Word: hypothalamus
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...UCLA researchers reported this month that autopsies showed that the anterior commissure -- a bundle of nerves that connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain -- appears to be about a third larger in homosexuals than in heterosexuals. Another study, published last year, revealed that a segment of the hypothalamus, which influences sexual activity, seems to be half as large in gay men as it is in straight men. A recent survey found that when one twin is gay, an identical sibling is three times as likely as a fraternal twin to be gay as well...
...obvious place to look for gender differences is in the hypothalamus, a lusty little organ perched over the brain stem that, when sufficiently provoked, consumes a person with rage, thirst, hunger or desire. In animals, a region at the front of the organ controls sexual function and is somewhat larger in males than in females. But its size need not remain constant. Studies of tropical fish by Stanford University neurobiologist Russell Fernald reveal that certain cells in this tiny region of the brain swell markedly in an individual male whenever he comes to dominate a school. Unfortunately for the piscine...
Many researchers suspect that, in humans too, sexual preferences are controlled by the hypothalamus. Based on a study of 41 autopsied brains, Simon LeVay of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies announced last summer that he had found a region in the hypothalamus that was on average twice as large in heterosexual men as in either women or homosexual men. LeVay's findings support the idea that varying hormone levels before birth may immutably stamp the developing brain in one erotic direction or another...
While most of the gender differences uncovered so far seem to fall under the purview of the hypothalamus, researchers have begun noting discrepancies in other parts of the brain as well. For the past nine years, neuroscientists have debated whether the corpus callosum, a thick bundle of nerves that allows the right half of the brain to communicate with the left, is larger in women than in men. If it is, and if size corresponds to function, then the greater crosstalk between the hemispheres might explain enigmatic phenomena like female intuition, which is supposed to accord women greater ability...
...first discovered that truth in 1980, when 15-year-old Brooke Shields cooed that nothing came between her and her Calvins, "nothing." That ad campaign ruffled a lot of feathers, sold a lot of jeans and spawned a hypothalamus-numbing host of imitators...