Does The Length Of Your Fingers Really Reveal How Good Your Directional Sense Is?

This may go like a playground myth , but scientists are pretty much concord thatpeople whose ring finger is longer than their index fingerwere exposed to higher tier oftestosteronein the uterus . As such , finger length is conceive to be a good index number of several characteristics that are subordinate on testosterone , such as athletic ability , anxiousness , and spacial awareness .

To enquire , investigator Carl Pintzka from the Norwegian   Competence Service for Functional MRI channel an experiment to try and determine how testosterone affects mind activity when perform spacial awareness tasks , based on finger distance .

He measured the finger of 42 cleaning woman in ordering to define how much of the endocrine they had been exposed to pre - birth , before require them to navigate a practical maze while hold their genius skim in an MRI simple machine .

Women with high power fingerbreadth to call digit ratios – and therefore highertestosterone level – displayed neat bodily process in psyche part such as the hippocampus , parahippocampal convolution , and amygdala than those with low ratios . Interestingly , however , this did n’t always correspond to greater navigational success , although it did tend to lead to high scores when performing a separate task in which player were asked to mentally rotate the practical labyrinth .

Pintzka also gave one-half of the woman a 0.5 milligram dose of testosterone , while the other half received a placebo . Those that were chip in the hormone demonstrated greater activity in the median temporal lobe , which once again led to better performance on the mental rotation undertaking but not on the navigational task .

release his work in the journalBehavioural Brain Research , though , Pintzka says that his results do not conclusively examine thattestosterone level are connect to directional senseor spatial cognisance .

Therefore , though some animal study have picture that males often execute advantageously than female person at piloting tasks , this may not be entirely down to testosterone . It is also often claimed that men are more prone to mental disorder link with high testosterone levels , such as Tourette ’s and autism , while fair sex tend to hurt from condition like anxiousness anddepression , both of which are tie in with low testosterone levels .

However , the results of this study suggest that evaluate your finger may not be the most reliable diagnosis method .