Parting Glances
April is Brain Awareness Month. If you're reading this it's a sure sign you have one. (Whether you're fully using your amygdala for the good of humankind is another story. Mind your frontal lobes!)
Just out of high school way back when, I trained as an OR Tech at Harper Hospital. I had the extremely rare opportunity of witnessing a craniotomy. (Who do you know who's been there done that? LGBT and/or Q?)
Boasting about it — modestly, of course — gains me curiosity points at Planned Parenthood meetings and Tupperware parties; and it's probably the reason why I now shave my head. That and barber clipping fees. $200 a year.
The Harper operation began with drilling four holes in the patient's shaved cranium. Next, the four holes — about three inches apart at four corners of a blue-marker drawn square — were connected by a small surgical band-ribbon saw, creating a flap.
The flap was lifted (without a creak) revealing a grayish-white brain matter that pulsated as rhythmically fed blood by the heart. It was awe inspiring contraction. Oh, yes: the patient was awake, answering questions following pinpointed electrical stimulation to brain areas.
If reading this description makes you queasy, it's only because your own brain has given you the imaginative ability to "see" your private version of the surgery. And to imagine the wide-awake patient. (By the way: cranial drilling — trepanning — goes back to early human cultures.)
The unhinged brain I peeked at in the OR had, I thought at the time, a rainbow aura about it that resonated with me. "I'll bet you anything that guy's gay," I said to myself. "Just a hunch."
Turns out my hunch was right (or, wishful thinking: he was cute). Research now shows that gay brains differ in many respects from straight brains. The gay male brain is closer in its neurological organization to the female straight brain.
Recently scientists at Sweden's famed Karolinska Institute studied brain scans of 90 gay men, and an equal number of straight men and women. They discovered that the size of the two symmetrical brain halves of gay men more closely resembled those of straight women than straight men.
In straight women, the two brain halves are more or less the same size. In straight men, the right hemisphere is slightly larger. Scans of the brains of gay men show that their hemispheres are relatively symmetrical, like those of straight women. The number of nerves connecting the two sides of the brains of gay men are also more like the number in straight women than in straight men.
Scientists also found that lesbian brains are asymmetrical like those of straight men. The number of nerves connecting the two sides of the brains of gay men are also more like the number in heterosexual women than in straight men.
The Swedish study is the first to find differences in parts of the brain not normally involved in sex (the denser network of nerve connections, for example, is found in the amygdala, known as the emotional center of the brain.)
Says Dr. Eric Vilain, University of California Los Angeles human genetics professor, "The big question has always been, if the brains of gay men are different, or feminized, as earlier research suggests, then is it just limited to sexual preference or are there other regions that are gender atypical in gay males?
"For the first time, in this study it looks like there are regions of the brain not directly involved in sexuality that seem to be feminized in gay males."
Unfortunately, no reasearch is being conducted on that unflappable specie of straight women: the Fag Hag. Sweden get with it.
