New findings contradict popular belief.
By Raif Karerat
A study conducted at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science has debunked the widely-accepted belief that the hippocampus, an integral portion of the brain that consolidates new memories and helps connect emotions to the senses, is larger in females than in males.
“Sex differences in the brain are irresistible to those looking to explain stereotypic differences between men and women,” said the study’s lead researcher, Lise Eliot. “And they often make a big splash. But as we explore multiple data sets and are able to coalesce very large samples of males and females, we find these differences often disappear or are trivial.”
In order to arrive at their conclusion, Eliot and her team meta-analyzed findings from 76 published papers, involving structural MRI scans of more than 6,000 healthy individuals, according to a press release from the university.
“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.”
Meta-analyses by other investigators have also disproved other purported sex differences in the brain, Dr. Eliot noted. There is neither a 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.