Male vs. Female Brains - Brain Differences and What We Can Learn from Them

Both males and females start off with a basic "female brain". Then a testosterone surge in the 8th week burns of the "communication centers" of the brain to almost nothing while spurring growth in sections that govern sex and aggression. As a consequence, girls are more interested in nurture games and communication while boys want to tumble and run around.

These brain differences make a baby girl more observant of faces while male babies get distracted easily and focus more on mechanical objects. A female seeks to understand facial expressions and keep eye contact. As a result her ability to recognize a persons attention towards her and what the attention is communicating (happiness/anger) comes to a girl before she can even talk intelligently. Her skills at observing others, knowing what their mother/social milieu is expressing are highly developed. Boys on the other hand are not so socially sensitive. They don't notice the nuance of a facial expression or tone of voice the way a girl can AND also they don't seek social acceptance in the same way that a girl would.

So it is understandable the girls become better at language while boys are better are spatial organization and mechanical stuff. This creates a social environment where women are mostly in a connected group of friends, follows the social convention of her group, is an expert at body language and often, verbal manipulation. For example a young boys may fight to dominate while a girl would use language and make the person think they are being selfish - both getting their way through different means.

What this all means is not that each sex is programmed with a specific brain function and is that way for life, it just means these are the advantages and disadvantages that each sex brings to the table. Brain plasticity is a theory that has developed around studies that show the brain adapts to its environment, growing new brain connections to learn a new skill and decreasing them if its not needed. In other words, your brain keeps changing throughout your life. The old belief that the brain stayed one way throughout your life has been disproved.

Women playing Tetris (an old computer game) over 10 weeks have improved spatial ability. To the point where it is a man is not practicing as much as the women, she can easily beat him at his natural "spatial organization" ability. Men too can develop a nuance for language, communication and understanding body language.

The old myth that women can't do math as good as men has also been diprovedn . Women use different parts of the brain to do math, but when they do the practice they build the nueral connections to be just as good as men

Men are seen as the more aggressive of the two. Often they are seen as the only aggressive sex. That is a misconception. Both male and female have aggressive circuits in their brains but apply it differently. Women focus on verbal consensus to get their way - maybe using the phrase, 'you are being selfish' rather than a physical punch. A male will seek to physically dominate as his sex and aggression centers are larger. It is conceivable that is women were "in charge" they would create a social structure of verbal and psychological manipulation as opposed to outright physical force. In today's age, more civilized times (for some people, in some segments of society) men use the art of persuasion to attain political of business power. This is a page right from a woman's book. In fact, it is no coincidence that women have become more politically active - the times allow their specific skills to be used to gain social influence.

Many women try to change their man, making him more like a woman. They want him to communicate more fully, with more emotion etc. But a man simply doesn't have the connections with the 'amygdala' of the brain, which women do. So emotional expression of the type women enjoy and are well developed in is not something that comes naturally to many men. It can be developed in time with the interest of the man involved. But if your focus is to change him you are leading yourself down a relationship you will hate in the long run.

On the other side, men can't understand why women want to talk 'so much' (It's their communication centers of their brains). Or why women demand constant attention. (i.e if a man seeks to reach the 'top of the pack' a woman wants to be the center of attention of the pack)

A little girl will perceive her parent not looking at her when she is talking as someone who is not 'listening' to her. Noticing facial expression and keeping eye-contact is very important to a woman. It shows you are listing and validates her value to you. If you are watching TV and she complains you are not listening, this is exactly what it means. A woman expects your body language to be directed to her to show you are paying attention. This is what she would do so it is what she expects you (her man) to do as well. She sees talking as an important social bonding experience and she will feel that her man must communicate with her as she does with her girl friends. A man simply doesn't have the size of communication centers in the brain as women do. It's simply not something they are naturally inclined towards.

A little boy will rush off to explore and jump onto a jungle Jim to go down the slide%u2026 while a little girl will look to her parent for approval. This is not because a girl is more insecure, it's because she is seeking social approval (in this case from her mothers facial expression that this is OK).

A woman always wants to be the center of attention and that will be one of the main activities she engages in. So if she is not already the center of her social circle, her actions and words will be measured to hopefully attain that position. Since her goal is to be the center of attention (on some level), her social groups conception of dating, relationships and sex is what she will perceive as the norm (no matter how abnormal they may be to the rest of culture and society). If she is in a group that has no respect for each other and give each other bad advice, then it is best for a man to move on as she is unlikely to change. To a woman her group of friends are almost always right. Her communication centers creates a strong bond within her little group. If her group has low self esteem and lack of self respect, she will overlook these qualities so she can fit in and hopefully become the center.

For relationships there is one very important lesson you can take from this.

It is that men and women ARE different. We have just begun learning more and more about how men and women really are and how they can attain better lives. Now more than ever, self-improvement has become necessary for both men and women in different ways. Whether the reason is to gain a competitive advantage at work in understanding systems or reading your competitors, keeping in mind that everyone has different skills in dating and relationships because of how they see the world (i.e. brain design) it is easier to be more understanding and compassionate for others. This helps you develop patience, understanding and makes life more fun.

Most of all, men and women have to STOP expecting the other to behave like them. A woman will talk a lot. A guy will often ignore it. A woman will want a great deal of romance. These are the natural inclinations of men and women. To try and change your mate is to try and change their very brain structures of what makes them men and women. You can acquire new skills and your brain will 'grow' to help you accomplish your goals. But you can't change its basic functions.

