| 中英对照：大脑结构男女有别
[打印] [关闭] 发布时间：[2008-7-28]
More Differences Between Brains of Men and Women
Scientists at Johns Hopkins have discovered “striking” differences between men and women in a part of the brain linked with ability to estimate time, judge speed, visualize things three-dimensionally and solve mathematical problems.
The differences, the researchers say, may underlie well-known trends that vary by sex, such as the fact that more men than women are architects, mathematicians and race-car drivers.
In a study reported this week in the journal Cerebral Cortex, the researchers show that a brain region called the inferior parietal lobule (IPL) is significantly larger overall in men than in women. The area is part of the cerebral cortex and appears on both sides of the brain just above ear-level.
Also, there’s a symmetry difference, with men having a larger left IPL than right. in women in the study, it’s the right IPL that’s somewhat larger, though the difference between the two sides of the brain is less obvious than in men, says psychiatrist Godfrey Pearlson, M.D., who headed the project.
“This is the same part of Albert Einstein’s brain that was particularly large,” says Pearlson, “Scientists have noticed this region is also larger in the postmortem brains of other physicists and mathematicians.”
In the study, researchers reviewed MRI-scans of the brains of 15 closely matched men and women. They used new computer software created by Hopkins psychiatrist Patrick Barta, M.D., Ph.D. to compare overall IRL volume by gender. The software lets scientists highlight the IRL by “painting” it in on computer images of each subject’s brain; it then calculates a highly accurate volume.
Researchers also compared IRL volumes on the left and the right sides of the brain. After allowances for men’s larger overall head and brain size, men had roughly 6 percent more IRL tissue than women.
“The inferior parietal lobule is far more developed in people than in animals and has evolved relatively recently,” says Pearlson. It allows the brain to process information from senses such as vision and touch, and enables the sort of thinking involved in selective attention and perception.
Studies link the right IRL with a working memory of spatial relationships, the ability to sense relationships between body parts and awareness of a person’s own affect or feelings. The left IPL, Pearlson says, is more involved in perception, such as judjing how fast something is moving, estimating time and having the ability to mentally rotate 3-D figures.
“To say this means mean are automatically better at some things than women is a simplification,” says Pearlson. “It’s easy to find women who are fantastic at math and physics and men who excel in language skills. Only when we look at very large populations and look for slight but significant trends do we see the generalizations. There are plenty of exceptions, but there’s also a grain of truth, revealed through the brain structure, that we think underlies some of the ways people characterize the sexes.”
Earlier research by Pearlson showed that two crucial language areas in the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain were significantly larger in women, perhaps explaining their advantage in language-associated thought.
大脑结构，男女有别
约翰斯·霍普金斯大学的科学家们已经发现，在大脑中与估算时间、判断速度、想象三维事物和解数学题等能力有关的部位，男女之间有着“惊人的”差异。
研究人员说，这种差异可能形成众所周知的男女有别的现象，例如建筑师、教学家和赛车选手男性多于女性这一事实。
在本周的《大脑皮层》杂志上报道的一项研究中，研究人员说明一个叫做下顶叶（IRL）的大脑部位，就总体来说，男性的比性的要大得多。该部位属大脑皮层，正好位于耳朵上方大脑两侧。
此外，还存在着一种对称的差异，男性的左下顶叶大于右下顶叶。领导这项研究的精神病学家、医学博士戈弗雷·皮尔逊说，研究表明，女性的右下顶叶略微大一些，尽管女性大脑两边的这种差异没有男性的那么明显。
皮尔逊说：“这个部位与艾尔伯特·爱因斯坦大脑中那个特别大的部位是同一部位。科学家们已经注意到，尸体解剖表明，其他物理学家和数学家的大脑也是这个部位比较大一些。”
研究人员在研究中观察了15个几乎不相上下的男女的大脑磁共振成像扫描图。他们使用的是霍普金斯大学精神病学家、医学博士兼哲学博士帕特里克·巴塔发明的新的电脑软件，以便大体上比较男性和女性的下顶叶的体积。这种软件能使科学家在每个受试者大脑的计算机图像上将下顶叶“涂上颜色”以使其凸现出来；然后它再高度精确地计算出其体积。
研究人员还比较了大脑左右两侧的下顶叶体积。在考虑到男性头部和大脑总体上较大的因素后，发现男性的下顶叶组织比女性的大约多6%。
皮尔逊说：“人类的下顶叶比动物的要发达得多，而且是在相当晚的近期才进化而来的。”下顶叶使大脑能够处理从诸如视觉和触觉等感官传来的信息，并使涉及有选择性集中注意和知觉之类的思维活动得以进行。
研究报告表明，右下顶叶与对空间关系的实用记忆力、感知人体各部位相互关系的能力和对自我的自觉感情或感觉的意识有关。皮尔逊说，左下顶叶则更多地涉及知觉，如判断某物移动的速度、估算时间以及拥有在大脑中旋转三维图形的能力。
“如果说这意味着男性在某些事情上必然强于女性，那就把事情简单化了，”皮尔逊说。“发现精通数学及物理的女性和擅长语言技能的男性是很容易的。只有在大量的人口中进行调查，并找出虽微不足道但有重要意义的趋势后，我们才能明白其中规律性的东西。当然有很多例外，但也不乏从大脑结构中显露出的真理的成分——我们认为，这构成了人们在性别方面的某些特征。”
皮尔逊早些时候的研究表明，女性大脑额叶和颞叶中的两个关键的语言区域比男性的大得多，这也许解释了为什么女性在与语言有关的思维方面享有优势。
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