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Right Brain vs Left Brain: Are There Differences Between Males and Females?
The brain has roughly 86 billion neurons (nerve cells). Although women have smaller brains than men, women’s brains have significantly more neurons per unit of cortex than men’s brains (up to 12% more). And women’s brains have a somewhat different organizational architecture than men’s brains. In any case, sheer brain size doesn’t seem to matter much in humans. Albert Einstein’s brain weighed less than the average adult male brain.
The overall architecture of your brain mimics the architecture of the rest of your body: a mirror-image pair of everything on each side, but only one of the things in the middle. You have one corpus callosum, the main bundle of nerves (there are others) that connects the left and right hemispheres. If you’re a woman, your corpus callosum is quite a bit larger than it is in the brain of a man. This may account for the superior ability of women to reconcile conflicting left-right brain analyses of situations.
The female brain is significantly less lateralized than the male brain. Functional modules are more globally distributed.
Female and male humans have different attitudes and behave differently because of differences in evolved brain functions, wired-in from birth (more on this later in the chapter). Apparently, this fact still stirs controversy.