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Showing posts from March, 2025

How Men and Women's brains are different - Stanford

https://stanmed.stanford.edu/how-mens-and-womens-brains-are-different/ "  There was too much data pointing to the biological basis of sex-based cognitive differences to ignore, Halpern says. For one thing, the animal-research findings resonated with sex-based differences ascribed to people. These findings continue to accrue. In a study of 34 rhesus monkeys, for example, males strongly preferred toys with wheels over plush toys, whereas females found plush toys likable. It would be tough to argue that the monkeys’ parents bought them sex-typed toys or that simian society encourages its male offspring to play more with trucks. A much more recent study established that boys and girls 9 to 17 months old — an age when children show few if any signs of recognizing either their own or other children’s sex — nonetheless show marked differences in their preference for stereotypically male versus stereotypically female toys."

Neurobiology of gender identity and sexual orientation

Pub Med Central   The empirical basis for hypothesising that gonadal hormones influence gender identity and sexual orientation is based on animal experiments involving manipulations of hormones during prenatal and early neonatal development. It is accepted dogma that testes develop from the embryonic gonad under the influence of a cascade of genes that begins with the expression of the sex-determining gene  SRY  on the Y chromosome. 4 , 5  Before this time, the embryonic gonad is “indifferent”, meaning that it has the potential to develop into either a testis or an ovary. Likewise, the early embryo has 2 systems of ducts associated with urogenital differentiation, Wolffian and Müllerian ducts, which are capable of developing into the male and female tubular reproductive tracts, respectively. Once the testes develop, they begin producing 2 hormones, testosterone and anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH). In rats, this occurs around day 16–17 of gestation, whereas, in humans, i...