Male and female brains look similar
Gender stereotypes don’t extend to the brain. Researchers prove that male and female brains look pretty much the same.
Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science researchers debunked the belief that the hippocampus, a crucial part of the brain that consolidates new memories and helps connect emotions to the senses, is larger in females than in males.
Lise Eliot, PhD, associate professor of neuroscience at the university’s medical school and het team found no significant difference in hippocampal size between men and women.
They used meta-analysis, a statistical technique that allows researchers to combine the findings from many independent studies into a comprehensive review. The team examined findings from 76 published papers, involving more than 6,000 healthy individuals.
“Sex differences in the brain are irresistible to those looking to explain stereotypic differences between men and women,” said Dr. Eliot. “They often make a big splash, in spite of being based on small samples. But as we explore multiple datasets and are able to coalesce very large samples of males and females, we find these differences often disappear or are trivial.”
Hippocampi are located on both sides of the brain, under the cerebral cortex. The team’s findings challenge the common claim that a disproportionately larger hippocampus explains females’ tendency toward greater emotional expressiveness, stronger interpersonal skills, and better verbal memory.
“Many people believe there is such a thing as a ‘male brain’ and a ‘female brain,'” Dr. Eliot said. “But when you look beyond the popularized studies — at collections of all the data — you often find that the differences are minimal.”
