Story at a glance
- Scientists have often argued that men are inherently smarter than women, but newer research smashes that belief.
- In reality, our brains aren’t pink or blue. They’re pink and blue, in a mosaic.
- The brains of transgender people are often different than cisgender people, but that may be largely due to different experiences.
Isn’t it a bummer when you find out something you don’t like about someone you do?
Did you know Charles Darwin was sexist? The father of evolutionary theory thought women were naturally inferior and could never measure up to male intellect or achievement.
Perhaps he had never met any who were given a chance.
Darwin was certainly well-adapted to his environment (Victorian England) where such views were standard. At the time, it was thought that the bigger the brain the smarter the owner, and men of science would fill up skulls with buckshot or birdseed to test brain weight. Male brains came up as bigger than women’s, outweighing the ladies by 5 ounces (a comparison Caucasians always seemed to win at, as well).
Such findings would “prove” women inferior, confining them to domestic roles, leaving scholarship, earning power and professional achievement to men.
This is “the best example of the ludicrous ‘size matters’ genre,” says Gina Rippon, author of “Gender and Our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myth of Male and Female Minds,” in which the author tackles the centuries-old view of the brain as binary, hard-wired for “male” or “female” traits and abilities.
A cognitive neuroscientist at Aston University in Birmingham, England, Rippon explores in her book, in part, “neurosexism.” Coined by author Cordelia Fine, neurosexism is the long-held idea that male and female brains have differences that dictate our abilities and behavior, like being better at math or languages, and focusing on these differences in research to explain us along sex lines.
There are differences in the brains of the sexes, Rippon writes, but they’re also remarkably similar and the differences don’t influence what we are capable of. Our brains aren’t pink or blue. They’re pink and blue, what Daphna Joel, a psychologist at Tel Aviv University, calls a mosaic.
It’s a helpful metaphor because gender stereotyping that tells us how we’re supposed to be can be undermining. A study Rippon cites in her book has participants doing a simple card-sorting task, but the test giver tells the group “Males usually do better on this test,” or vice versa. When told girls usually do better, boys’ performance dropped somewhat. When told boys perform better, girls’ performance dropped significantly.
Plastic brains
It was thought that our brains grew at a huge rate in infancy, and then at some point in adulthood, bing! You’re done, like a cake. About 30 years ago, it was found that the brain is plastic, able to change its structure depending on experiences. This plasticity can lead to a kind of chicken-and-the-egg question about whether the brain in question started out looking a certain way or whether experience has shaped it.
A good example of plasticity from the book is about volunteers who were taught to juggle over a three-month period. Brain scans revealed that over time gray matter increased in parts of their brain concerned with “perceived motion” and “visual guidance of hand action.” After stopping for three months this gray matter had returned to baseline.
It’s interesting to know that you can rearrange the furniture in the attic sometimes. But what if it’s your body you want to change?
We all have degrees of masculine and feminine traits, says Lise Eliot, professor of neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School of Rosalind Franklin University.
“Some are more in one direction than others, and for some it doesn’t match their genitalia,” she says.
Gender identity is not your physical sex but the sex with which you innately identify. Is this mismatch of body and identity something we should look for in the brain?
Shawna Williams of The Scientist took a deep dive into the subject. detailing a number of studies, some showing the brains of transgender individuals matching the gender they identify with, others finding mixed results.
“It is highly likely that the brain of a gender fluid or trans individual will be different from a cisgender individual,” Rippon says, because the brain changes to reflect our experience. The experience of a transgender person in our culture will be different than a cisgender person, and their brain will reflect that.
Rippon writes in the book that she hopes changing the idea of having a gendered brain that dictates who you’re supposed to be would hopefully be a positive idea for the transgender community, by questioning the confines of the boxes we are sorted into in the first place.
Finding differences?
Brain differences based on sex remain scientifically interesting in the modern era and catnip for the pop psych audience eager for articles and books explaining us along sex lines, which Rippon calls “neurotrash.”
“There does, indeed, appear to be a hunger for ‘At last, the truth!’ pieces,” that offer sex-related explanations for skill or behavior, Rippon says, via email. “I think the powerful ‘two types of body = two types of brain’ argument has been so well embedded for so long in everything from philosophy and religion to science and education and, of course, stereotypes, that it is the bedrock of many beliefs and lifestyle choices.”
“Sex sells, so anything to do with sex differences is always sexy,” Eliot says, adding that the genre is always popular, partly to explain sexual attraction “and also due to the seductive allure of brain science as allegedly proving such differences are “hardwired.”
Academic publishers aren’t immune to the allure, she says, and brain studies that fail to find differences may be underplayed or even unpublished. Sometimes the way studies are reported can be problematic.
“More recently, the issue has not really been with getting results wrong but, rather, overstating the extent of any differences that were found or failing to draw attention to the evidence of marked similarities,” Rippon says.
Rippon has detractors and the binary vs. nonbinary brain is a topic of debate among neuroscientists, writes Margaret McCarthy, chairwoman of the department of pharmacology and a member of the Program in Neuroscience at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore. While she listed a raft of brain differences in mice, she also used the mosaic example to describe human brains, saying a mix of masculine and feminine benefits us by making us more adaptable.
Adaptable. Whatever would Darwin say?
changing america copyright.
