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"… Men and women's brains are connected in different ways which may explain why the sexes excel at certain tasks, say researchers. A US team at the University o

"… Men and women's brains are connected in different ways which may explain why the sexes excel at certain tasks, say researchers. A US team at the University of Pennsylvania scanned the brains of nearly 1,000 men, women, boys and girls and found striking differences. Male brains appeared to be wired front to back, with few connections bridging the two hemispheres. In females, the pathways criss-crossed between left and right. ... " https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1316909110 https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1316909110

jojobas 3y ago
[flagged]
zapdrive 3y ago
[flagged]
nonethewiser 3y ago
Seems like a pretty fundamental difference
bena 3y ago
This seems like a wicked study. By starting with 8 year olds, you've selected people who have already developed somewhat. It's quite possible these differences are developed. Partly by reinforcement of norms. We believe boys are more spatially oriented, so we treat them as such, and we implicitly train them to be, this then begins developing those pathways. But you can't run the study to see if you could develop girls in similar ways. The amount of controls and isolation required to run the study properly is a bit inhumane. You'd need 24 hour control over everything that child learns and encounters. So while the conclusions may be true, it's possible that it's not an inherent difference due to initial biology.
- ben_w 3y ago
  One thing I wonder about whenever "the brains of men and women have systematically different structures" comes up, is what structures do the brains of trans people demonstrate?
  - C-x_C-f 3y ago
    There's not many studies but they generally show that the brain reflects the gender (i.e. a trans woman's brain looks more like a cis woman's than a cis man's), see e.g. https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/131/12/3132/295849?login=false https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/131/12/3132/295849?lo...
    - ben_w 3y ago
      Thanks :)
    - oononm 3y ago
      Later research found that opposite-sex similarity in some brain features actually correlates with homosexuality. This wasn't accounted for in the earlier transsexual studies, because they were using subjects who were both homosexual and trans.
  - nonethewiser 3y ago
    Why do you wonder that? Because if brain structure is shaped by environment then it tells us nothing. If it’s not shaped by environment and brain structure is a fundamental biological difference then it provides some signal.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      I don't think it matters so much to me why someone has a particular gender identity — if that's physiology or environment — but I think it would still be interesting to be able to determine independently of self-identification.
      - oononm 3y ago
        [dead]
        chownie 3y ago
        I followed the link and I only found a hateful twitter thread, in which the thread author referred to trans people as "depraved"? Did you mean to link something else? The comments shared aren't at all insightful, that's pure hatred looking for an excuse
- digging 3y ago
  One option to investigate this would be to study children from highly varied cultures around the world. In fact it seems almost obvious that the study of brains is nearly worthless without such diversity. But that would be difficult and expensive.
  - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
    Also: how much diversity is enough? I strongly suspect that the invention of agriculture had major effects on the social differences between men and women. You would have to include hunter-gatherers in your study to account for this possible effect, and I’m not sure how you would find enough left to do that.
pessimizer 3y ago
Seems like another deceptive statistical study that probably doesn't even control for brain size. It also seems to have discovered that women probably mix up their logic and "intuitive modes", as we always thought. And why would they further show statistics by race rather than by brain size? Brain sizes affect the density of connections and proportions of white matter to grey matter, so comparing small-brained women and men to large-brained women and men would seem like an obvious thing to do if you have the data [edit: but this is obviously me just desperately looking for a control.] Instead, I suspect they were fishing to find out some headline-grabbing result, hoping that (for example) black women were more masculine than white women, or Asian men were more feminine than white men. On the mis-presentation and misinterpretation of gender-related data: The case of Ingalhalikar’s human connectome study https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1323319111 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1323319111
- rayiner 3y ago
  > Instead, I suspect they were fishing to find out some headline-grabbing result, hoping that (for example) black women were more masculine than white women, or Asian men were more feminine than white men. That’s quite a bomb to throw with zero evidence. Like, why does your mind even jump to that?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

jojobas 3y ago

[flagged]

zapdrive 3y ago

[flagged]

nonethewiser 3y ago

Seems like a pretty fundamental difference

bena 3y ago

This seems like a wicked study. By starting with 8 year olds, you've selected people who have already developed somewhat. It's quite possible these differences are developed. Partly by reinforcement of norms. We believe boys are more spatially oriented, so we treat them as such, and we implicitly train them to be, this then begins developing those pathways. But you can't run the study to see if you could develop girls in similar ways. The amount of controls and isolation required to run the study properly is a bit inhumane. You'd need 24 hour control over everything that child learns and encounters. So while the conclusions may be true, it's possible that it's not an inherent difference due to initial biology.

ben_w 3y ago
One thing I wonder about whenever "the brains of men and women have systematically different structures" comes up, is what structures do the brains of trans people demonstrate?
- C-x_C-f 3y ago
  There's not many studies but they generally show that the brain reflects the gender (i.e. a trans woman's brain looks more like a cis woman's than a cis man's), see e.g. https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/131/12/3132/295849?login=false https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/131/12/3132/295849?lo...
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Thanks :)
  - oononm 3y ago
    Later research found that opposite-sex similarity in some brain features actually correlates with homosexuality. This wasn't accounted for in the earlier transsexual studies, because they were using subjects who were both homosexual and trans.
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  Why do you wonder that? Because if brain structure is shaped by environment then it tells us nothing. If it’s not shaped by environment and brain structure is a fundamental biological difference then it provides some signal.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    I don't think it matters so much to me why someone has a particular gender identity — if that's physiology or environment — but I think it would still be interesting to be able to determine independently of self-identification.
    - oononm 3y ago
      [dead]
      - chownie 3y ago
        I followed the link and I only found a hateful twitter thread, in which the thread author referred to trans people as "depraved"? Did you mean to link something else? The comments shared aren't at all insightful, that's pure hatred looking for an excuse
digging 3y ago
One option to investigate this would be to study children from highly varied cultures around the world. In fact it seems almost obvious that the study of brains is nearly worthless without such diversity. But that would be difficult and expensive.
- amanaplanacanal 3y ago
  Also: how much diversity is enough? I strongly suspect that the invention of agriculture had major effects on the social differences between men and women. You would have to include hunter-gatherers in your study to account for this possible effect, and I’m not sure how you would find enough left to do that.

pessimizer 3y ago

Seems like another deceptive statistical study that probably doesn't even control for brain size. It also seems to have discovered that women probably mix up their logic and "intuitive modes", as we always thought. And why would they further show statistics by race rather than by brain size? Brain sizes affect the density of connections and proportions of white matter to grey matter, so comparing small-brained women and men to large-brained women and men would seem like an obvious thing to do if you have the data [edit: but this is obviously me just desperately looking for a control.] Instead, I suspect they were fishing to find out some headline-grabbing result, hoping that (for example) black women were more masculine than white women, or Asian men were more feminine than white men. On the mis-presentation and misinterpretation of gender-related data: The case of Ingalhalikar’s human connectome study https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1323319111 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1323319111

rayiner 3y ago
> Instead, I suspect they were fishing to find out some headline-grabbing result, hoping that (for example) black women were more masculine than white women, or Asian men were more feminine than white men. That’s quite a bomb to throw with zero evidence. Like, why does your mind even jump to that?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]