Male and female brain types a myth, they’re basically the same

While specific parts show sex differences, an individual brain only rarely has all “male” traits or all “female” traits, researchers say.

Are there really any difference between a man’s brain and women’s brain?

The research puts paid to the theory that having a “male” or “female” brain can affect people’s success in the jobs market. “Rather, even when considering only the small group of brain features that show the largest sex/gender differences, each brain is a unique mosaic of features, some of which may be more common in females compared with males, others may be more common in males compared with females, and still others may be common in both females and males”.

Male and female brain types, described as quite different, is a myth, says a team of researchers from Israel and Germany – human brains can not be categorized into two distinct classes: male brain and female brain.

They published their work in a paper released Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It was based on MRI scans that focused on the anatomy of more than 1,400 brains. Both studies came back with the same result: the human brain can not be successfully divided into male or female.

They did find some regions of the brain that tended to indicate sex differences.

The researchers also used a similar approach to analyse psychological and behavioural scores from two prior studies that covered more than 5,000 participants, and again they had similar results. They found 29 brain regions including the hippocampus and the inferior frontal gyrus that generally seem to be different sizes in self-identified males and females.

According to their statistics, in only 6 percent of all cases, the brains would demonstrate traits consisted with one of the three designated areas.

Your brain makeup doesn’t have much to do with your gender as it turns out.

“Most people are in the middle”, says Daphna Joel at Tel Aviv University. Because, as Cahill said, there is indeed a significant difference of how are our brains our wired, depending on our gender.

The concept of a “male” or “female” brain is an old one, the professor tells New Scientist.

“There is no sense in talking about male nature and female nature”. Part of the belief states that male brains secrete testosterone, making them more masculine. A growing body of evidence suggests that development is a give-and-take between genetic, environmental and epigenetic (above the genome) factors, all of which are acting in parallel and influencing one another in complicated ways.