Study says men are unevolved

Men and women are on different brain waves. According to researchers at the University's Medical Center, behavioral differences between the sexes can be attributed to actual physiological differences. Men tend to deal with emotions through actions and physical aggression while women mediate their emotions more symbolically such as through vocalization, according to Ruben Gur, director of the Brain Behavior Laboratory and professor of psychology in psychiatry. The part of the brain utilized more heavily by men is less developed and is similar to that of reptiles and lower species. Lying below the corpus collosum, the temporal limbic system controls more primitive responses, the findings state. Women, on the other hand, primarily use the cingulate gyrus in their cognitive process. This part of the brain evolved later and is more refined and complex. "Instead of acting like a reptile and charging at everything, women are likely to verbalize and say 'I'm mad at you," Gur said. The cingulate gyrus is not present in reptiles, he added. The study, reported in the latest issue of Science, used an imaging technique known as Positron Emission Tomography to monitor activity in different sections of the brain. PET uses short-lived radioactive compounds as tracers to detect glucose metabolism as a measure of brain activity, Gur said. The more active a section of the brain is, the more glucose it will consume. Computers utilize colorful images to display glucose uptake by various regions of the brain. The study compared the rates of metabolism in 37 men and 24 women and noted that in almost all areas of the brain, activity was identical. The only differences noted were those in the limbic system of the brain, the area noted for emotional processing, Gur said. Women were also noted to have a more active left hemisphere, the side more active in verbal and analytical tasks. Men, on the flip side, have greater control over spatial problem-solving and motor tasks, which is connected to the right hemisphere. All subjects selected for the study were right-handed to avoid inconsistencies. Certain variances are bound to occur whenever statistical data is studied, according to Gur. "What shocked me was that many more men than women tended to show opposite sex patterns," Gur said. Of the 61 subjects studied, 13 men displayed typical female brain patterns as opposed to only four females showing typical male patterns. These statistics correspond to recent findings in a nation-wide survey on sexuality, he added. "This may provide a substrate for homosexual behavior," Gur said. "However, we do not have data on the sexual preferences of our subjects."

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