No significant difference
Nora Caplan-Bricker at Slate reports:
Men and women are equal—and so are the architectures of our brains, according to a new study by neuroscientist Lise Eliot of the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science. According to a write-up in Wired, the study was aimed at evaluating the theory that the hippocampus is larger in women than in men; since the hippocampus is the part of the brain associated with memory and emotion, this has been proposed as an explanation for all those feelings ladies tend to have. Eliot and her team analyzed 6,000 MRI scans and found “no significant difference in hippocampal size between men and women.”
This isn’t the first study that has shown no significant difference [insert various brain items here] between men and women. There are a lot of such studies.
This is more than a matter of abstract interest for Eliot, the author of the 2010 book Pink Brain, Blue Brain, about how dubious theories of sex differences in the brain lead us to raise and educate boys and girls differently. She’s devoted years to decrying these kinds of stereotypes and their frustratingly strong grip on the American approach to childrearing.
And not just child-rearing – the American approach to everything. Women have to be seen as radically different from men, so that there can be justification (however feeble) for treating them as subordinates. There are lots of studies that do just that, right alongside the studies that bust them.
These theories may be tidy, but that doesn’t make them true. The Science articledescribes them as “misguided, and often justified by weak, cherrypicked, or misconstrued scientific claims rather than by valid scientific evidence.” Unfortunately, as long as they dovetail neatly with American culture, these ideas may remain popular with both parents and principles. As Eliot told Wired in regards to her newest study, “Sex differences in the brain are irresistible to those looking to explain stereotypic differences between men and women, [a]nd they often make a big splash. … Many people believe there is such a thing as a ‘male brain’ and a ‘female brain.’ But when you look beyond the popularized studies—at collections of all the data—you often find that the differences are minimal.”
The differences are minimal, and yet we build such towering edifices on them.
I just ordered that book through Interlibrary Loan. Thanks for this article. I follow this science, and actually wrote a play about it after reading Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender.
And one of the most important *human* things about the brain is that it’s got plasticity. The connections form according to how the brain is used, allowing us to learn, to train, to develop new reflexes and new ways of perceiving things. Whenever we insist that hardwiring is at the center of things, we are denying how flexible we actually are.
“The differences are minimal, and yet we build such towering edifices on them.”
We also don’t know whether the minimal differences are what we build towers on, or whether our towers are what cause the minimal differences.
What Emily said, cubed.
Exactly. Funny how intuitively obvious (and readily accepted) this concept is when looking at situation where sexist beliefs of male dominance are not challenged (i.e., “of course cab drivers, after years of experience, develop larger/more active hippocampi”)
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/london-taxi-memory
That said, it’s a breath of fresh air to see that there’s not even an anomalous effect in need of nuanced thought….
Exactly.
(1) Only a very few studies have shown differences between male and female brains, and you can bet there have been far more that showed no “significant” difference and thus weren’t published;
(2) Even when studies show a difference between male and female brains, it’s tiny (even if “significant” statistically); and
(3) Even among the small number of tiny differences between male and female brains, NOT ONE has ever been proven to be innately caused by sex difference and not by society’s relentless insistence on treating boys and girls differently. It’s all in Delusions of Gender.
It’s not just the wiring, anyway. Our consciousness swims in a sea of hormones, among other things.
Two more points: There are studies that have shown different brain activation patterns for men and women who are doing equally well at whatever tasks are being tested. Different activation patterns often don’t correspond with differences in ability.
Second, differences in the nervous system can compensate for hormonal differences. A clear example of point 2 comes from prairie voles (aka field mice), that pair-bond and share parenting. Put an inexperienced male in with pups, and he will behave paternally towards them. Put a virgin female in with pups, and she will ignore them, or eat them. What’s going on? In the females, hormones associated with pregnancy and birth mediate maternal behaviors. The males don’t have the same hormonal signals; their behavior is based in their brains. This results in neural and hormonal influences, which both differ in males and females, compensating each other so that males and females behave similarly when rearing offspring. No one knows how common or rare such compensating effects might be.
There’s nothing new or controversial in what I’ve said above, but neither point appears to have made much impact on popular claims for brain sex differences.
Olaru, humans’ sapience is yet another complicating factor. Instincts dictate our behaviour much less than, say, it does voles, so inferences from behaviour are much more fraught.
John,
Absolutely agree that sapience is a hugely complicating factor. I’ll also note that we can’t be sure that any particular finding will generalize from prairie voles to lab rats, much less to humans.
However it is the relative simplicity of rodents’ behavior that allows us to be clear that hormones and nervous systems *can* influence behavior in opposing directions. Plus the ability to do experiments on rodents that cannot be done in humans.
It is beyond irony that both ‘difference’ feminists and a portion of trans activists DEMAND that brain differences somehow support their positions. The science-fiction notion of ‘Gender X brain in Gender Y body’ is really an insult to the real experience of people who aren’t successfully fitted into cultural boxes.