Neural Wiring: Dependant on the Plumbing or Not?

Or maybe it's somehow part of what determines the plumbing.

Robin Lloyd
Special to LiveScience
Thu Apr 20, 10:00 AM ET

Men and women are actually from the same planet, but scientists now have the first strong evidence that the emotional wiring of the sexes is fundamentally different.

It ends by saying that the wiring in the brain is the same, it just uses different programmin' in men's and women's brains. Well, good! But I wonder how goes it for a transvestite? I'm just askin' . . . Are Both sides trying to use the equipment at the same time?

This part, how we're so physiologically similar, is very cool, though not particularly helpful to me right now 'sfar's I can see. But I do love saying am-yg-da-la.

The new study focused on activity in the amygdala, a cluster of neurons found on both sides of the brain and involved for both sexes in hormone and other involuntary functions, as well as emotions and perception. Cahill already knew that the sexes use different sides of their brains to process and store long-term memories, based on his earlier work. He also has shown that a particular drug, Propranolol, can block memory differently in men and women.

Cahill and his co-author Lisa Kilpatrick, scanned the brains of 36 healthy men and 36 healthy women. The subjects were told to relax with their eyes closed during the scan, so that differences between the sexes could be studied at rest rather than during heavy lifting like accessing memories.

The scans also showed that men's and women's amygdalas are polar opposites in terms of connections with other parts of the brain. In men, the right amygdala is more active and shows more connections with other brain regions. In women, the same is true of the left amygdala.

Scientists still have to find out if one's sex also affects the wiring of other regions of the brain. It could be that while men and women have basically the same hardware, it's the software instructions and how they are put to use that makes the sexes seem different.

emotions and perception . . .

So, girls may indeed be cuter than boys, but that doesn't have much to do with what attracts us to them.

She's got hers. He's got his. Together they gotta make those two lives mesh. Ostensibly for gene replication though on so many individual levels, reproductive sex is just not in the plan. Non-breeders fill a necessary niche statistically, I'd say.

And it never hurts if they're cute, either. {-;