When brain scans are done on men and women there is a difference between the brain patterns. what impact will this have on relationships between the sexes?

-- Beth Ellis (wbellis@hci.net), August 27, 2002

Answers

I don't think anyone really knows because (some interesting hypotheses notwithstanding) no one really knows how such differences manifest themselves, if at all, in experience and behavior. Indeed, don't be overwhelmed by any single report about what such differences consist in even structually. My experience is that the "consensus" about such differences changes once or twice per decade.

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), August 27, 2002.

Let's refine the question a little: are there "tasks" which will correlate with different brain "patterns" in men and women? Some examples of tasks: lexical retrieval, priming, word-picture matching, etc. The answer is yes, many studies using PET, fMRI and evoked potentials have shown sex differences and some studies have not. Please remember, though, that there are also tasks which show different brain patterns for left vs right handers, as well as other subject variables. It might not be too much of a caricature of brain imaging research to say that every brain difference that has been systematically searched for has been found.

-- Harry Whitaker (hwhitake@nmu.edu), August 29, 2002.