29 March 2019

Proof that girls and boys are born to be different: Study finds that brain differences between the sexes begin in the womb

Feminists undergo all sorts of gyrations to dispute findings such as this but the fact remains that differences between the neural networks in  male and female brains are detectable BEFORE BIRTH (using MRI).

I interpret the finding "the association between GA and increased intracerebellar FC was stronger in males" as a preparation for  males to be more active and athletic, which is unsurprising

Journal abstract appended.  Note that Moriah Thomason is a female

In a scientific first, researchers claim to have found that differences between men’s and women’s brains start in the womb.

The conclusion is likely to be controversial, with some experts claiming social influences are more important.

But scientists who did brain scans of 118 foetuses in the second half of pregnancy to analyse the links between gender and the connectivity of a developing brain believe the differences are biological.

Professor Moriah Thomason, from New York University Langone, said one of the main differences was in connectivity across distant areas of the brain.

According to the US study, published in the journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, female brains growing in the uterus produced ‘long-range’ networks.

Professor Thomason said this was less true of boys, who were ‘more susceptible to environmental influences’.

SOURCE

Sex differences in functional connectivity during fetal brain development

M.D.Wheelock et al.

Abstract

Sex-related differences in brain and behavior are apparent across the life course, but the exact set of processes that guide their emergence in utero remains a topic of vigorous scientific inquiry. Here, we evaluate sex and gestational age (GA)-related change in functional connectivity (FC) within and between brain wide networks. Using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging we examined FC in 118 human fetuses between 25.9 and 39.6 weeks GA (70 male; 48 female). Infomap was applied to the functional connectome to identify discrete prenatal brain networks in utero. A consensus procedure produced an optimal model comprised of 16 distinct fetal neural networks distributed throughout the cortex and subcortical regions. We used enrichment analysis to assess network-level clustering of strong FC-GA correlations separately in each sex group, and to identify network pairs exhibiting distinct patterns of GA-related change in FC between males and females. We discovered both within and between network FC-GA associations that varied with sex. Specifically, associations between GA and posterior cingulate-temporal pole and fronto-cerebellar FC were observed in females only, whereas the association between GA and increased intracerebellar FC was stronger in males. These observations confirm that sexual dimorphism in functional brain systems emerges during human gestation.

Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, Volume 36, April 2019, 100632





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