Male and female brains have different components, it was revealed last week in a study led by Canadian scientist Dr Maya Saleh. Men have more grey matter (for data processing) and women more white matter (for words and social interaction).

I first realized men and women thought differently when I was driving in a car with a woman doing the map reading. "You’re holding the map upside down," I said. She replied: "I know. That’s because we’re driving upside down." There was no answer to that. Later, I asked her what make of car her father drove. "A blue one," she replied.

The report confirmed long-held theories that men are better with numbers and women with words and colors. It’s so true. I’ve suffered my whole life from a tragic inability to have an opinion on the color of curtains. Once a year, my wife checks my condition by asking: "Are you yet able to have an opinion on whether satin-finish curtains in pale ecru are preferable to cotton-lined drapes in dark muffin?" Every year, she receives nothing but a panicked stare in response, and knows my condition has not improved.

Fortunately, it is not life-threatening, nor is it uncommon. In fact, it is more or less de rigueur for heterosexual males. It strikes me that this test could be used to check people’s sexuality at an early age. Any boy who shows an interest in the hue of curtains is unlikely to grow up to have the classic characteristics of the Asian male, that is, to be the hopelessly unredeemable, sexist, chauvinist thug that their loving fathers desperately want them to be.

I know that if my son ever expresses an opinion on curtain tones, I will immediately enroll him in the local equivalent of the US Navy Seals, so he can learn useful manly skills, such as how to conduct covert assassination operations. Bizarrely, this information is NOT included on ANY school curriculum, a tragic consequence of the fact that schools are dominated by female decision-makers. Fortunately, the male-dominated computer games industry is working to make up this astonishing shortfall in our children’s education.

Now I’m no anthropologist but I have long suspected that all heterosexual men are descended from a tribe in New Guinea. In their wonderfully simple language, called Dan, there are only two colors: mili, which means "darkish", and mola, which means "lightish". This is so simple that Dan-speaking men would have no problems generating opinions about the color of curtains, although this is not really a major issue for them, as jungle huts have no windows.

Meanwhile, I suspect that all women of my acquaintance have been descended from the Machiguenga tribe of Peru. In their language the number "tobaiti" means "any number bigger than four". Their counting system goes: one, two, three, four, tobaiti. That’s it: the whole thing.

One can imagine how easy a Machiguengan maths test would be. Q: What’s five and five? A: Er, is it tobaiti? Q: Correct. What’s the population of China? A: Hmm, I would say, about tobaiti. Q: Right again. How many people in your family? A: Um, tobaiti-ish?

I’ll stop here and tell my wife to buy curtains in a nice shade of mola. She’ll be impressed.