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Review
. 2021 Jun:125:667-697.
doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2021.02.026. Epub 2021 Feb 20.

Dump the "dimorphism": Comprehensive synthesis of human brain studies reveals few male-female differences beyond size

Lise Eliot  1 , Adnan Ahmed  2 , Hiba Khan  2 , Julie Patel  2
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Free article
Review

Dump the "dimorphism": Comprehensive synthesis of human brain studies reveals few male-female differences beyond size

Lise Eliot et al. Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2021 Jun.
Free article

Abstract

With the explosion of neuroimaging, differences between male and female brains have been exhaustively analyzed. Here we synthesize three decades of human MRI and postmortem data, emphasizing meta-analyses and other large studies, which collectively reveal few reliable sex/gender differences and a history of unreplicated claims. Males' brains are larger than females' from birth, stabilizing around 11 % in adults. This size difference accounts for other reproducible findings: higher white/gray matter ratio, intra- versus interhemispheric connectivity, and regional cortical and subcortical volumes in males. But when structural and lateralization differences are present independent of size, sex/gender explains only about 1% of total variance. Connectome differences and multivariate sex/gender prediction are largely based on brain size, and perform poorly across diverse populations. Task-based fMRI has especially failed to find reproducible activation differences between men and women in verbal, spatial or emotion processing due to high rates of false discovery. Overall, male/female brain differences appear trivial and population-specific. The human brain is not "sexually dimorphic."

Keywords: Amygdala; Anterior commissure; Connectome; Corpus callosum; Cortical thickness; Default mode network; Emotion; Empathy; Gender; Hippocampus; Lateralization; MRI; Massa intermedia; Mental rotation; Meta-analysis; Multivariate; Precision medicine; Sex; Spatial; Verbal.

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