A map of the human brain may in fact be a two-volume edition, divided by gender, according to a new study that found significant differences between how the male and female brains are hard-wired.
Males tended to have have stronger front-to-back circuits and links between perception and action, while women had stronger left-to-right links between reasoning and intuition, according to University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine researchers who imaged the brains of 949 adolescents and young adults.
Their maps of the brain’s so-called connectome, published online Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, matched observed behavioral differences between the sexes. Women did better at tests of attention, word and face memory and cognition. Men did better on spatial processing, motor skills and sensorimotor speed.
The results lend weight to growing evidence that humans have formed strong adaptive complementarity, suggesting that biological evolution predisposes the species to divide gender roles. That implication is sure to fuel debate over the roles of nature versus nurture and the interplay of function and structure within the human brain. But they also could inform treatment of neurological disorders known to vary by age and sex, such as autism and schizophrenia.
“There is biology to some of the behavior we see among men and women,” said Ragini Verma, a University of Pennsylvania biomedical imaging analyst and lead author of the study.
“In the population, men have stronger front-back connectivity, and women have inter-hemispheric or left-right connectivity more than the men. It’s not that one or the other gender lacks the connectivity altogether, it’s just that one is stronger than the other,” Verma said.
That means men may be quicker on the perception-action path, while women better integrate the analytic side of the brain with the intuitive and social side. . .