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The Brains of Men and Women Are 'Wired Differently'
Rambo Tribble writes "Research out of the University of Philadelphia concludes there are major differences in the neural pathways in the brains of men and women. Men, they say, are wired more front-to-back, women more side-to-side. 'The results establish that male brains are optimized for intrahemispheric and female brains for interhemispheric communication. The developmental trajectories of males and females separate at a young age, demonstrating wide differences during adolescence and adulthood. The observations suggest that male brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action, whereas female brains are designed to facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes.' They propose this may explain why women have been found to be better multitaskers. Of course, this may also have ramifications for what skill and career proclivities each sex exhibits."
And the poisonous ideologies invented to justify it, and the pervasive violence employed to enforce it. For women's liberation through socialist revolution! Abolish the family!
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Don't tell me! Men and women might be different!?!?!?!?!?
.... Considering the different Tate's and preferences?
... sometimes centuries ahead of society, sometime millenniums behind..
Water is wet.
No Shit Sherlock
Can we please stop posting articles about having more women in STEM.
It will never be 50/50 and won't ever get much higher than it is now. It is what it is.
Is there such a thing? There's University of Pennsylvania... also something called "Philadelphia University".
First BBC link says UPenn. UPenn always likes being mixed up with Penn State. Never heard them mixed up with other universities though.
female brains are designed to facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes
Ah, this must explain why most programmers are women.
Would be interesting to see if their pathways follow that of the gender they were born in, or the one they have chosen.
No! Men and women are EQUAL, dammit! I'm not listening, lalalalalala...!
..is still dwarfed by the differences between individuals of a gender. None of these articles about statistical differences will ever justify the prejudices and social roles some people want to enforce on others to make things simpler.
As the article notes, the pathways being studied can change throughout life.
Presumably they change to fit the tasks the person spends most time on.
So... it seems plausible that the pathways reflect gender stereotypes because gender stereotypes created them in the first place.
What about people whose brains are "intersexed" - the brain analog to those whose reproductive organs are neither wholly male nor wholly female?
What about the mistaken social assumptions that come when a person is physically one gender and self-identifies as that gender (i.e NOT a traditional "transgender" person) but whose brain is wired the other way?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
So a study noted some interesting neurological structural differences, which is cool.
What is likely to be not cool are the coming comments about how this is just more evidence that divides in fields like STEM, management, finance, etc, are somehow the result of natural drives/talents and that women really do just want to be relegated to the low paid, low respect fields which have minimal chances for advancement, and that they are paid less because they are simply less capable.
No shit, Sherlock.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
" is a huge leap to extrapolate from anatomical differences to try to explain behavioural variation between the sexes. Also, brain connections are not set and can change throughout life."
So... basically this could be 100% enculturation and there could be zero genetic differences. This is essentially the equivalent of pointing out that people who do a lot of running have strikingly different looking cells in their leg muscles than people who sit on the couch all day. Jumping to the runners being born with different leg muscles might not be the correct answer.
As I understand it, the brain is highly adaptive. This begs the question that early conditioning and training may very well have long term consequences to how our brains develop. If boys and girls are subjected to different stimuli and expectations, it follows that their brains are also going to develop differently. Or, to be more blunt, any change in development trajectories that happen after birth could be due to different biology just as well as environmental pressure on the child. This, naturally, makes it very difficult when one wants to consider which is cause and which is effect.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
Different wiring for different sexes does not in itself imply genetic predetermination but might as well be a consequence of differences in what challenges grown ups are likely to present to the child. ... Oh! I see Heidi Johansen-Berg says something to that effect as well in the last paragraph - good!
send + more == money?
It's not the University of Philadelphia.
Really? What a shock! You mean men and women... think... differently!? No. It can't be! Brain... exploding.. can't... process... data...
Any neurological study that perpetuates the myth that women are better at multitasking is suspect.
Numerous studies show that no one* is capable of multitasking to any degree of usefulness.
*Exception being people that have had their corpus callosum physically cut.
Spatial skills for men, verbal dexterity for women. Got it, thanks. But tell men what sex feels like for a woman and women what it feels like for a man. Only then can we bridge the divide between the genders.
what implications this has for sexual preference & gender self-identification ? I expect that there is full spectrum of "wiring diagrams" not just male=front/back & female=left/right just as there is a full spectrum of gender identification. Could there be a direct correlation, even causation? Somebody please prove that sexual preference and gender identity is hard-wired by cerebral development and let's shut up the religious asshats once and for all.
The problem when discussing gender differences is that there is no stereotypical male or stereotypical female.
The difference in genetic makeup between the average male and the average female is LESS than the difference between one individual and another individual.
Trying to create more "gender ghettos" is the wrong response. Here at the UW there are many women engineers and scientists, and not in the fields old fogies think they "should" be in.
