School of Psychological Sciences and Sagol School of Neuroscience, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel.
Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2021 Mar;122:165-175. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2020.11.018. Epub 2021 Jan 10.
The paper reviews the relations between sex and brain in light of the binary conceptualization of these relations and the challenges posed to it by the 'mosaic' hypothesis. Recent formulations of the binary framework range from arguing that the typical male brain is different from the typical female brain to claiming that brains are typically male or female because brain structure can be used to predict the sex category (female/male) of the brain's owner. These formulations are challenged by evidence that sex effects on the brain may be opposite under different conditions, that human brains are comprised of mosaics of female-typical and male-typical features, and that sex category explains only a small part of the variability in human brain structure. These findings led to a new, non-binary, framework, according to which mosaic brains reside in a multi-dimensional space that cannot meaningfully be reduced to a male-female continuum or to a binary variable. This framework may also apply to sex-related variables and has implications for research.
本文从性与大脑关系的二元概念化以及“镶嵌”假说对其提出的挑战出发，对二者之间的关系进行了综述。最近提出的二元框架的各种观点，从认为典型的男性大脑不同于典型的女性大脑，到声称大脑通常是男性或女性，因为大脑结构可以用来预测大脑所有者的性别类别（女性/男性）。这些观点受到了以下证据的挑战：在不同条件下，大脑对性别的影响可能相反；人类大脑由女性典型和男性典型特征的镶嵌体组成；性别类别仅能解释人类大脑结构可变性的一小部分。这些发现导致了一个新的、非二元的框架，根据这个框架，镶嵌大脑存在于一个多维空间中，不能有意义地简化为一个男女连续体或一个二元变量。这个框架也可能适用于与性别相关的变量，并对研究具有影响。
