Study Shows Male and Female Brains are Hardwired Differently
Why do men, in general, excel at certain tasks, and women at others? Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania mapped the brain activities of male and female participants and found striking differences between their neural wiring.
Past studies have shown differences between the male and female brain but there’s not enough investigation on the neural wiring connecting the whole brain, which is essential to cognitive functions.
The new study, published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, and one of the largest of its kind, found greater neural connectivity from front to back and within one hemisphere in males, suggesting that their brains are structured to facilitate strong connectivity between perception and coordinated action. Women, on the other hand, has neural wiring that goes between the left and right hemispheres, suggesting that they facilitate communication between the analytical and intuition.
The study involved 949 volunteers, 521 of which were women and 42 were men, ages 8 to 22 years old. Using the diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) technology – a water-based imaging technique that can trace and highlight the fibre pathways connecting the different regions of the brain, laying the foundation for a structural network of the whole brain, researchers examined the gender-specific differences in brain connectivity of the participants.
They found that females had greater connectivity in the supratentorial region – the part of the brain which contains the cerebrum, the largest part of the brain, between the left and right hemispheres. Males, on the other hand, demonstrated greater neural activity within each hemisphere. They also had opposite neural activities in the cerebellum – the part of the brain that plays a major role in motor control. Women had greater intra-hemispheric connectivity whilst men had greater inter-hemispheric connectivity.
According to lead investigator Ragini Verma, PhD, an associate professor in the department of Radiology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, this may help explain why men excel at certain tasks, and women at others. For instance, on average, men tend to be better at learning and performing a single task at hand, like cycling or navigating directions, whereas women have superior memory and social cognition skills – making them more likely to succeed in tasks that involve multitasking and solution-making.
"It’s quite striking how complementary the brains of women and men really are," said study co-author Ruben C. Gur, PhD, a professor of psychology in the department of Psychiatry. "Detailed connectome maps of the brain will not only help us better understand the differences between how men and women think, but it will also give us more insight into the roots of neurological disorders, which are often sex related."
The researchers are set to identify which neural connections are gender-specific and common in both, and quantify how an individual’s neural connections are different from the population. They will also compare whether their findings are similar to those that utilised the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology.
Source of this article:
Sex differences in the structural connectome of the human brain
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