6 ms·

It’s improtant to remember that this study isn’t being done just to prove that men and women have different brains. It’s primarly designed to help understand ne

by elil17 8y ago

It’s improtant to remember that this study isn’t being done just to prove that men and women have different brains. It’s primarly designed to help understand neurological phenomena like Autism which are sex differentiated. Also, this study seemed to do a good job avoiding sexist stereotyping. This is an example of the right way to do research about neurological differences between men and women.

DoreenMichele 8y ago
I wasn't going to say anything, but since you brought it up: There is evidence that autistic girls tend to go underdiagnosed and tend to be more required than boys to simply figure out the social stuff. So there are some confounding social elements there. Having said that, I think there are gender differences and we do ourselves no favors to try to pretend they don't exist at all. Granted, it's a minefield in terms of gender politics and the like. However, I don't think "La La La not listening!" gets us safely and effectively to the other side. That minefield seems to exist anyway, whether we discuss it or not.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  However, I don't think "La La La not listening!" gets us safely and effectively to the other side. "La La La not listening!" -- is generally a symptom of a faction which is about to become the villains in the story.
- Symmetry 8y ago
  It seems really strange to me to say that you can push autistic children to act non-autistic just by requiring them to figure out social stuff. I don't really know much at all about autism treatment but I had thought that it was much more involved than that. Do you have a link? I would have guessed that just pushing kids wouldn't work and that parents would be more bothered to autism-spectrum behaviors in boys than girls.
  - elil17 8y ago
    So signing th autistic community pretending to be non-autistic is called masking and it is certainly possible for lots of autistic people. However, it is exhausting. It makes it hard to get work done and leaves you totally drained at the end of the day. It’s not a fun way to go about life.
    - mantas 8y ago
      Meanwhile not participating in normal life and shutting off from the rest of the world is not fun way either. I'll take living at 80% any day over pretending to be a unicorn and shutting off from the world. It's sort of like some people pretending being blind or death is their "culture" and thus has to be cherished. No, it's not. It's a deficiency and learning to work around it is damn nice. Source: I'd probably be on the spectrum if I was a kid nowadays and have eye sight issues.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    Just one I pulled up and skimmed a bit: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/07/31/539123377/social-camouflage-may-lead-to-underdiagnosis-of-autism-in-girls https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/07/31/5391233... It's not something I keep at my fingertips. I don't have any daughters. There is always a grey zone of some bandwidth between "I simply can't do it at all" and "I just don't want it bad enough." Expecting people to just want it bad enough can do them a lot of harm, but sometimes it can (also) be the push they need to force themselves to do the hard thing and make it work, though it tends to really cost them. When there is too much pressure to perform combined with inability to perform and lack of support for helping them perform, this can go really bad places. But, there is some truth to the idea that if you just insist X is not okay, you get more compliance, even though it is harder for some people to comply than others. I personally think that a very large factor in the so-called autism epidemic is that society has changed. Rather than recognizing that element, we blame individual children as being defective. Functional adults are made, not born. Humans raise our children for many years. If you don't intuitively just know social stuff works this way, some of it can be learned. It helps enormously if there is a sympathetic adult giving instruction instead of being all "And the beatings shall continue until morale improves." My dad was nearly 41 when I was born. He was literally old enough to be my grandfather and, like most people of his era, he grew up on a farm with no TV and general lack of modern noise makers that simply didn't exist back then. My parents both simply expected the house to be quiet so they could sleep. I moved home during my divorce and I was very struck by this. No one diagnosed my parents with "sensory issues." No one labeled them because they expected quiet in the house. They weren't determined to be excessively sensitive noise and in need of getting over it for the convenience of other people. They were