We’ve all heard it before—Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. There’s even a book about it.
But what does that mean, exactly? In the past, people have thought that men and women are wired differently. However, a recent study done by Daphna Joel and her colleagues at the Tel Aviv University in Israel proved that only between 0 and 8 percent of people had fully “male” or “female” brains.
In fact, 35 percent of the 1,400 people studied showed “substantial variability.” This means their brains had both male and female traits, Mic reports.
These people, between 13 and 85 years old, had 29 brain regions that differed in size. However, the only significant difference found between male and female brains was related to mental illness: Some mental illnesses are more likely to affect one gender than the other.
“We still don’t understand why this is,” Michael Bloomfield, a psychiatrist at University College London, told the Guardian. “Understanding this could well help us understand some of the biological mechanisms that give rise to these illnesses, which could then enable the development of better targeted treatments.”
In the meantime, claiming that men and women are wired differently is probably not valid.
“Analyses of internal consistency reveal that brains with features that are consistently at one end of the ‘maleness-femaleness’ continuum are rare,” Joel’s study said.
Perhaps key differences between the sexes are a product of cultural expectations rather than biological differences. It’s easy to claim men act the way they do because their brains work differently than ours, but there may be a better explanation out there.