Male brain, female brain: the hidden difference; gender does affect how our brains work - but in

surprising ways
Psychology Today,
Today Nov, 1985 by Doreen Kimura
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In particular, Harshman and I found, on analyzing data from people with damage to only one hemisphere,
that regardless of which hemisphere was injured, women's vocabulary--the ability to define words--was
impaired. I then found this was true whether I looked at anterior or posterior damage in either hemisphere,
suggesting that defining words is a function of the whole brain in women. Men had problems in defining
words only after left-hemisphere damage. So for this kind of thinking at least, women's brains do indeed
seem to be more diffusely organized.

I found different patterns of brain organization using other verbal tests, ones in which people were asked
either to generate words beginning with a certain letter or to describe what they should do in various social
situations. Other people have found that damage to the left anterior part of the brain causes the most
difficulty in performing such tasks. I found this to be true for both men and women. So for this task, men's
and women's brains were quite similarly organized.

In short, we are finding that, depending on the particular intellectual function we're studying, women's
brains may be more, less or equally diffusely organized compared with men's. No single rule holds for all
aspects of thinking. When it comes to speaking and making hand movements that contribute to motor skill,
the brain seems to be very focally organized in women compared with men. This may relate to the fact that
girls generally speak earlier, articulate better and also have better fine motor control of the hands. Also, a
larger proportion of women than men are right-handed, and unequivocally so. But when it comes to
certain, more-abstract tasks, such as defining words, women's brains are more diffusely organized than
men's, although men and women don't differ in overall vocabulary ability.

I have been describing the average state of affairs. But there is reason to believe that there is a lot of
variation in brain organization from person to person. We know, for example, that the brains of left-handers
and right-handers are organized somewhat differently, yet on average they function quite similarly.

In addition to individual variations, there are some interesting combined effects. Harshman and his
colleagues at the University of Western Ontario found, for example, when they looked separately at people
with above-average reasoning ability that sex and hand preference interacted. Left-handed men with
above-average reasoning ability showed poorer scores on certain spatial tests, as well as other tests, than
did right-handed men; but left-handed women were better at these tests than were right-handed women.
When Harshman and coworkers looked at people with below-average reasoning ability, just the opposite
happened: Now the left-handed men performed better than right-handed men on spatial tasks, but
left-handed women did worse than the right-handed women.

What does this confusion suggest? It must mean that brain organization for such problem-solving abilities is
related not only to sex and hand preference but also to overall intelligence level. And more to the point, it
indicates that we have probably not one or two types of brain organization but several.

How are these different patterns of brain organization determined? There have been several suggestions in
recent years that they may be related to the organism's rate of development both before and after birth.
Biopsychologist Jerre Levy of the University of Chicago suggested some time ago that the two halves of the
body, including the brain hemispheres, might grow at different rates in boys and girls, even before birth.
The left hemisphere may develop more quickly in girls, and the right hemisphere in boys, thus favoring
verbal skills in girls and spatial skills in boys. This idea has persisted in modified form in much of the
literature on sex differences.

A recent report by biologist Ernest Nordeen and psychobiologist Pauline Yahr of the University of California
at Irvine on the effect of injecting hormones into the brain of newborn rats suggested that even the
hypothalamus, a very basic regulating system, is asymmetrically organized for sexual behavior; injections on
the left or right side affected sex-typical behavior differently. So although it may seem a bit farfetched at
first, there do appear to be basic asymmetries in the developing organism and these asymmetries may well
have far-reaching repercussions for later differences between the sexes.

Functions such as speech and spatial ability traditionally have been thought to depend primarily on the
cerebral cortex. Although we should not dismiss the idea that deeper brain structures contribute something
to these abilities as well, it would be particularly interesting if there were sex-related differences in the
structure of the cortex.

Neuropsychologist Marian Diamond of the University of California at Berkeley, comparing cortical thickness
in male and female rats, did find that the right cortex is thicker in males at most ages, while the left cortex is
thicker in females but only at some ages (see "A Love Affair with the brain," Psychology Today, November
1984). Also very suggestive is her finding that, when ovaries are removed at birth, the female rat develops a
pattern of hemispheric dominance more like that of the male.

These studies on anatomical asymmetries in the brain are in a very early stage, of course, but they indicate
quite strongly that the biological sex differences in brain organization are probably dynamic, rather than a
crystallized pattern that is laid down entirely by the genes. At various periods in life, different brain
structures may be undergoing more- or less-rapid growth, and patterns of brain organization will vary from
time to time as a result. This may very well go on throughout a person's life, in fact, since hormonal
environments are in lifelong flux.

The role of sex hormones in prenatal development is quite dramatic and profound (see "What Are Little
Boys and Girls Made of?" box). It may also be appreciable in adult life, even affecting cognitive abilities in
men and in women. While hormonal changes occur in both sexes over a variety of short and long cycles, the
changes in women during stages of the menstrual cycle have been most thoroughly studied. For example,
there is some evidence that spatial ability in women may vary monthly as natural levels of sex hormones in
the bloodstream change; it may be best during the phase when the level of the female sex hormone
estrogen is lowest.

In contrast to these findings, Elizabeth Hampson, one of my graduate students, has found that women
perform best on tests of motor skill when their female sex hormones are at their highest level. So, as in brain
organization, the pattern we see may very well depend on the particular function that we study.

What do all these findings tell us about the inherent capabilities of the two sexes? And what can we, as a
result, deduce about the abilities of an individual man or woman? The fact seems inescapable that men and
women do differ genetically, physiologically and in many important ways psychologically. This should not
be surprising to us, since as a species we have a long biological history of having two sexual forms and have
had a sexual division of labor dating back perhaps several million years. Men and women probably have
been evolving different advantages for a wide range of activities for at least hundreds of thousands of years.
In short, given two genetically different sexes, we can expect differing behavioral capabilities extending even
beyond directly sexual roles.

But having said all that, I also have a number of important caveats. First, biological sex itself has turned out
to be much more variable and dynamic than we ever imagined. And brain-organization patterns are even
more variable from person to person, and probably even within the same person at different times. Further,
on most tests of cognitive ability there is enormous overlap of men and women. We strain to look for
differences and, of course, tend to emphasize the few we find.
Given these facts, it follows that while genital sex is related to our mental capabilities, it is going to be a very
poor screening device for intellectual assessment. Numerous environmental events interact with our genetic
heritage from prenatal development onward, and the human brain is extraordinarily malleable and variable.
Thus, we can predict very little about an individual's mental capabilities based on his or her sex. A number
of men and women can and do excel in activities that, on average, favor the other sex. There may be no
inherent characteristics unique to the brains of either sex that necessarily limit the intellectual achievements
of individual men or women.

COPYRIGHT 1985 Sussex Publishers, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group

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