Male And Female Brains example essay topic

715 words
The Male and Female Brain It is proven that the male and female brains differ, but can one prove that it affects the behavior? Many scientists would agree that ones behavior is determined by his / her gender. Although others are convinced that social conditioning is the cause for the differences between the male and female, it is very unlikely that biological differences play no role in behavior. The male and female brains differ not only by how they work, but also on the size.

For example, Natalie An gier and Kenneth Chang, neuroscientist's, have shown that the women's brain is about 10 percent smaller than the male's, on average, even after accounting for women's comparatively smaller body size. Three brain differences that affect ones behavior are the limbic size, the corpus size, and the amount of gray and white matter. Current research has demonstrated that females, on average, have a larger deep limbic system than males. Due to the larger limbic brain, woman are more in touch with their feelings, they are generally better to express their feelings than men ("Male-Female Brain Differences"). Women are the primary care takers for children because of their strong ability to be connected and bond well with others. Containing a larger limbic system also leaves a female more likely to become depressed.

As stated in "Male-Female Difference", women attempt suicide three times more than men, but men actually succeed three times more than women. This happens because men use more violent means of killing themselves (women tend to use over doses with pills, while men tend to either shoot or hang themselves), and men are generally less connected to others than are women. Such disconnections from others increase the risk of complete suicides. Another brain difference is that the corpus tends to be larger in the woman's brain. Having a larger corpus gives women the ability to transfer data between the right and left sides of her brain. While women have greater access to both sides, men mostly rely on the left side of the brain.

Because women are able to use both sides of the brain, they tend to be better with language then the male. Another advantage women have over men is if a woman has a stroke in the left front side of the brain, she would be able to more fully recover than a male because of their greater use of both sides (Re ville). The differences in the way men and women think is also affected by the gray and white matter. Men may have 6.5 times the gray matter devoted to their thinking process than women, but women have 10 times the white matter of men. Gray matter in the brain is where information comes together and is processed.

The white matter is made up of the connections that help messages travel from one process center to another (Jadrnak). These differences may help to explain why men tend to excel in tasks requiring more local processing like mathematics, while women are more likely to excel in areas that require pulling information out diverse areas of the brain, such as language ("Sex-based Brain"). Although it is proven that the brain affects the behavior, some will argue that society is what really affects ones behavior. To say when it comes to memory, women have more skill than confidence and men have more confidence than skill is a simplistic way to put it.

Men may show more confidence because they are socialized to form strong self-convictions. Women may be less confident because they are brought up to be supportive and non-threatening. In conclusion, there are profound differences between males and females. Those differences are programmed within the DNA from the moment of conception. The brains of the male and female are clearly "sexed", and estrogens are the juices that augment maleness and femaleness (York).

Although the male brain is larger, it becomes less and less flexible as they age. Women can still adapt to new ideas until quite late in life, but men become set in their ways and unable to accept major changes.