14 DAY TRIAL // Many researches have shown that a gay man's brain is not very...male... A recent Canadian research has shown that in homosexual men, the brain has a larger posterior corpus callosum, a trait linked to brain wiring which is specific to women. So, if gay men have a female brain wiring, no wonder their brain functions more like a woman's.
A new research at Queen Mary, University of London, led by Dr Qazi Rahman, has revealed that gay men navigate similarly to women. The team employed two virtual reality scenarios developed at Yale University, to see if spatial learning and memory are connected to sexual orientation. It has been known for long that men and women display differences in spatial learning and memory (how we register our environment).
On average, men are significantly better on spatial navigation and finding hidden objects; while women remember easier where objects are located in a particular room.
The Morris Water Maze test (MWM) placed subjects in a virtual pool and for escaping rapidly the subjects had to employ spatial clues to detect a hidden platform. The Radial Arm Maze test (RAM) put the subjects in the situation to traverse eight 'arms' from a circular junction to discover a hidden reward. Just four arms hid a reward.
The MWM test proved more difficult for gay men and straight women, than for straight men. But, both gay and straight men remained more in the area where the hidden platform was located, compared to women, straight or lesbian.
"Not only did straight men get started on the MWM test more quickly than gay men and the two female groups, they also maintained that advantage throughout the test. This might mean that sexual orientation affects the speed at which you acquire spatial information, but not necessarily your eventual memory for that spatial information", said Rahman.
"In previous studies we have also found that gay men tend to use similar navigation strategies to women, like using land-marks, and we now want to explore whether navigation strategies on these virtual navigation tasks are also the same for gay men and women. In particular, we are interested in whether heterosexual men are using a unique strategy from their first attempt at traversing a new environment, which accounts for why they are so quick off the mark", he added.
"This suggests that sexual variation in spatial cognition is not straightforward - gay people appear to show a 'mosaic' of performance, parts of which are male-like and other parts which are female-like", commented Rahman the similar results of straight and gay men for RAM test.
"We know that spatial ability declines more rapidly in men with age than in women, and this might be related to changing hormone profiles. This may have some relevance to sex differences in aging-related diseases of cognitive functioning, such as dementia. If we can understand more about how people of different sexes and sexualities differ in spatial performance, we might be able to tailor cognitive remediation therapies more effectively to specific groups within an aging population", he said.