Gay Brains and Funny Women
If you have missed the latest scientific report about structural differences in the brains of gay men and women, you have missed what could be the first salvo in a new public debate on hormones. That might seem a little counterintuitive, since we are talking about brain structures like the amygdala.
But the researchers, who found that the brains of gay men more closely resembled those of straight women and that those of gay women had more in common with heterosexual men, ruled out genetics and so-called “learned influences.” That pretty much leaves the gestational bath of hormones as the potential determining factor. If further studies confirm that hormonal influences in the womb truly determine sexual orientation in humans, then look out. Human engineering might enter a new and dangerous phase with unpredictable consequences.
In rummaging through the online files of PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), I also ran across this three-year-old study on the “sex differences in brain activation elicited by humor.” Humor, the authors report, “is a higher-order process crucial in human interaction” and, guess what, men and women process humor a little differently.
Among the study’s findings:
- Females appear to recruit specific brain regions to a greater extent than males when presented with humorous stimuli.
- Stronger female activation of the left prefrontal cortex also suggests greater use of executive functions involved in coherence, potentially using working memory, mental shifting, verbal abstraction, self-directed attention and irrelevance screening.
- Surprisingly, females also demonstrate more robust recruitment of mesolimbic reward regions at the right nucleus accumbens, suggesting greater reward network activity during humor response. This small brain region has been implicated in psychological reward, including situations of self-reported happiness, monetary reward receipt, the processing of attractive faces and cocaine-induced euphoria.