I do hate to break it to all you dad's out there, especially so close to Fathers Day and all, but in addition to having statistically shorter life spans ... although the divide there is shrinking as your habits get healthier ... your slope to mental decline is just ever so much more slippery and slick than that of us moms. Well, not just moms, but women in general tend to keep their grip better and longer than men do.

A new study ... a huge new study in fact that surveyed more than a quarter of a million people worldwide ... suggests that men's minds decline more than women's.

Like much from the world of science ... quantitative, esoteric, yet almost mystical, all at the same time ... I love the test that was given ...

There were four tasks testing sex-related cognitive skills, two that men are supposed to be better at and two that favor a woman's mind. Any guesses which are which?

1) matching an object to its rotated form
2) matching lines shown from the same angle
3) typing as many words in a particular category as possible in the given time
4) recalling the location of objects in a line drawing

Okay, the last one is a total no-brainer for anyone with a husband like mine that can never find his keys or his phone and needs a map to socks.

The word one is also pretty obviously a girl thing, at least in my house, although Sam gives a pretty good running dialog throughout his waking hours.

Matching objects to rotated forms may come from hanging upside-down over engines, which explains a lot about why cars are built the way they are I suppose, and I don't even know what "matching lines shown from the same angle" means ... or if I do, I don't get why that would be tough.

But I digress ...

The testing showed that each group studied did what expected ... men did better at the guy things, while women had better performance in the girl ones ... and everyone's skills declined with age. Women, however, showed "significantly less decline than men overall".

The team leader of the research, a woman, does warn:

"You can't sort of say, 'Oh, you're a man, so you're going to decline faster than me because I'm a woman,'" Maylor said.

Oh, but I think we can ...