The neurologist and psychiatrist Paul Julius Möbius attracted noteworthy public attention with numerous provocative theses with his book “On the physiological nonsense of women”, published in 1900. In it, he attests to women, to put it mildly, basically having lower cognitive abilities than men. It is proven that “parts of the brain that are extremely important for spiritual life (…) are less developed in women than in men.”
More than 100 years later, modern brain research paints a completely different picture. But there are still many prejudices and misunderstandings around the question: Is there a difference between the brains of the sexes and their abilities?
The size of the brain doesn’t matter
One difference between male and female brains is obvious: the male brain, with an average weight of 1,375 grams, is larger than the female brain, at 1,245 grams. But scientists agree: The size of our thinking organ does not allow any conclusions to be drawn about performance.
This is also shown, for example, by Albert Einstein’s brain: it was examined in detail after his death. Weighing just 1,230 grams, which corresponds to a living brain of around 1,350 grams, it is below the male average.
Do men and women think differently?
But there are also differences in the brain architecture: According to a US study from 2013, the two halves of the brain are more closely linked in female brains than in men, which in turn have a better connection within one hemisphere. This should explain gender-specific strengths such as greater language skills in women or better spatial imagination in men.
However, many researchers criticize the informative value of the results; There are actually minor deviations in special areas. However, the differences between individual individuals of one sex are significantly greater than between the sexes.
A mosaic of male and female parts
A group of scientists from Israel, Germany, and Switzerland who evaluated MRT scan images of over 1,400 human brains came to a clear conclusion. Their finding from the research published in 2015: There are no clearly female and male brains. Rather, the human brain resembles a mosaic of male and female parts that each person develops individually. It changes constantly throughout our lives, depending on what we learn and what experiences we have.
Men have a “bully center”
In the oldest areas of our central nervous system, however, there are small differences: This is where, for example, the nucleus preoptic medialis — a control center only a few millimeters in size that controls dominance, aggression, and the sex drive. This nerve center is larger in all-male mammals than in the female, and about twice as large in humans.
In women, these functions are neurologically separated from one another, but in men, they are coupled. This can be expressed in different behavior. For example, the willingness to have spontaneous sex outside of a relationship is actually significantly higher in men than in women.
Originally posted on Medium
