ArticleFrontiers in human neuroscience2018
Analysis of Human Brain Structure Reveals that the Brain "Types" Typical of Males Are Also Typical of Females, and Vice Versa.
Article in Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Sex differences in brain homotopic co-activations: a meta-analytic study.Brain structure & function · 2022Pooled it
- Effects of different intracranial volume correction methods on univariate sex differences in grey matter volume and multivariate sex prediction.Scientific reports · 2020Trial
- A sexually dimorphic neuronal cluster in the mouse medial amygdala responds to male sexual status.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- "Precision Medicine" and the Failed Search for Binary Brain Sex Differences to Address Gender Behavioral Health Disparities.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2025Review
- Relations of Lifetime Perceived Stress and Basal Cortisol With Hippocampal Volume Among Healthy Adolescents and Those at Clinical High Risk for Psychosis: A Structural Equation Modeling Approach.Biological psychiatry · 2024Article
- Characterizing diseases using genetic and clinical variables: A data analytics approach.Quantitative biology (Beijing, China) · 2024Article
- Sex mechanisms as nonbinary influences on cognitive diversity.Hormones and behavior · 2024Review
- Unsupervised deep representation learning enables phenotype discovery for genetic association studies of brain imaging.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Sex, gender diversity, and brain structure in early adolescence.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- Remembering the null hypothesis when searching for brain sex differences.Biology of sex differences · 2024Article
- After the trans brain: a critique of the neurobiological accounts of embodied trans* identities.History and philosophy of the life sciences · 2024Article
- Sex and Gender in Population Neuroscience.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2024Review
- New perspectives on sex differences in learning and memory.Trends in endocrinology and metabolism: TEM · 2023Review
- Classifying sex with volume-matched brain MRI.Neuroimage. Reports · 2023Article
- Higher performance for women than men in MRI-based Alzheimer's disease detection.Alzheimer's research & therapy · 2023Article
- White matter microstructure shows sex differences in late childhood: Evidence from 6797 children.Human brain mapping · 2023Article
- Law, policy, biology, and sex: Critical issues for researchers.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2022Article
- Brain architecture-based vulnerability to traumatic injury.Frontiers in bioengineering and biotechnology · 2022Article
- Feminism, gender medicine and beyond: a feminist analysis of "gender medicine".International journal for equity in health · 2021Review
- Are Sex Differences in Human Brain Structure Associated With Sex Differences in Behavior?Psychological science · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
Findings of average differences between females and males in the structure of specific brain regions are often interpreted as indicating that the typical male brain is different from the typical female brain. An alternative interpretation is that the brain types typical of females are also typical of males, and sex differences exist only in the frequency of rare brain types. Here we contrasted the two hypotheses by analyzing the structure of 2176 human brains using three analytical approaches. An anomaly detection analysis showed that brains from females are almost as likely to be classified as "normal male brains," as brains from males are, and vice versa. Unsupervised clustering algorithms revealed that common brain "types" are similarly common in females and in males and that a male and a female are almost as likely to have the same brain "type" as two females or two males are. Large sex differences were found only in the frequency of some rare brain "types." Last, supervised clustering algorithms revealed that the brain "type(s)" typical of one sex category in one sample could be typical of the other sex category in another sample. The present findings demonstrate that even when similarity and difference are defined mathematically, ignoring biological or functional relevance, sex category (i.e., whether one is female or male), is not a major predictor of the variability of human brain structure. Rather, the brain types typical of females are also typical of males, and vice versa, and large sex differences are found only in the prevalence of some rare brain types. We discuss the implications of these findings to studies of the structure and function of the human brain.
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