#brain differences

In other words, male and female brains are more similar than different.

Nothing here said that brains have a "gender" that can be found in the opposite sex.

Also, brains are plastic and will mould and shape to societal expectations or desires on the part of the individual.

Smaller brain does not equal dumber. They found that women outperformed men in science when the women were not exposed to sexist expectations while growing up.

Men have a larger amygdala, but women who become mothers tend to have an activated amygdala for the rest of their lives. Women have more grey matter. It's possible smaller brains have more grey matter to compensate.

Neuroimaging Study Reveals Brain Difference in People With ADHD

New Post has been published on http://www.newsnish.com/technology/expert-advice/malefemale-brain-differences-big-data-says-not-so-much/

Male/Female Brain Differences? Big Data Says Not So Much

“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.”

Illustration: Simon Letch.

A research study at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science has debunked the widely-held 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, headed a team of students in a meta-analysis of structural MRI volumes that found no significant difference in hippocampal size between men and women. Meta-analysis is 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.”

The study appears in the journal NeuroImage.

Meta-analyses by other investigators have also disproved other purported sex differences in the brain, Dr. Eliot noted. There is no difference in the size of the corpus callosum, white matter that allows the two sides of the brain to communicate, nor do men and women differ in the way their left and right hemispheres process language.

Research Shows Brain Differences in Children with Dyslexia and Dysgraphia

Newswise — University of Washington research shows that using a single category of learning disability to qualify students with written language challenges for special education services is not scientifically supported. Some students only have writing disabilities, but some have both reading and writing disabilities.

The study, published online in NeuroImage: Clinical, is among the first to identify structural white matter and functional gray matter differences in the brain between children with dyslexia and dysgraphia, and between those children and typical language learners. The researchers say the findings underscore the need to provide instruction tailored to each of these specific learning disabilities, though that is currently not mandated under federal or state law.

“This shows that there’s a brain basis for these different disabilities,” said co-author Virginia Berninger, a psychologist who heads the UW Learning Disabilities Center, funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. “So they require different diagnoses, and different instruction. We’ve got to start acknowledging this.”

The study involved 40 children in grades 4 to 9, including 17 diagnosed with dyslexia — persisting difficulty with word reading and spelling — and 14 diagnosed with dysgraphia, persisting difficulty with handwriting, along with nine typical language learners. The children were asked to write the next letter in the alphabet following a letter they were shown, to write the missing letter in a word spelling, to rest without any task, and to plan a text about astronauts.

The children used a fiber-optic pen developed at the UW that allowed researchers to record their writing in real time while their active brain connections were measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI.

The three groups differed from each other in written language and cognitive tasks. The control group had more white matter connections, which facilitate functional connections in gray matter for language processing and cognitive thinking. By contrast, children with dyslexia and dysgraphia showed less white matter connections and more functional connections to gray matter locations — in other words, their brains had to work harder to accomplish the same tasks.

“Their brains were less efficient for language processing,” said lead author Todd Richards, a UW professor of radiology.

The results, Berninger said, show that the two specific learning disabilities are not the same because the white matter connections and patterns and number of gray matter functional connections were not the same in the children with dyslexia and dysgraphia — on either the writing or cognitive thinking tasks.

Federal law guarantees a free and appropriate public education to children with learning disabilities, but does not require that specific types of learning disabilities are diagnosed, or that schools provide evidence-based instruction for dyslexia or dysgraphia. Consequently, the two conditions are lumped together under a general category for learning disabilities, Berninger said, and many schools do not recognize them or offer specialized instruction for either one.

“There’s just this umbrella category of learning disability,” said Berninger. “That’s like saying if you’re sick you qualify to see a doctor, but without specifying what kind of illness you have, can the doctor prescribe appropriate treatment?”

“Many children struggle in school because their specific learning disabilities are not identified and they are not provided appropriate instruction,” Berninger said. Recent UW research published in February in Computers & Education shows that computerized instruction has tremendous potential to help time-strapped teachers in regular classrooms provide such instruction for children with dyslexia and dysgraphia, but only if they are correctly diagnosed.

“Dyslexia and dysgraphia are not the only kinds of learning disabilities. One in five students in the United States may have some kind of a specific learning disability,” Berninger said. “We just can’t afford to put 20 percent of children in special education classes. There just aren’t the dollars.”

Other co-authors are Thomas Grabowski, director of the UW Integrated Brain Imaging Center; Peter Boord, a UW senior fellow in radiology; UW research scientists Katie Askren, Paul Robinson and Kevin Yagle; UW undergraduate students Desiree Gulliford, Zoe Mestre and Olivia Welker; and William Nagy, a professor of education at Seattle Pacific University.

Source: University of Washington

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Now after 2 years on female hormones, I seem to have a maximum capacity on everything. I can usually only do one task for a couple of hours before I get bored with it and want to move on to something else. And I seem to have completely lost that ability to obsess on just one thing. It’s nearly impossible to get in that laser-focused “zen” mode where it feels like nothing in the world exists except the thing I’m obsessing about, my mind is much more likely to just jump around from one thing to another for no reason, or suddenly randomly feel like what I’m doing isn’t important anymore.