You've no doubt rolled your eyes at articles claiming that there's such as a thing as a male or female brain.
Male brains supposedly are more interested in making lists, reading non-fiction, find maps easy-to-read and can spot grammatical errors easily whereas female brains focus on beauty and technique, can easily chat to people and have little interest in history and lack interest in technology or gadgets.
Well, that's all bullshit and there's science to back it up.
A study at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine scanned over 6,000 MRIs and found that the hippocampus is more or less exactly the same size across men and women. Dr. Lise Eliot said that "sex differences in the brain are irresistible to those looking to explain stereotypic differences between men and women."
"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."
The hippocampus is the area of the brain often linked to short and long term memories and connecting the emotions to the senses. It was previously understood that the hippocampus was much larger in females, which explained the stereotype that women are more emotional and have a better verbal memory than men. As this study shows, that's just not the case.
"Many people believe there is such a thing as a 'male brain' and a 'female brain'," said Eliot. "But when you look beyond the popularised studies - at collections of all the data - you often find that the differences are minimal."
Looks like Ron Burgundy was talking crap, basically.
Via Wired.com
