Are there gender differences in the human brain

The rules will change how the brain works and how someone behaves. Rippon regularly talks in schools. She wants girls to have leading scientists as role models, and she wants all children to know that their identity, abilities, achievements and behaviour are not prescribed by their biological sex. Male babies dressed in blue romper suits, female ones in pink is a binary coding that belies a status quo that resists the scientific evidence. Anatomically, men and women are different.

The brain is a biological organ. Sex is a biological factor. But it is not the sole factor; it intersects with so many variables. I ask her for a comparable watershed moment in the history of scientific understanding, in order to gauge the significance of her own.

Letting go of age-old certainties is frightening, concedes Rippon, who is both optimistic about the future, and fearful for it. That disconnect, says Rippon, is writ large, for example, in men. The satnav recalibrates, according to expectations. On the plus side, our plastic brains are good learners. All we need to do is change the life lessons. Research so far has failed to challenge deep prejudice, says Gina Rippon.

Several things went wrong in the early days of sex differences and brain imaging research. The team cross-referenced their anatomical findings with publicly available maps of gene expression in the brain. These maps are based on more than 1, postmortem tissue samples from six human donors.

The spatial pattern of sex differences in cortical volume was similar to the spatial pattern of sex-chromosome gene expression in the cortex. Regions with relatively high expression of sex-chromosome genes tended to have greater cortical volume in males than females. The researchers also compared the anatomical findings with data from more than 11, functional neuroimaging studies. Such studies examine brain activation during specific activities or conditions.

Of 50 cognitive categories, five were associated with anatomical differences: visual object recognition, face processing, cognitive control, inhibition, and conflict.

Facial processing showed the strongest association. More research is needed to determine whether these anatomical distinctions play any role in sex differences in cognition and behavior. Many of these cognitive differences appear quite early in life. Infant girls respond more readily to faces and begin talking earlier.

Boys react earlier in infancy to experimentally induced perceptual discrepancies in their visual environment. In adulthood, women remain more oriented to faces, men to things.

All these measured differences are averages derived from pooling widely varying individual results. While statistically significant, the differences tend not to be gigantic. They are most noticeable at the extremes of a bell curve, rather than in the middle, where most people cluster. Some argue that we may safely ignore them.

Women are twice as likely as men to experience clinical depression in their lifetimes; likewise for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Men are twice as likely to become alcoholic or drug-dependent, and 40 percent more likely to develop schizophrenia. The neuroscience literature shows that the human brain is a sex-typed organ with distinct anatomical differences in neural structures and accompanying physiological differences in function, says UC-Irvine professor of neurobiology and behavior Larry Cahill, PhD. Brain-imaging studies indicate that these differences extend well beyond the strictly reproductive domain, Cahill says.

In , Cahill scanned the brains of men and women viewing either highly aversive films or emotionally neutral ones. The aversive films were expected to trip off strong negative emotions and concomitant imprinting in the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure found in each brain hemisphere. But in women, this relationship was observed only in the left amygdala. In men, it was only in the right amygdala. Cahill and others have since confirmed these results. In part, because of differences in processing these chemicals, males on average tend to be less inclined to sit still for as long as females and tend to be more physically impulsive and aggressive.

Additionally, males process less of the bonding chemical oxytocin than females. Overall, a major takeaway of chemistry differences is to realize that our boys at times need different strategies for stress release than our girls. A number of structural elements in the human brain differ between males and females. Females often have a larger hippocampus, our human memory center.

Females also often have a higher density of neural connections into the hippocampus. As a result, girls and women tend to input or absorb more sensorial and emotive information than males do. If you note your observations over the next months of boys and girls and women and men, you will find that females tend to sense a lot more of what is going on around them throughout the day, and they retain that sensorial information more than do men. Additionally, before boys or girls are born, their brains developed with different hemispheric divisions of labor.

The right and left hemispheres of the male and female brains are not set up exactly the same way. For instance, females tend to have verbal centers on both sides of the brain, while males tend to have verbal centers on only the left hemisphere.

This is a significant difference. Girls tend to use more words when discussing or describing incidence, story, person, object, feeling, or place. Males not only have fewer verbal centers in general but also, often, have less connectivity between their word centers and their memories or feelings. When it comes to discussing feelings and emotions and senses together, girls tend to have an advantage, and they tend to have more interest in talking about these things.

While we are on the subject of emotional processing, another difference worth looking closely at is the activity difference between male and female brains. The female brain, in part thanks to far more natural blood flow throughout the brain at any given moment more white matter processing , and because of a higher degree of blood flow in a concentration part of the brain called the cingulate gyrus , will often ruminate on and revisit emotional memories more than the male brain.

Males, in general, are designed a bit differently. Males tend, after reflecting more briefly on an emotive memory, to analyze it somewhat, then move onto the next task.

During this process, they may also choose to change course and do something active and unrelated to feelings rather than analyze their feelings at all. Thus, observers may mistakenly believe that boys avoid feelings in comparison to girls or move to problem-solving too quickly. These four, natural design differences listed above are just a sample of how males and females think differently.

Scientists have discovered approximately gender differences in the brain, and the importance of these differences cannot be overstated.

Understanding gender differences from a neurological perspective not only opens the door to greater appreciation of the different genders, it also calls into question how we parent, educate, and support our children from a young age.

Psychology is the study of the nature of mind. Philosophy is the use of that mind in life.