Tuesday, January 5, 2016

"The brains of men and women aren’t really that different, study finds"

"all of our brains seem to share a patchwork of forms; some that are more common in males, others that are more common in females, and some that are common to both. The findings could change how scientists study the brain and even how society defines gender.

“Nobody has had a way of quantifying this before,” says Lise Eliot, a neuroscientist at Chicago Medical School in Illinois who was not involved in the study. “Everything they’ve done here is new.”...

The team found a few structural differences between men and women. The left hippocampus, for example, an area of the brain associated with memory, was usually larger in men than in women. In each region, however, there was significant overlap between males and females; some women had a larger or more male-typical left hippocampus, for example, while the hippocampus of some men was smaller than that of the average female...

Very few of the brains—between 0% and 8%—contained all male or all female structures. “There is no one type of male brain or female brain,” Joel says.

So how to explain the idea that males and females seem to behave differently? That too may be a myth, Joel says. Her team analyzed two large datasets that evaluated highly gender stereotypical behaviors, such as playing video games, scrapbooking, or taking a bath. Individuals were just as variable for these measures: Only 0.1% of subjects displayed only stereotypically-male or only stereotypically-female behaviors."

http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/2015/11/brains-men-and-women-aren-t-really-different-study-finds?utm_source=newsfromscience&utm_medium=facebook-text&utm_campaign=brain_male-1143

Sex isn't what we think it is. It remains relevant in some areas, certainly, but it definitely isn't a binary categorization and it definitely isn't relevant in a lot of places.


Related: other one on gender, from nature; testosterone one 

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