Brain Scans May Support Venus/Mars Divide Between Sexes

[Buster's Uncle]

Brain Scans May Support Venus/Mars Divide Between Sexes
By Randy Dotinga  HealthDay Reporter,  Dec. 02, 2013 4:00PM PST



Study analyzed brain 'wiring' of kids, teens and young adults.



MONDAY, Dec. 2, 2013 (HealthDay News) -- While not every woman is intuitive or every man handy with tools, neurological scans of young males and females suggest that -- on average -- their brains really do develop differently.

The research comes with a caveat: It doesn't connect the brain-scan findings to the actual ways that these participants behave in real life. And it only looks at overall differences among males and females.

Still, the findings "confirm our intuition that men are predisposed for rapid action, and women are predisposed to think about how things feel," said Paul Zak, who's familiar with the study findings.

"This really helps us understand why men and women are different," added Zak, founding director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University in California.

Researchers Ragini Verma, an associate professor of radiology at the University of Pennsylvania, and colleagues used scans to explore the brains of 428 males and 521 females aged 8 to 22.

The goal was to better understand the connectivity in the brain, Verma said, and determine if certain types of wiring are in good shape or like a road "that could be broken or has a bad rough patch that needs to be covered over."

The study found that, on average, the brains of men seem to be better equipped to comprehend what people perceive and how they react to it. Females, on average, appear to be better able to connect the parts of their brains that handle analysis and intuition.

"It starts when they're young," Verma said. "It manifests itself when they are adolescents."

To put the results another way, "men's brains are biased toward rapid understanding of a situation and how to respond to it, especially in how to act and move in response to information," Claremont's Zak said. "Women's brains are biased toward integrating information with feelings."

The findings suggest the hormones that begin to kick in during adolescence push the male and female brains in different directions, he said.

What does all this mean in the context of people's day-to-day lives?

"It tells us why, almost always, when men and women are in a car together, the man drives," Zak contended. "His brain is biased toward being better at moving a vehicle along a road and going to the right place, the stereotype of the lost man notwithstanding."

Also, "women maintain and value friendships and other relationships better than men do. Men can have many friends, but on average we are less good at this," Zak said.

Verma, the study co-author, said the next step in the research is to figure out if people behave differently depending on how their brains are wired.

The study appears online Dec. 2 in the journal Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.


http://health.yahoo.net/news/s/hsn/brain-scans-may-support-venus-mars-divide-between-sexes

[Buster's Uncle]

How Men's Brains Are Wired Differently Than Women's
LiveScience.com
By Tanya Lewis December 2, 2013 3:03 PM



Devorah Sperber: Art inspired by how the brain sees



Men aren't from Mars and women aren't from Venus, but their brains really are wired differently, a new study suggests.

The research, which involved imaging the brains of nearly 1,000 adolescents, found that male brains had more connections within hemispheres, whereas female brains were more connected between hemispheres. The results, which apply to the population as a whole and not individuals, suggest that male brains may be optimized for motor skills, and female brains may be optimized for combining analytical and intuitive thinking.

"On average, men connect front to back [parts of the brain] more strongly than women," whereas "women have stronger connections left to right," said study leader Ragini Verma, an associate professor of radiology at the University of Pennsylvania medical school. But Verma cautioned against making sweeping generalizations about men and women based on the results. [10 Surprising Facts About a Man's Brain]

Previous studies have found behavioral differences between men and women. For example, women may have better verbal memory and social cognition, whereas men may have better motor and spatial skills, on average. Brain imaging studies have shown that women have a higher percentage of gray matter, the computational tissue of the brain, while men have a higher percentage of white matter, the connective cables of the brain. But few studies have shown that men's and women's brains are connected differently.

In the study, researchers scanned the brains of 949 young people ages 8 to 22 (428 males and 521 females), using a form of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) known as diffusion tensor imaging, which maps the diffusion of water molecules within brain tissue. The researchers analyzed the participants as a single group, and as three separate groups split up by age.

As a whole, the young men had stronger connections within cerebral hemispheres while the young women had stronger connections between hemispheres, the study, detailed today (Dec. 2) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found. However, the cerebellum, a part of the brain below the cerebrum that plays a role in coordinating muscle movement, showed the opposite pattern, with males having stronger connections between hemispheres.



Brain networks showing significantly increased intra-hemispheric connectivity in males (Upper) and intra-hemispheric connectivity in females (lower)


Roughly speaking, the back of the brain handles perception and the front of the brain handles action; the left hemisphere of the brain is the seat of logical thinking, while the right side of the brain begets intuitive thinking. The findings lend support to the view that males may excel at motor skills, while women may be better at integrating analysis and intuitive thinking.

"It is fascinating that we can see some of functional differences in men and women structurally," Verma told LiveScience. However, the results do not apply to individual men and women, she said. "Every individual could have part of both men and women in them," she said, referring to the connectivity patterns her team observed.

When the researchers compared the young people by age group, they saw the most pronounced brain differences among adolescents (13.4 to 17 years old), suggesting the sexes begin to diverge in the teen years. Males and females showed the greatest differences in inter-hemisphere brain connectivity during this time, with females having more connections between hemispheres primarily in the frontal lobe. These differences got smaller with age, with older females showing more widely distributed connections throughout the brain rather than just in the frontal lobe.

Currently, scientists can't quantify how much an individual has male- or female-like patterns of brain connectivity. Another lingering question is whether the structural differences result in differences in brain function, or whether differences in function result in structural changes.

The findings could also help scientists understand why certain diseases, such as autism, are more prevalent in males, Verma said.


http://news.yahoo.com/mens-brains-wired-differently-womens-200343976.html