of the brain might be involved. One study in 2000 showed differences in the activity of this region in men and women during navigation.

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