Posted on 12/03/2013 12:20:52 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
PHILADELPHIA — A new brain connectivity study from Penn Medicine published today in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences found striking differences in the neural wiring of men and women that’s lending credence to some commonly-held beliefs about their behavior.
n one of the largest studies looking at the “connectomes” of the sexes, Ragini Verma, PhD, an associate professor in the department of Radiology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and colleagues found greater neural connectivity from front to back and within one hemisphere in males, suggesting their brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action. In contrast, in females, the wiring goes between the left and right hemispheres, suggesting that they facilitate communication between the analytical and intuition.
“These maps show us a stark difference--and complementarity--in the architecture of the human brain that helps provide a potential neural basis as to why men excel at certain tasks, and women at others,” said Verma.
For instance, on average, men are more likely 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 equipped for multitasking and creating solutions that work for a group. They have a mentalistic approach, so to speak.
Past studies have shown sex differences in the brain, but the neural wiring connecting regions across the whole brain that have been tied to such cognitive skills has never been fully shown in a large population.
In the study, Verma and colleagues, including co-authors Ruben C. Gur, PhD, a professor of psychology in the department of Psychiatry, and Raquel E. Gur, MD, PhD, professor of Psychiatry, Neurology and Radiology, investigated the gender-specific differences in brain connectivity during the course of development in 949 individuals (521 females and 428 males) aged 8 to 22 years using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). DTI is water-based imaging technique that can trace and highlight the fiber pathways connecting the different regions of the brain, laying the foundation for a structural connectome or network of the whole brain.
This sample of youths was studied as part of the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort, a National Institute of Mental Health-funded collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania Brain Behavior Laboratory and the Center for Applied Genomics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
The brain is a roadmap of neural pathways linking many networks that help us process information and react accordingly, with behavior controlled by several of these sub-networks working in conjunction.
In the study, the researchers found that females displayed greater connectivity in the supratentorial region, which contains the cerebrum, the largest part of the brain, between the left and right hemispheres. Males, on the other hand, displayed greater connectivity within each hemisphere.
By contrast, the opposite prevailed in the cerebellum, the part of the brain that plays a major role in motor control, where males displayed greater inter-hemispheric connectivity and females displayed greater intra-hemispheric connectivity.
These connections likely give men an efficient system for coordinated action, where the cerebellum and cortex participate in bridging between perceptual experiences in the back of the brain, and action, in the front of the brain, according to the authors. The female connections likely facilitate integration of the analytic and sequential processing modes of the left hemisphere with the spatial, intuitive information processing modes of the right side.
The authors observed only a few gender differences in the connectivity in children younger than 13 years, but the differences were more pronounced in adolescents aged 14 to 17 years and young adults older than 17.
The findings were also consistent with a Penn behavior study, of which this imaging study was a subset of, that demonstrated pronounced sexual differences. Females outperformed males on attention, word and face memory, and social cognition tests. Males performed better on spatial processing and sensorimotor speed. Those differences were most pronounced in the 12 to 14 age range.
“It’s quite striking how complementary the brains of women and men really are,” said Dr. Ruben Gur. “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.”
Next steps are to quantify how an individual’s neural connections are different from the population; identify which neural connections are gender specific and common in both; and to see if findings from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies fall in line with the connectome data.
Co-authors of the study include Madhura Ingalhalikar, Alex Smith, Drew Parker, Theodore D. Satterthwaite, Mark A. Elliott, Kosha Ruparel, and Hakon Hakonarson of the Section of Biomedical Image Analysis and the Center for Biomedical Image Computing and Analytics.
Three articles (where comments are allowed - and as you'd expect interesting):
The Difference Between Men and Women’s Brains Revealed?
larry summers figured this out twenty years ago. and he didn’t need a study.
Now we need a study of the differences between the liberal brain and the human.
Short-circuits, probably.
Uh huh, Uh huh. IOW, if your wife tells you "No, it wasn't there it was at the other place," or "No, it wasn't him, it was his brother", etc. etc. ... JUST FORGET IT!
My wife gives me crap because I’m such a terrible multi-tasker lol. She never forgets when bills are due, who needs a Christmas present, what groceries we need, who’s birthday is coming up, how much we can spend etc. She’s extremely intelligent, but give her the task of putting my son’s lego set back together and you’d think I was asking her to do quantum mechanics. ;-)
First off, thanks for posting this
Second, the problem with an article like this is that it says nothing about what the actual experiments were and the actual findings were. This is narrative story speculation of potential implications or understandings of the results of these experiments, not a description of the experiment itself and the actual experimental results — except for one sentence almost buried in the article.
For example, “ones” are big cool buzzwords now, but not necessarily meaningful in the manners they are often used. This article should describe how they are defining the “connectome” and the scientific methods they used to assess the connections etc...
As written, so many of these press release articles from university PR departments are modern just so stories and the interesting hard science is hardly touched upon.
I seem to remember a bunch of women that couldn’t see any evidence that O.J. Simpson committed double homicide.
What kind of brain is that?
A study was needed for this?
I suspect that either their technology was not up to the task or they are not looking in the right places.
Anyone who have observed children at play can tell you that their behaviors and how they choose to play are markedly different.
And I certainly believe that the architecture of the brain for the most part drives behavior particularly in the very young.
From the earliest age of children it is easy to observe the differences in the way boys and girls behave.
But it was a group of women who got GZ off, no? Although I’m too young to really know the particulars off the top of my head, wasn’t the jury comprised of mostly blacks? Plus, if you factor in that OJ is famous and that the case took place in CA, you have your answer.
One of the strongest, most obvious differences I have found between the sexes is the sense of compass direction. Almost any woman couldn’t point out west at sunset.
Is it just me, or does David Addison’s facial features look very much like Bruce Willis?
Also want to say thanks to the OP of this thread (sorry, but I don’t recall the name right now). Very interesting.
I guess that multi-tasking comes in real handy when deciding who to vote for, say Bill Clinton and Barack Obama...
>>One of the strongest, most obvious differences I have found between the sexes is the sense of compass direction. Almost any woman couldn’t point out west at sunset.
For my wife, “north” is always the direction she is currently facing.
Don’t generalize.
I have an excellent sense of direction and have known many men who don’t and won’t admit it.
According to the little map in my head, I am currently facing NW.
:)
I used to have a decent sense of direction but then I married a woman with an excellent sense of one I stopped cluttering my brain with that stuff about 50 years ago. These days, I couldn't find my way out of a paper bag without asking my wife.
Well, if this study has validity, they can now test an equal number of people who describe themselves as homosexuals and see what each of their brains looks like as compared with the preponderance of the brains of the people born with their gender. This could either support or debunk the homosexual lobby claim that homosexuals were meant to be the opposite gender.
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