WonderBranding: Marketing to Women With Michele Miller: Intuition III: Eye of the Beholder

Your physical senses – sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch – are the tools you use to gather and store information in your brain. One of these tools, sight, has a fascinating link to gender difference. Inside your eye, the retina is the component that gauges focus, light, clarity, and movement. Two important parts of the retina are cones and rods, which are connected. The cones of the retina work to intensify clarity and color, and allow for focus (especially intense focus on one thing at a time), meaning greater depth perception. The rods of the retina, being extremely sensitive to light, can detect the slightest movement in the visual field, meaning greater peripheral vision.

Guess which women have more of – cones or rods? You got it – rods. As a general rule, the female retina has more rods, resulting in greater peripheral vision and the ability to “see the whole picture” all at once. (Understand now why children think their mommies have “eyes in the back of their head?”)

Not just "seeing" the whole picture, but "feeling" it as well - an important part of intuition.

Men, on the other hand, have more cones in their retina, resulting in greater depth perception and the ability to focus on “one thing at a time.”

[A personal aside… I have just one question. If men have this great depth perception, why is that they are rarely able to see beyond the front row of stuff in the refrigerator when looking for the ketchup?]

Comments

Well, the answer to the question of why men can't see past the ketchup in the refrigerator is an easy one. Many men can only focus on one thing at a time. In this case, the sole focus is the ketchup.

I had an employer, the company President, who was exasperating that way. He could not discuss beyond one topic. Period. If he called to discuss an issue, that would be the only subject we could consider in that call. It drove me crazy. I can talk about many topics at the same time and one after the other. He simply could not.

Posted by: Wayne Hurlbert | April 14, 2004 at 11:59 AM