ELSC Seminar Series

Sex-related variables affect brain structure and function and there are group-level differences between women and men in specific measures of brain and behavior. Within the binary framework, these are often taken as supporting the existence of ‘male’ and ‘female’ brains. I will describe how the binary framework is challenged by available data from animal studies, and how these studies open a new way – the mosaic hypothesis – of thinking about ‘sex itself’ and its relations with brain and behavior. Applying machine learning algorithms to better understand how best to conceptualize the relations between sex and the brain beyond the binary, we found that the brain architectures typical of women are also typical of men, and vice versa, and sex category provides very little information on how one brain will differ from or resemble another brain.