lifeonq.com

Gay on the Brain

Scientists have proven that gay men are like straight women, and lesbians are like hetero men. It’s not that my preference for pants gave it away, or my friend David’s girlish screams upon encountering a spider. No, apparently researchers in Sweden got inside our heads and saw similarities between the brains of homo sapiens who are oriented toward their same sex and their opposite sexes in the hetero world. A study by researchers at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm subjected 90 healthy people to the noisy confines of an MRI machine and PET scans, and discovered that lesbians and straight men had larger right hemispheres than gay men and straight women. The study was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Further tests found additional evidence in the nerve connections of the amygdala, that part of the brain responsible for our “fight or flight” reactions and “orientation.” In an article by BBC News, Dr. Qazi Rahman, a lecturer in cognitive biology at the University of London, explained that the similarities in nerve connections among the oppositely-oriented sexes were significant because of the amygdala’s role in “orientating” (that’s British for “orienting”) the rest of the brain in response to an emotional stimulus, whether directing the brain during a “fight or flight” response, or when a potential mate comes to our brain’s attention. I find this interesting, because my response to a potential mate often seems to come from a completely different anatomical area.

Dr. Rahman further asserted that these differences could not be attributed to nurture, but more likely occurred naturally in the womb. “As far as I’m concerned there is no argument anymore - if you are gay, you are born gay,” he told the BBC.

Well then, that settles it. Swedish and British scientists agree: it’s all in our heads.