Whether human brains belong to two distinct populations, male brains and female brains, has scientific as well as social implications. We have recently analyzed the volume, cortical thickness, diffusion anisotropy, or connectivity in over 1400 human brains from four datasets, and found that most brains are composed of unique mosaics of features, some more common in females compared to males, some more common in males compared to females, and some common in both females and males. On the basis of this finding we claimed that human brains do not belong to two distinct types (Joel et al., 2015, PNAS). New analyses of magnetic resonance images of over 2100 brains using three additional approaches corroborate this claim by showing that the brain types common in females are also common in males and vice versa. Scientifically, these findings call for a shift in our conceptualization of the relations between sex and the brain, from dimorphism to mosaic. Socially, these findings question the meaning of sex/gender as a social category.

Prof. Daphna Joel received her Ph.D. in psychology in Tel-Aviv University in 1998, and joined the faculty of TAU, after receiving the Alon fellowship for young Israeli scientists. Prof. Joel is presently the head of the Psychobiology graduate program at the School of Psychological Sciences and a member of the Sagol School of Neuroscience. Prof. Joel studied the involvement of basal ganglia-thalamocortical circuits in normal and abnormal behavior, using mainly animal models of psychopathology. More recently Prof. Joel has expanded her work to research questions related to brain, sex and gender. Ongoing studies attempt to characterize the relations between sex and brain structure and function. Other studies focus on the perception of gender identity and on sexual practices.

Sponsored by the Department of Gender & Women's Studies, Department of Psychology, and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute