By Phil Williams 

What if your sexual preference was decided before you were even born, when some unanswerable force chose to shape your brain a certain way? A fresh punch has been thrown in the fight to explain the development of sexual orientation as a result of nature or nurture; this time for nature. A Swedish study has shown physical similarities between the brains of heterosexual females and homosexual males.

Invaka Savic, a Swedish Neurologist at the Karolinska Institute, led the study, which included MRI scans of 90 brains, from equal numbers of males and females, of both heterosexual and homosexual orientation.

 
The findings, to be published in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that straight female and gay male brains were symmetrical, whilst the right hemisphere of heterosexual male and lesbian brains was slightly larger than the left, as though grouping brain-shapes regarding their fancies.

The right side of the brain is responsible for spatial awareness, whilst symmetry favours language skills. The findings help to explain past studies conducted at the University of London that demonstrated gay men and straight women’s comparatively poorer sense of direction and superior verbal skills; two traits that have always dramatically divided the sexes.

Savic performed further experiments concerning blood-flow through the part of the brain responsible for the ‘fight-or-flight’ response. This circuitry was similar in the same groupings; in lesbian and heterosexual males there were found to be more connections to the right side of the brain.

The study fits into wider research concerning differences between male and female brains, hoping to explore the varying affects of psychological disorders across the sexes. Patterns exist showing depression to be more common for heterosexual females and gay men than heterosexual males, and the similarities of their brains could help to explain this.

This research still cannot answer the question of whether the brain sizes and structures are a cause of sexual orientation or the result of it, however, but Savic valiantly aims to explore these findings through predictive scans of newborn babies. Is sexual orientation decided in the womb? Perhaps those babies could decide for us, in twenty or thirty year’s time.

Average user rating

   (0 vote)