Men and women sometimes use different parts of their brains when doing the same things, highlighting psychological differences between the sexes, researchers say.
The findings, reported in the December issue of the journal NeuroImage, stem from a study conducted by researchers at the University of Alberta in Canada.
The study involved 33 volunteers, 23 men and 10 women, who performed a variety of tasks, including verbal and memory drills, while their brain activity was monitored with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) technology. Peter Silverstone, a University of Alberta psychiatrist, said the findings, if backed by further research, could help patients with depression and other psychiatric conditions.
Women are twice as likely to suffer from major &to=http://english.pravda.ru/main/18/90/360/15176_whipping.html' target=_blank>depression than men, he said, reports Independent Online.
"Sometimes males and females would perform the same tasks and show different brain activation, and sometimes they would perform different tasks and show the same &to=http://english.pravda.ru/science/19/94/377/16274_brain.html' target=_blank>brain activation," Bell says.
Men performed better on the spatial attention test, but their brain activity patterns didn’t differ from women in that test.
Bigger studies should be done, write Bell and colleagues, noting the small number of participants (and women, in particular). They add that men and women should be studied separately in brain imaging studies.
"We’d like to push forward in this area," Bell says. "It hasn’t been seen yet how this information can be used to help patients, but more work in this area may lead to that."
Bell’s colleague, psychiatrist Peter Silverstone, MD, also commented in the news release. "It is widely recognized that there are differences between males and females, but finding that different regions of the brain are activated in men and women in response to the same task has large potential implications for a variety of different clinical situations," Silverstone says.
Silverstone notes that men and women differ in some psychiatric conditions; depression is twice as common among women, and there are differences in symptoms in some mental illnesses, informs FOX News.
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