Can being gay be a chemical imbalance in your brain

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. The compound generally dampens sexual activity; for instance, antidepressants that increase the amount of serotonin in the brain sometimes decrease sex drive.

For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser. 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.

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. 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.

When the researchers injected a compound into these mice to restore neurotransmitter levels, they found that the animals mounted females more than males. 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.

Search Search. Latest Stories U. Janelle Weaver, LiveScience Contributor. A mouse's desire to mate with either a male or a female is determined by the brain chemical serotonin, scientists report. Among the homosexual cisgender controls, weaker sex dimorphism was found in white matter connections and a partly reversed sex dimorphism in Cth.

It finds that epigenetic effects, chemical modifications of the human genome that alter gene activity without changing the DNA sequence, may have a major influence on sexual orientation. Males emit these vocalizations when they encounter females to make them more receptive to mating.

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.

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. Serotonin is known to regulate sexual behaviors, such as erection, ejaculation and orgasm , in both mice and men.

Profile My News Sign Out. Sign In Create your free profile. They published their results in the March 24 issue of the journal Nature. Skip to Content. 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.

In the ongoing effort to determine whether sexual orientation is hardwired, University of Chicago scientists have used high-tech imaging to confirm that the hypothalamus–the sex center in the. Sections U. Follow NBC News. NBC News Logo. IE 11 is not supported.

Instead, they climbed onto males and serenaded them with ultrasonic love songs more frequently than normal. You can follow LiveScience on Twitter livescience. The finding demonstrates for the first time that a neurotransmitter governs sexual preference in mammals. These data show that whereas homosexuality is linked to cerebral sex dimorphism, gender dysphoria primarily involves cerebral networks mediating self–body perception.

Both types of altered mouse couldn't make serotonin.