This is an article from the NYT on the various differences between male and female brains, as well as their links to autism. Interesting points are listed below:
BUT, let us keep in mind that these differences appear when you look at GROUPS. INDIVIDUALS are widely varried and could fall on either side of the spectrum.
* the average man's cerebrum (the area in the front of the brain concerned with higher thinking) is 9 percent larger than the average woman's.
* men also have a larger amygdala (an almond shaped structure in the center of the brain involved in processing fear and emotion), and more nerve cells.
* In women, the connective tissue that allows communication between the two hemispheres of the brain tends to be thicker, perhaps facilitating interchange.
* This may explain why one study from Yale found that when performing language tasks, women are likely to activate both hemispheres, whereas males (on average) activate only the left hemisphere.
* On average, males finish faster and score higher than females on a test that requires the taker to visualize an object's appearance after it is rotated in three dimensions. The same is true for map-reading tests, and for embedded-figures tests, which ask subjects to find a component shape hidden within a larger design.
* Males are over-represented in the top percentiles on college-level math tests and tend to score higher on mechanics tests than females do.
* Females average higher scores than males on tests of emotion recognition, social sensitivity and language ability.
* girls tend to talk earlier than boys, and in the second year of life their vocabularies grow at a faster rate.
* One-year-old girls also make more eye contact than boys of their age.
* On average, at 24 hours old, more male infants will look at a mechanical mobile suspended above them, whereas more female infants will look at a human face. [I am suspicious of this one.]
* the amount of prenatal testosterone, which is produced by the fetus and measurable in the amniotic fluid in which the baby is bathed in the womb, predicts how sociable a child will be. The higher the level of prenatal testosterone, the less eye contact the child will make as a toddler, and the slower the child will develop language.
* Males obviously produce far more prenatal testosterone than females do, but levels vary considerably even across members of the same sex. In fact, it may not be your sex per se that determines what kind of brain you have, but your prenatal hormone levels.
Posted by bluprnt at August 9, 2005 02:16 PMI find that stuff fascinating. There are aslso some interesting differences when you start looking at handedness too - like left-handed males having a corpus callosum thge same size as those in females. Then there are the hormonal aspects relating to homosexuality - I think hormonal activity in the womb can affect it.
Posted by: Graeme at August 14, 2005 01:29 PM