HUMAN brains appear to come in at least two flavours: male and female. Now variations in the density of the synapses that connect neurons may help to explain differences in how men and women think.
Women and men tend to excel at different cognitive tasks, but although brain size and neuron density differ between the sexes, these don鈥檛 seem to correlate with cognitive differences. So at Complutense University in Madrid, Spain, and colleagues counted instead the number of synapses.
The brain tissue came from the left temporal cortex, involved in emotional and social processing, of four women and four men with epilepsy. The tissue itself was healthy, having been removed to allow doctors to access underlying damaged areas. The men had up to 52 per cent more synapses per brain 鈥渓ayer鈥� in this region than the women (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, ).
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While the effect of high synaptic density in this region is unknown, the team suspects that there may be other regions where women out-synapse men.
The Human Brain 鈥� With one hundred billion nerve cells, the complexity is mind-boggling. Learn more in our cutting edge special report.
