Are the Brains of Men and Women Truly Different?

Sharon Moore December 11, 2015

While specific parts of the human brain shows sex differences, an individual brain only rarely has all "male" traits or all "female" traits, researchers say. They report it’s more likely to be a mixed bag: some things are more common in women, some more common in men, and some are common in both.

In the current study, researchers from of Tel-Aviv University and headed by Daphna Joel, looked at the MRI scans of 1,400 brains with focus on the anatomy rather than how brains work. They found both male and female brains scored variable traits like tissue thickness or volume in different parts. Researchers focused on traits that showed the biggest sex differences, dividing the scores into a predominantly male zone, a predominantly female zone, and an intermediate range.

But the major question is - how often did a brain end up in just one of those three? Such consistency turned out to be unusual, generally found in 6 per cent or less of brains across analyses of several sets of data. It was much more common for an individual to score in both the male and female zones than to show a line-up that indicated only one sex or the other.

The researchers did the same experiment, this time, involving more than 5,000 participants. The results were the same.

Their findings suggest that "human brains do not belong to one of two distinct categories," male and female.

So how to explain the idea that males and females seem to behave differently? That too, could be a myth as previous research has shown. For instance, a study by Tel Aviv University in Israel suggests that there is no person that has all the male characteristics and another person that has all the female characteristics. Or if they exist they are really, really rare to find.

The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

Source of this article:

Sex beyond the genitalia: The human brain mosaic