Men Really Are More Forgetful Than Women, Study Confirms

Men are often pegged as the more forgetful of the two sexes, and a new study by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim corroborates the notion, reporting that men are more forgetful than women whether they are 30 years old or 60.

Writing in the journal BMC Psychology, NTNU's Jostein Holmen and his colleagues report that their findings were unambiguous: Men really are more forgetful than women.

To reach their conclusion, Homen and his team surveyed participants of HUNT3, a large longitudinal population health study being conducted in Norway. With 48,000 participants, HUNT3 is one of the largest health studies ever undertaken.

The nine questions on the survey asked participants if they had problems remembering things, whether they had trouble remembering names and dates, if they were able to remember details from conversations and whether they could remember what they did one year ago.

In eight out of nine questions, men reported the most trouble.

"We have speculated a lot about why men report more frequent problems with remembering than women do, but have not been able to find an explanation. This is still an unsolved mystery," Holmen said.

Women reported the same problems with remembering things as men. Numbers and dates were reportedly the hardest for women to remember. But women showed forgetfulness to a lesser extent than men.

The researchers found that while memory does fade with age, forgetfulness seems to be about the same whether a person is in their 30s or in their 60s. People with more education showed less frequency of forgetfulness when compared to those with less education.

"It is important to emphasize that we still don't know what clinical importance these problems with remembering have," Holman said.

"But we might know this in a few years. Problems with remembering at a younger age might not have any importance either. I know this from my own experience, but now I know that I am not alone," Holmen, who was born in 1947, added.