Different Behaviors, Different Brains?

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INAH-3 and Sexual Orientation

The scientist Simon LeVay has studied and compared the brains of heterosexual and homosexual men and heterosexual women. In particular, he has compared the size of the INAH-3 in these brains from cadavers. He found that the largest INAH3 clusters tended to belong to heterosexual men, the smallest to homosexual men; in fact, on average, heterosexual men had clusters twice the size of homosexual men's. Similarly, the size of the INAH-3 in heterosexual women was the same as that of homosexual men. Indeed, there was a large degree of variation and overlap between the two groups. (It is important to note that the homosexual mens that he studied died of AIDS, and some critics have suggested that these results are related to the disease).

Click here to read an article in Discover Magazine entitled "Sex and the Brain", about INAH-3 and sexual orientation.

As mentioned previously, another group has also shown that the anterior commissure in gay men is similar to women and much smaller that heterosexual men. This suggests that a certain brain structure is correlated with a certain type of behavior, in this case, sexual orientation.

So, does the brain structure result in a behavior or does behavior change the brain structure?



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