Men and women differ in brain use

EDMONTON, Alberta, Dec 1, 2005 (UPI via COMTEX) -- University of Alberta researchers say they've determined men and women utilize different parts of their brains while they perform the same tasks.

The study -- led by Emily Bell, a graduate student in psychiatry -- involved volunteers who performed memory tasks, verbal tasks, visual spatial tasks and simple motor tasks while their brain activity was monitored with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging technology.

"The results jumped out at us," said Bell, "Sometimes males and females would perform the same tasks and show different brain activation, and sometimes they would perform different tasks and show the same brain activation."

Dr. Peter Silverstone -- a UA psychiatrist and an author of the study -- said: "It is widely recognized there are differences between males and females, but finding different regions of the brain are activated in men and women in response to the same task has large potential implications for a variety of different clinical situations.

"The larger implications of this work, as well as other work pointing in the same direction, is that we may increasingly find out that there are differences in the 'hard wiring' of male and female brains."

The research is reported in the journal NeuroImage.

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