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Male and female brains work differently

12.06.2016

Although our whole life depends on the ability to cooperate and negotiate with others, this ability manifests itself in different people in different ways and depends on many things. One of the main factors here is gender. For example, it is known that women cooperate better with each other if they feel that other women are watching them, and men cooperate better with each other in large groups than in small ones. At the same time, it is easier for two men to reach agreement than for two women, but at the same time, in a female-male couple, a woman is more inclined to cooperate than her partner.

Sooner or later, of course, the question should have arisen of how such intersexual psychological characteristics are reflected in the functioning of the brain. Similar studies were carried out, but they had one methodological flaw - they all looked, roughly speaking, like this: a person lies in a brain scan machine and imagines that he needs to cooperate with someone. In order to somehow bring the experimental situation closer to real life, neuroscientists from Stanford used not fMRI, but spectroscopy in the near infrared region - it can also be used to monitor brain activity, but a person does not have to lie down and is able to communicate normally with others.

More than two hundred people participated in the experiment: they were divided into pairs of a man-man, a woman-woman and a man-woman and seated them at the tables, so that the partners were sitting opposite each other - they saw each other, but could not talk. In front of each of them was a monitor, on which was a circle that periodically changed color; the task was to press the button when the circle was repainted, and it was required to do this simultaneously with the partner. After another attempt, each participant in the experiment was told which of them pressed the button faster and how much faster. In total, each pair was given 40 attempts to synchronize the actions as fully as possible.

Men's pairs performed better than women's pairs. However, something else turned out to be important: if the partners were of the same sex, then the brains of both were in good agreement with each other, and the more obvious the synchronization of neural activity was, the better the result. But at the same time, synchronization was different for different sexes, that is, for example, in men, coordination of activity occurred in some neural circuits, and in women, in others. Thus, in women, the right temporal cortex took a particularly active part in mutual tuning, and in men, the right lower prefrontal cortex.

As for the female-male couples, a paradox was observed with them: they performed the task almost as well as the male couples, but they did not have coherence in the work of the brains. From this one could conclude that in some cases joint work can be performed without neural tuning to each other, however, the researchers themselves stipulate that they did not observe the entire brain, and that, perhaps, with female-male cooperation, coordination of actions occurs in other brains. plots.

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