By PETER HESS FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
Relationship columnists and pop psychologists have long claimed that men and women are wired differently, and a new study has proven them correct.
Scientists developed an artificial intelligence model that was able to tell the difference between scans of men’s and women’s brain activity with more than 90-percent accuracy.
Most of these differences are in the default mode network, striatum, and limbic network – areas involved in a wide range of processes including daydreaming, remembering the past, planning for the future, making decisions, and smelling.
With these results, scientists at Stanford Medicine add a new piece to the puzzle, supporting the idea that biological sex shapes the brain.
The researchers said they are optimistic that this work will help shed light on brain conditions that affect men and women differently.
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Scientists have long debated whether sex differences show up in the brain. This new study suggests that they can, if scientists look in the right places
For instance, autism and Parkinson’s are more common in men, whereas multiple sclerosis and depression are more common in women.
‘A key motivation for this study is that sex plays a crucial role in human brain development, in aging, and in the manifestation of psychiatric and neurological disorders,’ said the study’ senior author Vinod Menon, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, in a statement.
‘Identifying consistent and replicable sex differences in the healthy adult brain is a critical step toward a deeper understanding of sex-specific vulnerabilities in psychiatric and neurological disorders,’ he added.
To explore the question of sex-specific brain differences, Menon and his team developed a deep neural network model that could learn to classify brain scans as male or female.
They started by showing the AI a series of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans and telling it whether it was looking at a male or female brain.
Through this process, it started to get a handle on which parts of the brain showed subtle differences depending on sex.
When the AI was fed about 1,500 brain scans from a different set than the ones it was trained on, it successfully predicted the sex of the brain’s owner more than 90 percent of the time.
These brain scans came from men and women in the US and Europe, suggesting that the AI model could discriminate by sex even when there were other differences, like language, diet, and culture.
‘This is a very strong piece of evidence that sex is a robust determinant of human brain organization,’ said Menon
One major difference between this team’s AI model and others like it is that it is ‘explainable.’
Scientists often criticize AI for being a ‘black box’ – it can take in information and spit out results, but how it reached its conclusions is often a mystery.
Not so with the Stanford team’s model.