Stanson Toshok Center for Brain Function and Repair, Chicago Medical School, Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine & Science, North Chicago, IL, USA.
Biol Sex Differ. 2024 Feb 9;15(1):14. doi: 10.1186/s13293-024-00585-4.
Human brain sex differences have fascinated scholars for centuries and become a key focus of neuroscientists since the dawn of MRI. We recently published a major review in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews showing that most male-female brain differences in humans are small and few have been reliably replicated. Although widely cited, this work was the target of a critical Commentary by DeCasien et al. (Biol Sex Differ 13:43, 2022). In this response, I update our findings and confirm the small effect sizes and pronounced scatter across recent large neuroimaging studies of human sex/gender difference. Based on the sum of data, neuroscientists would be well-advised to take the null hypothesis seriously: that men and women's brains are fundamentally similar, or "monomorphic". This perspective has important implications for how we study the genesis of behavioral and neuropsychiatric gender disparities.
人类大脑的性别差异已经引起学者们几个世纪的兴趣,并成为磁共振成像(MRI)出现以来神经科学家的主要关注点。我们最近在《神经科学与生物行为评论》上发表了一篇重要综述,表明人类大脑的大多数男女差异较小,并且很少有差异能够得到可靠的重复验证。尽管这一研究得到了广泛引用,但它也成为了 DeCasien 等人的一篇评论(Biol Sex Differ 13:43, 2022)的目标。在本回应中,我更新了我们的发现,并确认了最近在大型人类性别差异神经影像学研究中出现的小效应量和明显的分散现象。基于数据总和,神经科学家应该认真对待零假设:即男性和女性的大脑在根本上是相似的,或者说是“同型的”。这一观点对于我们研究行为和神经精神性别差异的起源具有重要意义。