The Human Brain Is Best Described as Being on a Female/Male Continuum: Evidence from a Neuroimaging Connectivity Study
Research output: Contribution to journal › Research article › Contributed › peer-review
Contributors
Abstract
Psychological androgyny has long been associated with greater cognitive flexibility, adaptive behavior, and better mental health, but whether a similar concept can be defined using neural features remains unknown. Using the neuroimaging data from 9620 participants, we found that global functional connectivity was stronger in the male brain before middle age but became weaker after that, when compared with the female brain, after systematic testing of potentially confounding effects. We defined a brain gender continuum by estimating the likelihood of an observed functional connectivity matrix to represent a male brain. We found that participants mapped at the center of this continuum had fewer internalizing symptoms compared with those at the 2 extreme ends. These findings suggest a novel hypothesis proposing that there exists a neuroimaging concept of androgyny using the brain gender continuum, which may be associated with better mental health in a similar way to psychological androgyny.
Details
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 3021-3033 |
Number of pages | 13 |
Journal | Cerebral cortex |
Volume | 31 (2021) |
Issue number | 6 |
Early online date | 20 Jan 2021 |
Publication status | Published - Jun 2021 |
Peer-reviewed | Yes |
External IDs
PubMed | 33471126 |
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ORCID | /0000-0001-5398-5569/work/161890727 |
ORCID | /0000-0002-8493-6396/work/161891646 |
Keywords
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Keywords
- androgyny, brain functional network, sex difference