Do gay people have different brain chemistry

They published their results in the March 24 issue of the journal Nature. Males emit these vocalizations when they encounter females to make them more receptive to mating. Don't miss these. This review systematically explored structural, functional, and metabolic features of the cisgender brain compared with the transgender brain before hormonal treatment and the heterosexual brain compared to the homosexual brain from the analysis of.

Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now. We saw Saturn and Jupiter with this telescope and now it's even cheaper for Prime Day. Biological sex differences in brain function and structure are reliably associated with several cortico-subcortical brain regions.

Open menu Close main menu. James Webb telescope finds 'remarkable' evidence that a black hole plowed through a galaxy, leaving an enormous scar behind. A male mouse's desire to mate with either a male or a female is determined by the brain chemical serotonin, scientists report in a new study.

You can follow LiveScience on Twitter livescience. Serotonin is known to regulate sexual behaviors, such as erection, ejaculation and orgasmin both mice and men.

Is Homosexuality Based on

Still, she agreed with Chen, cautioning against overinterpreting the results. Unlike typical males, mice deficient in the neurotransmitter showed no inclination to mount sexually receptive females more than males, nor did they prefer to smell females' genital odors or bedding.

Sign in View Profile Sign out. While all of the males who possessed serotonin mounted females first, nearly half of the mice that lacked serotonin clambered onto males before females, and about 60 percent spent more time sniffing or hovering over the genital odors and bedding from males than from females.

Live Science. Neuroscientist Yi Rao of Peking University and the National Institute of Biological Sciences in Beijing, and his collaborators have now shown that serotonin also underlies a male's decision to woo a female or another male. But too much serotonin reduced male-female mounting, suggesting that the amount of this chemical must stay within a certain range to foster heterosexual rather than homosexual behaviors.

I was born this

Instead, they climbed onto males and serenaded them with ultrasonic love songs more frequently than normal. Both types of altered mouse couldn't make serotonin. Janelle Weaver. Rao and his team genetically engineered male mice to lack either serotonin-producing neurons or a protein that is crucial for making serotonin in the brain.

When the researchers injected a compound into these mice to restore neurotransmitter levels, they found that the animals mounted females more than males. While sexual orientation (hetero- versus homosexuality) has been. The finding demonstrates for the first time that a neurotransmitter governs sexual preference in mammals.

More recent brain imaging studies reported sexual orientation ‐related differences in cortical regions devoted to vision, some asymmetries between the two hemispheres and differences in the. Some naked mole rats are designated toilet cleaners, study suggests.

The compound generally dampens sexual activity; for instance, antidepressants that increase the amount of serotonin in the brain sometimes decrease sex drive. But one of the co-authors, neuroscientist Zhou-Feng Chen of Washington University, cautioned against forming hasty conclusions about the potential influence of this neurotransmitter on human sexual orientation.

Elaine Hull, an expert in rodent sexual behavior at Florida State University who was not involved in the study, said that the findings "may have implications for homosexuality or bisexual behavior in humans ," adding that the neurotransmitter could help to guide sexual development.