男女大腦沒有太顯著差別

　　12月21日VOA聽力：男女大腦沒有太明顯差異

　　Scientists have long held that there are differencesbetween men's and women's brains. The Tel Avivteam wanted to find out if those differences aresignificant enough to create two distinctly differenttypes of brain, just as there are distinctly male andfemale reproductive organs.

　　"To answer this question, we looked at over 1,400 brains from different samples," said DaphnaJoel, who heads the psychobiology program at Tel Aviv University. "In each sample wedetermined the regions showing the largest differences, and then we asked whether thesedifferences add up so whether the subject is on the female end, as you can see here on thefemale end of the continuum in one region, whether this subject will also be on the female endof the continuum on all other regions, and what we found is that this is very rare."

　　The researchers determined that specific parts of the brain do show sex differences, but anindividual brain rarely has all 'male' or all 'female' traits. `.

　　So what are the social repercussions of the findings? Joel suggests that we should try to movefrom the language categorizing people according to their sex toward the language treatingeveryone according to their specific characteristics and interests.

　　"It means that our assumption as a society that our sex category—whether we have male orfemale genitalia has implications to what we would love, what we would like to do and what typeof person we will be that also people come in two types, male nature and female nature—thishas no scientific basis and people are very different from each other," she said.

　　While most scientists agree that brains contain varying mixtures of male and femaleanatomical traits, many say that prevailing evidence proves that sex has an importantinfluence on brain function.

　　Mental health experts, for example, argue that exploring biological differences between male andfemale brains may help answer questions such as why men are more likely than women todevelop autism, while women are more likely to suffer from depression. They say more study isneeded to determine in what way and to what extent one's sex influences the brain.

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