It turns out that men and women aren’t that different after all.
A new study has found that, though we might think that men and women have different brains, that’s not the case.
“Our results demonstrate that…human brains cannot be categorized into two distinct classes: male brain/female brain,” the study reads.
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The researchers used sets of MRIs and measured the volume of grey matter (which contains the core nerve cells) and white matter (which transmits nervous system signals), as well as other data, in the brains of more than 1,400 people.
There were some differences, however. For one — and this probably will come as a surprise to men who think women remember everything — the hippocampus, which is associated with memory, was larger in men on average compared to that of women.
But for the most part, there was very little structurally that could identify the sex a particular brain belonged to. Some women had larger hippocampi, while some men had smaller ones.
The researchers also studied datasets that looked at gender stereotypical behaviours such as scrapbooking or playing video games — and only 0.1 per cent of those involved in the study displayed any stereotypically male or stereotypically female behaviours.
In 2013, a study out of the University of Pennsylvania found that there were differences between the connectivity of men and women’s brains did differ. In men, for example, there was greater neural connectivity from the front of the brain to the back suggesting that their brains are built to make it easier to go between perception and co-ordinated action; in women, the connection goes from left to right suggesting that their brains make it easier to go between the analytical and intuition.
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