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Women's Brains Are Different Than Those Of Men
GreyPoopon writes: "Check out this article on BBC Online regarding a gender divide in brain usage between male and female. Basically, the article talks about how the males and females use the brain differently to execute the same tasks. Differences between males and females are always a subject of controversy, and the article does a good job of presenting facts without trolling." As the article points out, in the case of brain injuries, the treatments appropriate for men and women ought perhaps vary to accomodate these newly discovered usage patterns.
How did they ever collate all the data from such a massive sample?
Well here's my bone with the article. They mentioned how many boys and girls were in the study but they didn't seem to factor in whether those boys and girls were left/right handed or ambidextrous. That makes a *huge* difference in which side of the brain one uses more. Or rather, the side of the brain one uses more determines handedness. I've also read previously more girls are left handed than boys. Left handed generally means right brained. But their study is concluding girls use their left brain more.
If they studied all right handed subjects, then this study may hold true. But if they mixed handedness, these results may not mean a thing.
That may sound like an odd thing to consider, but research has shown differences in brain physiology between homosexual and heterosexual men - specifically, in the interstitial nuclei of the anterior hypothalamus.
There are plenty of other factors around sex, sex preference, and sex-organ related endocrinology that affect physiology and function as well. Polycystic ovarian syndrome comes to mind (affects ~8-10% of women in the US), as do hyper- and hypogonadism, hermaphroditism, etc. Admittedly, those are oddball cases, but then oddball cases sometimes isolate specific mechanisms for better study. Anyone know anything about science being done around these factors?
That doesn't even scratch the surface, the more I think of it... Early exposure to music can affect neurophysiology of the aural centers, there are various factors that affect the proportion of glial cells (Einstein had an abnormal excess of them; babies of alcoholic mothers tend to develop fewer), et cetera ad nauseum.
Anyway, rambling aside, it sounds like there's still a lot to learn here; A gross study of gender-based brain differences is just scratching the surface, and I'd be skeptical of strictly gender-based treatment regimens that took nothing else into account.
OK,
- B
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http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
The "environmentally-sensitive" bit is something that most people are oblivious about. Given that brains develop differently in response to differing stimulous, and given that men and women are treated so differently from birth (if not before), it's not exactly a big surprise that there are detectable differences.
The $64,000 question is how much of a difference there would be if men and women weren't treated so differently. The nature-vs-nurture question is still wide open.
Ok, critisism is easy, but how would I do it?
Essentially, this is NOT a simple case of H0 (the default hypothesis) being that the brain usage is the same. Rather, it is one of H0 being that the brain usage is the same, when the brains are functioning in the same way.
This means that you have an N-way analysis of variance to do, where N is the number of mental conditions you are allowing for.
(For example, do you allow for tetrachromatic women? Sure, that might only affect the vision portions of the brain, but can you be SURE of that??)
That, in turn, affects the sample size you would need. You -really- want a sample size of at least 100, per category. Some categories, though, make up less than 0.01% of the population. This means you will need a TOTAL sample size of around 2,000,000+, to get statistically meaningful results. (Anything less, and your numbers will skew your results, in unpredictable ways.)
Two million individuals is a LOT of people. Sure, there are 60 million people in Britain, so you're only talking 1:30 being involved in the study. Still, that's no small number. I honestly have never heard of any serious medical or mental studies done on this kind of scale. Which is a shame, because (as I've said), it's only on this scale that you can get useful results.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I've never read it, though I think I did see some magazine extracts. The reader's review on Amazon found it interesting, but was dubious about how much weight the experimental evidence deserved.
Can anybody else give an opinion on the book ?
Significant parts of men's brains are between their legs while portions of women's brains switch on and off depending on the time of the month :).
That said it's an interesting study, pity the small sample. They need a bigger sample and more info (handedness) to really be conclusive. And in fact follow up till adulthood. That would be interesting.
Cheerio,
Link.
Maybe if a female had posted the article, she would at least have managed proper English grammar.
'Women's Brains Are Different From Those Of Men.'
[laugh] Right. As if parents are disinterested observers.
In any case, many parents I've talked to say that the differences between individual siblings significantly overshadow any theoretical gender-based differences. That's what it all boils down to -- treating people as individuals rather than as members of a group that may or may not be relevant.