We are all individuals. How we use what we have differs, but that doesn't make it "better".
It's like a study on Mergers and Aquisitions reported today saying boards with only one female member were less likely to do a merger than boards with all male members - the problem is that mergers are usually a bad idea for shareholder value in the first place.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
how about the fact that guys actually are confronted and have to explain themselves about 1000 more times than women before adulthood?
Sorry to burst your pretend bubble but: do they have an X and Y chromosome or not? The end.
Yeah, sorry, but nature leaves humanity much more mixed up than your simple world view wishes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRY Have fun learning about "XX males" and "XY females"!
Did we need a study for this?
"In other news, scientists have confirmed that the sky is, in fact, blue."
It's depressing that time and energy are being wasted on mind-numbingly obvious things like this when we still don't know how to cure cancer, prevent aging, or even permanently leave the planet.
Of course it would take a team of MALES to come to this conclusion. We are no different. I'm shocked and offended.
In my experience, men are far better than women at multitasking.
I'll never understand why people claim the opposite.
Take a simple chore list - take out the trash, do the dishes, do the laundry, vacuum.
Females in my experience will do them sequentially, in an order that suits them - if they hate vacuuming that gets done last.
Males in my experience will do them concurrently. Fill the sink, put the laundry in the washer, do one rack of dishes, take out the trash, put the laundry in the dryer, vacuum, put the dry dishes away and do the rest of the dishes, fold the laundry.
Do your research instead of wondering and you'll figure it out. Both the 'standard' orgasms feel/are described roughly the same way by both sexes except with less recovery time for women. G-spot orgasms provide waves similar to prostate stimulation waves. Women might be able to mentally suppress/delay their orgasms better, but physical stimulation will still get them wet. Orgasms can always be forced (we do that to breeding livestock), but if that feels good or not is a different matter.
On a more technical side, see which chemicals get released at which points and rates for both sexes. See where the tissues develop from and assume similar feelings from similar origins. We end up differently, but started the same and work the same way.
I think it has a lot to do with estrogen flow vs. testosterone flow, and not men and women. I know women who are more manly than men, and men more womanly than women. This is the whole men and women are equal argument, they are and should be in the eyes of the law, but it's highly variant between individuals. Also, this doesn't mean one has to necessarily pick a single flow for either gender. It's just not very clear cut like our society would like to believe.
See the book "Unlocking the Clubhouse" for how high-achieving girls fascinated by computers suffer a death by a thousand cuts and switch fields despite their preference.
Men and women are equal.
- The IRS
I come here for the love
By and large, men are physically more powerful -- by a very large margin. Over the vast majority of history, that physical power has been both a key factor in survival, making the male indispensable to the household, and consequently a means to dominate the family unit that could not be excised -- at the same time, it isn't something that depends upon superior cognitive function.
It is only (very) recently that females have become broadly able to support a household without benefit of a male presence. If women are to dominate due to any particular cognitive advantage, they've only just entered the race and it'll most likely be some time yet before we see the results, both due to cultural inertia and learning curves.
There's no telling what women may be capable of as yet in terms of exceeding male performance; they've barely had a few decades to try things on, and they're still being held back by religion, chauvinism, and the divisive backwards ride that sexual-role focused feminism took them on.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
... the brain of those transsexuals, those XXY, those XYY people, how their brains have been wired ?
Instead of from front to back or side to side, how their brains are being wired ??
By rotating women's brains 90 degrees you can "fix" them.
Up next...PRAYING the GAY AWAY!
There is no University of Philadelphia, only a Philadelphia University, which would also be wrong.
The news is from the University of Pennsylvania.
Or is it because of Slashdot's sexistic name? "Babe, let me show you the slash between my dots".
I think I need to get decidedly more drunk before I can appreciate my jokes.
The observations suggest that male brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action, whereas female brains are designed to facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes.
To there?
Yes, so can we please stop pretending that it is a travesty that few women are interested in IT?
The brain is an organ that shapes itself according to how it is used.
Women are from Venus, men are from Mars. Of course their brains are wired differently.
The fight over "begging the question" was lost decades ago. The modern usage makes more sense anyway: the logical fallacy would be better off renamed "assuming the premise", which both serves as a more descriptive name and is a better translation of the Latin petitio principii.
Save your time and effort for the "literally" folks. It's wasted here.
The proper term in propositional logic is 'affirming the antecedent'. Assuming all of the premises are always part of the process to determine an argument's validity. So the idea you are presenting is already in effect in learned circles. Further, Latin names for logic terms are not used outside of law studies. Greek is preferred.
No one who is married needs to be told that men and women are wired differently.
For example, my wife seems to have a problem with my spending all my free-time playing Battlefield 4 and Need for Speed Rivals. She thinks family dinners and holiday celebrations and our anniversary should take precedence over a week of double-XP.
