Gay men, straight women share brain detail

[defendandprotect]

Gay men, straight women share brain detail: report 1 hour, 32 minutes ago

LONDON (Reuters) - Gay men and straight women share some characteristics in the area of the brain responsible for emotion, mood and anxiety, researchers said on Monday in a study highlighting the potential biological underpinning of sexuality.

Brain scans also showed the same symmetry among lesbians and straight men, the researchers wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"The observations cannot be easily attributed to perception or behavior," the researchers from Sweden's Karolinska Institute wrote. "Whether they may relate to processes laid down during the fetal or postnatal development is an open question."

A number of studies have looked at the roles genetic, biological and environmental factors play in sexual orientation but little evidence exists that any plays an all-important role. Many scientists believe both nature and nurture play a part.

Brain scans of 90 volunteers showed that the brains of heterosexual men and homosexual women were slightly asymmetric with the right hemisphere slightly larger than the left, Ivanka Savic and Pers Lindstrom wrote. The brains of gay men and heterosexual women were not.

Then they measured blood flow to the amygdala -- the area key for the "fight-or-flight" response -- and found it was wired in a similar fashion in gay men and heterosexual women as well as lesbians and heterosexual men.

The researchers added that the study cannot say whether the differences in brain shape are inherited or due to exposure to hormones such as testosterone in the womb and if they are responsible for sexual orientation.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080616/lf_nm_life/brain_gay_dc

[devilgrrl]

1. I always wondered why I got along with gay guys so well, now I know!

:silly:

[skooooo]

3. plus...

..they're not always trying to hit on you, or confuse friendship with something else...
:)

[devilgrrl]

4. You know what? That is what I like the most.

Not feeling the need to impress, I can just be myself around them.

[midnight]

2. It is nice that science can back up what so many have already

known.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

5. If homosexuality were just behavior, gaydar would be impossible

As a single woman, I've developed a pretty good gaydar as a survival skill. If I meet a stranger, I have no way of knowing what he does in bed, but it takes me very little time to figure out which end of the continuum he is closer to.

I once had a teaching colleague who set off four-alarm gaydar, but he had been teaching there forever and had a wife and children, so once, when some of us women faculty members were guessing which of our male colleagues was straight or gay, everyone dismissed my suggestion that this particular professor was anything other than a typical heterosexual man.

Years later, when I was no longer teaching, I saw this ex-colleague in Portland on a Saturday morning window shopping with another man and standing way too close to be just buddies. I never went back and said, "I told you so" to my former colleagues, because I knew enough about the atmosphere on that faculty to know that he had good reasons to be closeted.