Even if a woman beats a man at spatial games or a man beats a woman in social effectiveness, the parts of the brain being used for the same or similar functions are different. So even when one sex is as good or better than the opposite sex at something that is their domain, different aspects of their brains will utilized to do these same tasks. Brain scanning done of males and females doing IQ tests, for example, have shown that even with similar scores on the same tests, girls use different areas of their brains to solves the same problems.

So men and women will always be different even with similar skill sets. Respect this difference, enjoy this difference and you can always develop healthy relationships.

[Article and image are from here.]

Sex differences in the brain are sexy. As MRI scanning grows ever more sophisticated, neuroscientists keep refining their search for male-female brain differences that will answer the age-old question, "Why can't a woman think like a man?" (and vice-versa).

Social cognition is one realm in which the search for brain sex differences should be especially fruitful. Females of all ages outperform males on tests requiring the recognition of emotion or relationships among other people. Sex differences in empathy emerge in infancy and persist throughout development, though the gap between adult women and men is larger than between girls and boys. The early appearance of any sex difference suggests it is innately programmed-selected for through evolution and fixed into our behavioral development through either prenatal hormone exposure or early gene expression differences. On the other hand, sex differences that grow larger through childhood are likely shaped by social learning, a consequence of the very different lifestyle, culture and training that boys and girls experience in every human society.

At first glance, studies of the brain seem to offer a way out of this age-old nature/nurture dilemma. Any difference in the structure or activation of male and female brains is indisputably biological. However, the assumption that such differences are also innate or "hardwired" is invalid, given all we've learned about the plasticity, or malleability of the brain. Simply put, experiences change our brains.

Recent research by Peg Nopoulos, Jessica Wood and colleagues at the University of Iowa illustrates just how difficult it is to untangle nature and nurture, even at the level of brain structure. A first study, published in March 2008 found that one subdivision of the ventral prefrontal cortex-an area involved in social cognition and interpersonal judgment-is proportionally larger in women, compared to men. (Men's brains are about 10 percent larger than women's, overall, so any comparison of specific brain regions must be scaled in proportion to this difference.) This subdivision, known as the straight gyrus (SG), is a narrow strip of cerebral cortex running along the midline on the undersurface of the frontal lobe. Wood and colleagues found the SG to be about 10 percent larger in the thirty women they studied, compared to thirty men (after correcting for males' larger brain size). What's more, they found that the size of the SG correlated with a widely-used test of social cognition, so that individuals (both male and female) who scored higher in interpersonal awareness also tended to have larger SGs.

In their article, Wood and colleagues speculate about the evolutionary basis for this sex difference. Perhaps, since women are the primary child-rearers, their brains have become programmed to develop a larger SG, to prepare them to be sensitive nurturers. Prenatal sex hormones are known to alter behavior and certain brain structures in other mammals. Perhaps such hormones-or sex-specific genes-may enhance the development of females' SG (or dampen the development of males') leading to inborn differences in social cognition.

The best way to test this hypothesis is to look at children. If the sex difference in the SG is present early in life, this strengthens the idea that it is innately programmed. Wood and Nopoulos therefore conducted a second study with colleague Vesna Murko, in which they measured the same frontal lobe areas in children between 7 and 17 years of age.

But here the results were most unexpected: they found that the SG is actually larger in boys ! What's more, the same test of interpersonal awareness showed that skill in this area correlated with smaller SG, not larger, as in adults. The authors acknowledge that their findings are "complex," and argue that the reversal between childhood and adulthood reflects the later maturation of boys' brains, compared to girls. (Adolescents' brains undergo a substantial "pruning" or reduction in gray matter volume during adolescence, which happens about two years earlier in girls, compared to boys.)

However, in both studies, Wood and colleagues added another test that reminds us to be cautious when interpreting any finding about sex differences in the brain. Instead of simply dividing their subjects by biological sex, they also gave each subject a test of psychological "gender:" a questionnaire that assesses each person's degree of masculinity vs. femininity-regardless of their biological sex-based on their interests, abilities and personality type. And in both adults and children, this measure of "gender" also correlated with SG size, albeit in just as complicated a way as the correlation between "sex" and SG size. (Larger SG correlated with more feminine personality in adults but less feminine personality in children.)

In other words, there does seem to be a relationship between SG size and social perception, but it is not a simple male-female difference. Rather, the SG appears to reflect a person's "femininity" better than one's biological sex: women who are relatively less feminine show a correspondingly smaller SG compared to women who are more feminine, and ditto for men.

This finding-that brain structure correlates as well or better with psychological "gender" than with simple biological "sex"-is crucial to keep in mind when considering any comparisons of male and female brains. Yes, men and women are psychologically different and yes, neuroscientists are uncovering many differences in brain anatomy and physiology which seem to explain our behavioral differences. But just because a difference is biological doesn't mean it is "hard-wired." Individuals' gender traits-their preference for masculine or feminine clothes, careers, hobbies and interpersonal styles-are inevitably shaped more by rearing and experience than is their biological sex. Likewise, their brains, which are ultimately producing all this masculine or feminine behavior, must be molded-at least to some degree-by the sum of their experiences as a boy or girl.

And so, any time scientists report a difference between male and female brains, especially in adults, it begs the question, "Nature or nurture?" Is women's larger SG the cause of their social sensitivity, or the consequence of living some 30 years in a group that practices greater empathetic responding? Wood and colleagues are among the few neuroscientists to analyze male-female brain differences for their relationship to gender type, as opposed to strict biological sex. Their findings do not prove that social learning is the cause of male-female differences in the brain, but they do challenge the idea that such brain differences are a simple product of the Y chromosome.