Clearly, her priorities are way out of whack. Yet, somehow it seems to work. Or at least it did until I stopped showering last Tuesday and she started insisting I sleep in the basement. But the joke's on her because that's where my gaming rig is set up.
You are welcome on my lawn.
"whereas female brains are designed..." Hold it right there, cowboy! Brains weren't designed, they evolved.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
So age-old 'sexist' stereotypes are, in fact, rooted in reality. Whaddya fucking know.
Its patiently obvious that we are different. Men and women think differently. Not just in terms of spacial perception but emotionally. Our personalities are different.
And that's fine. It doesn't mean either is inferior. Just different. And there is nothing wrong with being different.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Your tax and tuition dollars at work.
Maybe we need a new study category; "Verifying Common Sense"
And in other news, gravity makes things fall down.
When you come down to it everything is a power struggle. Some people play the game differently than others, but in the end it's mostly being at the right place at the right time. The interesting thing about this is that end of this game, does it really matter? Sure it makes a debate about gender roles, who should have what job, creating categories, etc. But what is the outcome we expect? Can we hope find justice or something like that from it? I suggest that it won't and really only serves as a sharpener for a tool that people have experimented for quite some time, this thing called cohersion. Of course your next boss is going to eat this all up, it's like candy! Except the problem is sometimes this leads to really painful and debilitating chronic health problems. Oh well, tastes great less filling. When you scientists do in depth analysis on the effects on fear (driving force for many human endeavors) on the brain, maybe your results will be a bit more meaningful.
The striking thing in this article isn't that we're different, but that our differences appear to be in a realm that is not physical, but is reflected in the physical realm.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
The differences are physical because neurology and genetics are physical. Possibly you refer to programming which is also physical but is often considered to be beyond or beside the physical somehow. In any case...
Men and women had different evolutionary pressures upon them and so sexual dimorphism exists. This has been a known fact of science and is patiently obvious...
We've only had this obscured because the ideological literalists have crept into the feminist movement and have concluded that for men and women to be given equal meritorious treatment in society they must be literally identical.
You see the same thing out of evangelical Christians when they insist the world is 6000 years old or that dinosaurs didn't exist because they aren't able to accept that maybe there were dinosaurs... and maybe the world is billions of years old... and yet maybe their god still created it all. The other religious factions don't seem to have a problem making that leap but literalists are annoying in this sort of discussion. Tragically irritating.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
"Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences", Dr. Rebecca Jordon-Young.
The literature, on careful examination, turns out to be full of floating definitions, hidden assumptions, and outright discarding of data.
There are sexually dimorphic places in the hypothalamus, but it's really tough otherwise to tell a male brain from a female brain. The differences are a matter of overlapping bell curves at most.
>> They propose this may explain why women have been found to be better multitaskers
Citation please. This is not self-evident. In fact I for one don't believe that women are actually any better than men at multitasking.
From many personal observations I've come to a pretty much inescapable conclusion that while many women do clearly believe they can multitask well, in reality they perform each task very poorly (i.e. just as badly or even worse than men) when attempting to do them concurrently. If one of those tasks is driving, all the other road users better watch out.
Men seem more inclined to a sequential rather than concurrent approach, not because they can't multitask as well/badly as women, rather they want to do each task more properly. Again this is just my personal theory based on observing many real-life cases over 50 years, of which nearly all have pretty much (re)(re)(re)confirmed this.
... the brain of those transsexuals, those XXY, those XYY people, how their brains have been wired ?
Instead of from front to back or side to side, how their brains are being wired ??
Well women are wired side to side and men a wired front to back. So consider that a car engine can be mounted latitudinally (side to side) in a front wheel drive car or longitudinally (front to back) as in a rear wheel drive car, transsexuals would be all wheel drive.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
It is probable "consensual copulation" is a relatively modern requirement for the propagation of one's genetic line.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
... oh yes, clearly the brain has to be the only organ not strongly shaped by genetics. 'cause that's so scientific.
This sounds a lot like, "Men have specific adaptations for hunting and women are better for almost everything else," which sounds about right, actually.
Who? Socialists.
--
Tell that to feminists demanding societal concessions from men.
Didn't a woman invent OO (object orientation) This would seem to be a perfect example of a woman's intuitive side and logical sides communicating in a more inter-hemisphere fashion. It's a very intuitive yet useful application to something logical.
men and women have 'differing dangling private parts'.... /., AT THE FOREFRONT OF SCIENCE!
There will certainly be abuses. There will be people who take and don't give back. And this should be prevented
I think this has been severely underemphasized and is missing a dynamic. There are compelling arguments to evaluate whether social justice is doing more harm than good. http://www.columbian.com/news/2013/dec/03/ideology-of-victimhood-hampers-those-at-the-bottom/
You forgot the hyperlink to the research that shows that women are better in multitasking.