just old and things being quiet was their norm and it was their house I was living in, so it was their rules. You have to respect that. Life has gotten a lot noisier. People tend to live in larger cities instead of smaller communities where they need to interact with a great many more people, plus moving around is much more the norm. Life has sped up a whole lot. Etc. Etc. But we don't go "Wait a minute. Kids used to grow up with a smaller number of social contacts in quieter surroundings with much less overall pressure. Maybe we don't simply have some unexplainable epidemic of socially defective children. Maybe the world has changed in ways that children weren't designed for." Nope, we just assume that the ones who can't take the noise and can't rapidly adapt to high levels of change and can't cope with a jillion different people are missing something and are a nuisance requiring special accommodation. I've made a lot of lifestyle changes to accommodate my needs and the needs of my adult sons who still live with me. I forget how impaired my oldest can be in noisy, crowded settings because we've arranged our lives where he almost never has to spend time in such settings. And he's vastly more functional than he's supposed to be capable of because I've never told him he's defective for not being a social butterfly and preferring his peace and quiet and only wanting a strong connection to close family members. You know, kind of like his grandparents that no one thought had anything wrong with them for having such preferences.
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
  I feel that more and more people feel that the existence of the minefield becomes a problem in itself, and that disarming these mines is an important part of the process that makes progress possible. If we avoid conversation or make it one-sided, what kind of result can be achieved?
anon49124 8y ago
Yup. There's a wide variation within all people as to how each brain processes perception. For example, some dudes can't remember what a car looks like or are bad with directions.
- kokey 8y ago
  I believe gender related traits are on a spectrum just like autistic traits. This means between individuals you can't make any assumptions about how they compare on specific behavioural traits or abilities, but as whole groups some of these are clustered enough make some assumptions. I also think that just like people on the autistic spectrum can develop coping strategies to help 'fit in' and appear 'normal' to neurotypicals, so can people develop coping strategies to make them fit in better with people of the opposite gender or in a generally more gender neutral society. These coping strategies means it's harder work for them than just acting on instinct and inherit passion, but the results can appear the same. That said I think it's quite good for society to have such a variety of different mechanisms, natural or developed, around specific traits, behaviours or activities.
dubya23 8y ago
It's critically important to admit that there ARE differences in the first place. Something that inexplicably has become taboo to many on the left.
- williamdclt 8y ago
  Please don't turn that into politics.
- yjyofiz 8y ago
  > Something that inexplicably has become taboo to many on the left I think the more important split than left vs right is neuroscientist vs non-neuroscientist [0]. It's absurd to think that there would be no gender-related neurological differences, but also unlikely that there are large differences. The answer lies somewhere in between, and the more you learn about the brain, the more you realize how limited our scientific understanding of it is. Also, seeing as how this article is pay-walled and not available on any mirror sights, I suspect that almost no one commenting here has read the article in full. Which brings us yet again to [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  - nisuni 8y ago
    > It's absurd to think that there would be no gender-related neurological differences Surprisingly enough, that's a widely accepted hypothesis in sociology.
    - themarkn 8y ago
      Well, they wouldn’t be gender related because gender and biological sex are different ideas. To many people, anyway.
      - nisuni 8y ago
        Since gender and biological sex are extremely strongly correlated, stating that there are no gender-related neurological differences it's substantially equivalent to saying that there are no biological sex-related neurological differences.
dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
> just to prove that men and women have different brains Well, we do have different brains. I don't think it's a problem and I'm sorry this fact is offending to some, but there is a whole branch of science related to that. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_sex_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_sex_difference...

