a most interesting gender difference

n summary, 1) there are substantial differences in female cortical activation topography during rectal distension compared with males, in that the insula and anterior cingulate/prefrontal cortices are predominantly activated in females

Comment by Joel Slater on April 21, 2011 at 8:51pm

It was kind of serendipitous to find that article about the brain and gender differences involving defecation-(pretty, pretty wierd stuff). But then I wondered about other signals to the brain ("afferents") and if pain might be processed differently and experienced differently by sex, and it seems to be. I also read an article that claimed that males have more neurons, while women have more connections between neurons. The writer of the article felt that this might help explain why dementia processes seem to take a greater toll on females.

Whether you are male or female also influences how much pain you have, what type of pain it is, and how treatment affects you. Male and female brains process pain differently, according to speakers at a conference on gender and pain at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, in April 1998. The conference was the first to be wholly devoted to this topic. Some 500 persons attended the 2-day meeting. More than 30 researchers and clinicians described recent findings and progress toward developing safer and more effective ways to relieve pain.
"Sexual difference is biology's, that is, life's most potent experimental variable," noted conference speaker Karen Berkley, Ph.D., McKenzie Professor of Neuroscience at Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida. Women report pain more often than men do, she said, and in more body regions. They also have more severe and more persistent pain. When women and men are given the same pain stimuli in laboratory studies--gradually increasing heat, for instance--women say "ouch!" before men do. Women discriminate better between types of pain

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