The physical differences between men and women are pretty simple to decipher from an anatomy book, but those categorical dividing lines disappear when it comes to the brain.
Going back nearly a century, scientists have attempted to determine whether the brain structures of men and women, like our reproductive organs, fell into separate and distinct categories based on sex. Gender-based differences in the brain, the thinking goes, could explain variations in behavior between men and women. But searching for distinctly male or female brain identifiers may be a fool’s errand: Researchers at Tel Aviv University, in a new study, demonstrated that our brains are actually an unpredictable mash-up of male and female characteristics.