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Mind

Brain activity seems to be more complex in baby girls than boys

When fetuses and babies were exposed to sound stimuli, their brains' subsequent activity appeared to be more complicated in the females than the males

By Moheb Costandi

25 April 2024

A baby in the trial having its brain's electrical activity recorded while hearing sound stimuli

The experiment involved recording a baby’s brain activity while they heard sound stimuli

University Hospital Tuebingen

The complexity of signals in the brain seems to decrease as the nervous system develops in fetuses and babies – and does so significantly faster in males compared with females.

Joel Frohlich at the University of Tübingen in Germany and his colleagues used an imaging technique called magnetoencephalography (MEG) to measure the magnetic fields produced by the brain’s electrical currents in 43 third-trimester fetuses and 20 babies, aged between 13 and 59 days old, to sound stimuli. Of the babies, 16 had also been recorded…

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