LONDON - 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.
“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.”
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.
“These observations motivate more extensive investigations of larger study groups and prompt for a better understanding of the neurobiology of homosexuality,” they wrote.
- from an MSNBC article entitled Gay men, straight women have similar brains: New study points to possible biological source of sexual orientation
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