Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen has done a lot of remarkable research on human minds and how they work. His work on autistic spectrum disorder and mind-reading ability (i.e. to understand other people have their own sets of beliefs, thoughts and feelings which are different from our own)fascinates me.

Ever wonder why men and women respond differently in a situation? Here is your answer:

Baron-Cohen's theory is that the female brain is predominantly hard-wired for
empathy, and that the male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding
and building systems. He calls it the empathising-systemising (E-S) theory.

Empathising is the drive to identify another person's emotions and
thoughts, and to respond to these with an appropriate emotion. The empathiser
intuitively figures out how people are feeling, and how to treat people with
care and sensitivity.

Systemising is the drive to analyse and explore a
system, to extract underlying rules that govern the behaviour of a system; and
the drive to construct systems.

The article is a good read.

Want to know whether your brain is female or male?
Take the interactive empathy quotient test and the interactive systemising quotient test.