Oh, it doesn't really exist...
Or longer ... this is pretty far from a new idea.
Major neuroanatomical differences between genders have been known for some years eg women have a relatively larger corpus collosum (Einstein had a big corpus collosum) joining the two hemispheres which supports the idea that women have superior integrative abilities between thought and feeling. Yet other ideologically-driven studies still try to insist that "men and women are more alike than we think". We are not alike, we are wired differently. That is not to say that some behaviors and ideas are inculcated socially.
Really?
How much of this is genetic vs environmental? We know our brains can rewire themselves after accidents because they must. Perhaps they are wiring themselves in this "normal" way as we grow due to social influences.
It led me to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_running_hypothesis
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
This is why my woman can make me a sandwich and iron my shirt at the same time.
You make some good points, but you also make some key questionable assumptions. Bill Gates was himself born a millionaire (trust fund from banker granddad) and also he did not write most of the software he resold, and what he wrote,he wrote based on knowledge gained in part from dumpster diving to find program listings from a computer center. Without his mother's knowing someone at IBM, he probably would not have gotten the deal for an OS for the IBM PC. IBM probably would have been better off using an in-house Forth that had been written bu David Frank, or Unix like the CS-9000, but suffered from internal politics.
The deep question is what part of the the fruits of our infrastructure (air, water, farmland, roads, machines, seeds, internet, books, software, ICs, etc.) should be shared equally (not "means-tested") and what part should somehow be used to "reward" hard work or risk taking or whatever. So you make an assumption with being "OK" with a huge wealth disparity whatever its cause (in this case, Bill Gates indeed being bright and hard working, but also rich from birth and part of a socially well-connected family). But another point of view might be that, say, half the economic output of the USA should be shared equally (US$25K per person per year) as social security payments from birth as a "basic income", and the other half should then be "earned"or divided based on effort or merit somehow.
Dan Pink questions the whole notion of financial reward as a motivator for intellectual work (even as we all need some money to survive and thrive in this culture we have built):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
See also:
http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/
"William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars. "
On Bill Gates and dumpster diving:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=437640&cid=22255952
Bill Gates made a lot of money by damaging the community of people freely sharing knowledge and software with each other, while hypocritically pleading poverty:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
Often people can make a lot of money by disempowering other people and disrupting communities.
That said, is Windows a useful standard given its backward compatibility? Yes it is (as much as I don't like to have to admit that).
The JK Rowling story is more complex too. Many people write amazing stories, but few get widely published by the nature of our publishing industry. Still, her story is a good example of the value of a "basic income" to promote creativity. ... "In fact," harrumphs the Yorkshire Post, "this middle-class English girl with an Exeter University degree and a career as a teacher didn't try to dispel the myth that she'd been a penniless, single mother." ..."
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/08/27/1030053057866.html
"Too good, it turns out. Yes, Rowling was a single mother with a bad marriage behind her, and yes, she was briefly on the dole. But the coffee shop was owned by her brother-in-law and Rowling was never far from her middle-class origins.
If the dole effectively promotes the arts effectively in a compassionate way, then why do we have copyright instead?
In a world of
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus!
Also is it just me or does this sound like Phrenology. Maybe because of all the speculation based postulations made in the summary.
"Oh yes! That side to side 'brain wiring' is the cause of your problem right there. That clearly makes you better at multitasking. While your friend with the more 'front to back wiring', well there be dragons..."
"Of course, this may also have ramifications for what skill and career proclivities each sex exhibits."
I have some doubts about the infallibility of the conclusion. Were any of the data samples acquired from the brains of newborn babies? How about from adults living within a matrilineal culture... or ANY other culture for that matter? How about other species hemispheric central nervous systems? Brains are constantly rewiring themselves. It's called neuroplasticity. I'm no more feminist than the next guy (or gal), but I'm a little concerned at how comfortable the media is with extrapolating scant data and presenting the extrapolation as honest-to-god fact. I mean, "dark matter". "god particle". Gimme a break.
Based on the experiment alone, it's just as likely that mens' and womens' brains are respectively externally conditioned towards intrahemispheric and interhemispheric functioning.
...then gay-conversion therapy has a rational basis.
Look, if people can be naturally different in sexual proclivity, then people can be naturally different in interests and career choices. To pretend like the only reason that women participate in varying percentages in various industries is due to cultural factors is opening the gate to the assertion that the only reason men are attracted to men in varying percentages is due to cultural factors, not inherent biological ones.
Of course bro-gramming harassment is bad. Of course some women have crappy, unfair experiences. But simply because a black teenager plays the knockout game and assaults a jewish grandma doesn't mean that every black teenager is a thug.
I expect men and women to be different. The question is, are you able to appreciate those differences, or are you determined to override them by any means necessary?