Word: braine
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What makes people gay? Biologists may never get a complete answer to that question, but researchers in Sweden have found one more sign that the answer lies in the structure of the brain...
...Scientists at the Karolinska Institute studied brain scans of 90 gay and straight men and women, and found that the size of the two symmetrical halves of the brains of gay men more closely resembled those of straight women than they did straight men. In heterosexual women, the two halves of the brain are more or less the same size. In heterosexual men, the right hemisphere is slightly larger. Scans of the brains of gay men in the study, however, showed that their hemispheres were relatively symmetrical, like those of straight women, while the brains of homosexual women were asymmetrical...
...Just what these brain differences mean is still not clear. Ever since 1991, when Simon LeVay first documented differences in the hypothalamus of gay and straight men, researchers have been struggling to understand what causes these differences to occur. Until now, the brain regions that scientists have come to believe play a role in sexual orientation have been related to either reproduction or sexuality. The Swedish study, however, is the first to find differences in parts of the brain not normally involved in reproduction - the denser network of nerve connections, for example, was found in the amygdala, known...
...When a child screams in delicious fright as these image leap from the screen and into the brain's trauma center, any parent will whisper a consoling "They're not real, honey." They are, though-as real as any nightmares the dream machine can conjure. But a machine didn't dream up, design, build, or give festering life to these creatures. Stan Winston...
...Rutgers University in Newark, N.J., neuroscientist April Benasich fits prelingual babies with caps that read electrical activity in the brain. Benasich then plays one-syllable word bits to them--da and ta sounds, for example--and watches as their brains process the difference. At first, the sounds are separated by 300 milliseconds, very fast but well within the brain's ability. She then speeds things up so that the gap shrinks to 200 milliseconds, then 100, then 35--the point at which the length of the space is less than the length of the syllable itself. Even then the babies...