3 ms·
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
by bena 4y 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 4y agoOne 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 4y agoThere'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...
- nonethewiser 4y agoWhy 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.
- rayiner 4y agoHere is another study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8955456/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8955456/ > For this purpose, we analyzed a sample of 24 cisgender men, 24 cisgender women, and 24 transgender women before gender-affirming hormone therapy. We employed a recently developed multivariate classifier that yields a continuous probabilistic (rather than a binary) estimate for brains to be male or female. The brains of transgender women ranged between cisgender men and cisgender women (albeit still closer to cisgender men), and the differences to both cisgender men and to cisgender women were significant (p = 0.016 and p < 0.001, respectively).
- digging 4y agoOne 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 4y agoAlso: 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.