Male vs. female brain?
Advertisement
Many people still think that men and women have completely different brains (all those stereotypes about women being better and multitasking and men being good at logical problems come to mind), but this recent research is something to think about.
Scientists from Tel Aviv University say that although there are specific regions in the brain that possess sex differences, individual brains are not entirely made up of all “male” traits or all “female” traits.
Male and female brain types, described as quite different, is a myth, says a team of researchers from Israel and Germany – human brains can not be categorized into two distinct classes: male brain and female brain. Their findings were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America or PNAS.
Bruce McEwen, at the Rockefeller University in NY, said the study is the first step ahead to realize the complexity of “male” and “female” brain and will change minds of many people.
They couldn’t find any single pattern that distinguishes between a male brain and a female brain, and say only a very small percentage of people fall under clear all-male or all female brain patterns.
Even with this generous designation of “male” and “female” scores, the researchers found little evidence of the consistency they would need to prove brain dimorphism. “There are not two types of brain”.
According to lead author of the study, psychobiologist Daphna Joel of Tel Aviv University, the notion of a male brain and a female brain is old fashioned. Because, as Cahill said, there is indeed a significant difference of how are our brains our wired, depending on our gender.
Anywhere between 23 percent and 53 percent of the MRIs had at least one region with a “male-end” score and one region with a “female-end” score, they found. And at the most, 8 percent of the brain scans showed someone whose brain regions all scored “male” or “female”.
Indeed, previous studies have found large areas of overlap in the structure of male and female brain structures, even when population-level gender differences are found. Part of the belief states that male brains secrete testosterone, making them more masculine. While statistical differences between the genders exist, she told Live Science, the new study shows that the distribution of malelike and femalelike attributes is patchy, not uniform.
Advertisement
Only 0.1 percent of the samples showed behaviors associated with stereotypical males or stereotypical females.