by elil17 8y ago

DoreenMichele 8y ago

I wasn't going to say anything, but since you brought it up: There is evidence that autistic girls tend to go underdiagnosed and tend to be more required than boys to simply figure out the social stuff. So there are some confounding social elements there. Having said that, I think there are gender differences and we do ourselves no favors to try to pretend they don't exist at all. Granted, it's a minefield in terms of gender politics and the like. However, I don't think "La La La not listening!" gets us safely and effectively to the other side. That minefield seems to exist anyway, whether we discuss it or not.

stcredzero 8y ago
However, I don't think "La La La not listening!" gets us safely and effectively to the other side. "La La La not listening!" -- is generally a symptom of a faction which is about to become the villains in the story.
Symmetry 8y ago
It seems really strange to me to say that you can push autistic children to act non-autistic just by requiring them to figure out social stuff. I don't really know much at all about autism treatment but I had thought that it was much more involved than that. Do you have a link? I would have guessed that just pushing kids wouldn't work and that parents would be more bothered to autism-spectrum behaviors in boys than girls.
- elil17 8y ago
  So signing th autistic community pretending to be non-autistic is called masking and it is certainly possible for lots of autistic people. However, it is exhausting. It makes it hard to get work done and leaves you totally drained at the end of the day. It’s not a fun way to go about life.
  - mantas 8y ago
    Meanwhile not participating in normal life and shutting off from the rest of the world is not fun way either. I'll take living at 80% any day over pretending to be a unicorn and shutting off from the world. It's sort of like some people pretending being blind or death is their "culture" and thus has to be cherished. No, it's not. It's a deficiency and learning to work around it is damn nice. Source: I'd probably be on the spectrum if I was a kid nowadays and have eye sight issues.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  Just one I pulled up and skimmed a bit: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/07/31/539123377/social-camouflage-may-lead-to-underdiagnosis-of-autism-in-girls https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/07/31/5391233... It's not something I keep at my fingertips. I don't have any daughters. There is always a grey zone of some bandwidth between "I simply can't do it at all" and "I just don't want it bad enough." Expecting people to just want it bad enough can do them a lot of harm, but sometimes it can (also) be the push they need to force themselves to do the hard thing and make it work, though it tends to really cost them. When there is too much pressure to perform combined with inability to perform and lack of support for helping them perform, this can go really bad places. But, there is some truth to the idea that if you just insist X is not okay, you get more compliance, even though it is harder for some people to comply than others. I personally think that a very large factor in the so-called autism epidemic is that society has changed. Rather than recognizing that element, we blame individual children as being defective. Functional adults are made, not born. Humans raise our children for many years. If you don't intuitively just know social stuff works this way, some of it can be learned. It helps enormously if there is a sympathetic adult giving instruction instead of being all "And the beatings shall continue until morale improves." My dad was nearly 41 when I was born. He was literally old enough to be my grandfather and, like most people of his era, he grew up on a farm with no TV and general lack of modern noise makers that simply didn't exist back then. My parents both simply expected the house to be quiet so they could sleep. I moved home during my divorce and I was very struck by this. No one diagnosed my parents with "sensory issues." No one labeled them because they expected quiet in the house. They weren't determined to be excessively sensitive noise and in need of getting over it for the convenience of other people. They were just old and things being quiet was their norm and it was their house I was living in, so it was their rules. You have to respect that. Life has gotten a lot noisier. People tend to live in larger cities instead of smaller communities where they need to interact with a great many more people, plus moving around is much more the norm. Life has sped up a whole lot. Etc. Etc. But we don't go "Wait a minute. Kids used to grow up with a smaller number of social contacts in quieter surroundings with much less overall pressure. Maybe we don't simply have some unexplainable epidemic of socially defective children. Maybe the world has changed in ways that children weren't designed for." Nope, we just assume that the ones who can't take the noise and can't rapidly adapt to high levels of change and can't cope with a jillion different people are missing something and are a nuisance requiring special accommodation. I've made a lot of lifestyle changes to accommodate my needs and the needs of my adult sons who still live with me. I forget how impaired my oldest can be in noisy, crowded settings because we've arranged our lives where he almost never has to spend time in such settings. And he's vastly more functional than he's supposed to be capable of because I've never told him he's defective for not being a social butterfly and preferring his peace and quiet and only wanting a strong connection to close family members. You know, kind of like his grandparents that no one thought had anything wrong with them for having such preferences.
dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
I feel that more and more people feel that the existence of the minefield becomes a problem in itself, and that disarming these mines is an important part of the process that makes progress possible. If we avoid conversation or make it one-sided, what kind of result can be achieved?

anon49124 8y ago

Yup. There's a wide variation within all people as to how each brain processes perception. For example, some dudes can't remember what a car looks like or are bad with directions.

kokey 8y ago
I believe gender related traits are on a spectrum just like autistic traits. This means between individuals you can't make any assumptions about how they compare on specific behavioural traits or abilities, but as whole groups some of these are clustered enough make some assumptions. I also think that just like people on the autistic spectrum can develop coping strategies to help 'fit in' and appear 'normal' to neurotypicals, so can people develop coping strategies to make them fit in better with people of the opposite gender or in a generally more gender neutral society. These coping strategies means it's harder work for them than just acting on instinct and inherit passion, but the results can appear the same. That said I think it's quite good for society to have such a variety of different mechanisms, natural or developed, around specific traits, behaviours or activities.

dubya23 8y ago

It's critically important to admit that there ARE differences in the first place. Something that inexplicably has become taboo to many on the left.

williamdclt 8y ago
Please don't turn that into politics.
yjyofiz 8y ago
> Something that inexplicably has become taboo to many on the left I think the more important split than left vs right is neuroscientist vs non-neuroscientist [0]. It's absurd to think that there would be no gender-related neurological differences, but also unlikely that there are large differences. The answer lies somewhere in between, and the more you learn about the brain, the more you realize how limited our scientific understanding of it is. Also, seeing as how this article is pay-walled and not available on any mirror sights, I suspect that almost no one commenting here has read the article in full. Which brings us yet again to [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
- nisuni 8y ago
  > It's absurd to think that there would be no gender-related neurological differences Surprisingly enough, that's a widely accepted hypothesis in sociology.
  - themarkn 8y ago
    Well, they wouldn’t be gender related because gender and biological sex are different ideas. To many people, anyway.
    - nisuni 8y ago
      Since gender and biological sex are extremely strongly correlated, stating that there are no gender-related neurological differences it's substantially equivalent to saying that there are no biological sex-related neurological differences.

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago

> just to prove that men and women have different brains Well, we do have different brains. I don't think it's a problem and I'm sorry this fact is offending to some, but there is a whole branch of science related to that. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_sex_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_sex_difference...