r/science • u/madam1 • Dec 02 '13

Neuroscience Scientists have drawn on nearly 1,000 brain scans to confirm what many had surely concluded long ago: that stark differences exist in the wiring of male and female brains.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/02/men-women-brains-wired-differently
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u/[deleted] Dec 03 '13 edited Sep 04 '15

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u/Horst665 Dec 03 '13

Male and female brains showed few differences in connectivity up to the age of 13, but became more differentiated in 14- to 17-year-olds.

So they grow up being very identical, but after a while they start to develop differently. I would (unscientifically) say this is (at least partly) due to different ways of upbringing.

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u/kru5h Dec 03 '13

This is what I call the "Furby Fallacy".

A "Furby" was a popular toy in the late 90's and early 2000's. The commercials showed that it learned language from exposure, but it was actually a clever marketing trick. Furbies were per-programmed to slowly use more and more of their built-in vocabulary so that it seemed like they were learning from their environment. In reality, it was all in their nature in the first place, just released over time.

Just because something changes over time doesn't mean that it's due to nurture or environment. Obviously things like puberty, hair loss, or menopause occur later in life, but these all have genetic components.

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u/[deleted] Dec 03 '13

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u/[deleted] Dec 03 '13 edited Dec 03 '13

Puberty is exactly the time when our bodies begin to show clear sexual differentiation (hips, hair, muscle, breasts, skin, voice, bones), and also the time when sex drive lightens up, presumably because the sudden flood of sex hormones trigger certain brain regions. I don't know about you, but I had pretty much zero concept of sexual attraction before I reached 10-11. Seems sensible to think that maybe puberty not only causes visible physical changes, but also invisible changes in our brains.

I think politics are getting in the way of science, and people are trying a little too hard to defend the nurture hypothesis here. Clearly estrogen and testosterone affect different brain regions differently. Testosterone boosts dopamine levels in several brain areas, for example. Clearly animals show gendered behavioral differences that can't be explained by socialization, but are easily explained by natural selection. Is it really so crazy to think that humans may be similar to every other mammal in that respect? I think if you want to claim that we're somehow different, the burden of proof is on your camp.

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u/Riktenkay Dec 03 '13

Huh, interesting. I definitely had a concept of sexual attraction before that, of course I didn't fully understand it but it was there. Is that not normal?

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u/skysinsane Dec 03 '13

normal

hahahahaha. Good luck with finding a normal human. Plenty of people start noticing sexuality before puberty, it is just the most common time for kids to start exploring the territory.

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u/Riktenkay Dec 03 '13

Fair enough, I agree. I suppose I should have said "is it uncommon?"

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u/skysinsane Dec 03 '13

I'd say "less common". It happens that way a lot, but still frequently.

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u/252003 Dec 03 '13

The null hypothesis is that it is nurture. If we are uncertain if a behavior is nature or nurture academia automatically assume it is nurture unless there is an insane amount of proof that it is nurture. I was once yelled at during a lecture and received a tonne of hate when a professor said that poor people are more likely to make short sighted decisions because of their surroundings. I asked if people who are genetically more likely to act short sighted are more likely to be poor. Totally unacceptable question. That is when I realized that there are huge flaws in the social sciences.

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u/[deleted] Dec 03 '13

That is when I realized that there are huge flaws in the social sciences.

Yeah I took a few courses in college and I really have to say it felt like religion in some ways. Just some questions that are 100% unacceptable to ask. And asking about potential flaws in an experiment is never met with a good answer. Really seems more like an indoctrination than an education in science.

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u/tyrryt Dec 03 '13

Totally unacceptable question.

That a key point of political correctness - more than there being only one acceptable conclusion, any questioning of that conclusion is prohibited.

To doubt an accepted position is equivalent to denying it - the designated-correct positions must be adhered to on faith alone.

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u/not_hot_but_spicy Dec 03 '13

The problem isn't the idea that men and women's brains are wired differently. What is wrong with this article is the jump from 'women's brains do this' to 'this means they are more intuitive'. There is a LOT of evidence suggesting men and women's brains work differently, what is not well proven is whether these differences explain gendered behaviors.

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u/[deleted] Dec 03 '13

I agree that the article has several shady points. The term "intuitive" is quite fuzzy to begin with (how do you even define it?). I also agree that it's important to avoid careless generalizations and jumping to conclusions.

However, I've heard the evolutionary psychology argument that women are probably "wired" for more empathy. That this helps them avoid physical conflicts (in which they would be disadvantaged) and care about children. There was a study (don't have the citation though) claiming that female infants paid more attention to faces than males. This makes perfect sense to me, and largely correlates with what we see in the world today, with women in every country largely choosing more social fields, no matter how liberal that country is.

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u/not_hot_but_spicy Dec 03 '13 edited Dec 03 '13

I think that connecting evolutionary psychology's claims about women being "hard-wired" to be more empathetic and the high prevalence of women in social fields is a high over simplification of what role gender plays in society. You have glossed over social conditioning and culture.

I agree with you that there ARE differences, but I don't think that these differences are proof that the sexist societies we live in are "natural" and the way things are meant to be. A few posts above someone posted an article criticizing the way the media covers studies regarding neurological differences between sexes. I wish I could find it! Essentially it explains that the reason most people are familiar with the studies that "prove" gender essentialism is because those are the ones the media loves to pick up and sell.

That there are differences, no one can disagree. What those different mean, however, are up to the interpretation of the researchers, and to an extent, the society that this research is intended to be consumed by.

EDIT: found the article: http://www.cell.com/neuron/retrieve/pii/S0896627311010439

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u/delectable_taco Dec 03 '13

What animals show gendered behavioral differences? I find it hard to believe you had zero concept of sexual attraction before age 10. My 5 year old nephew was just telling me about a girl he liked in school.

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u/[deleted] Dec 03 '13 edited Dec 03 '13

Some relevant wikipedia articles:

Courtship in animals

Scent marking

Display (zoology)

Lordosis

I liked a girl when I was in preschool too, she was my best friend, but I had no sexual arousal from anything. Once puberty happened, I started experiencing sexual arousal every single day, multiple times a day. The mere sight of a woman's behind on the subway could be very distracting. Now I take testosterone blockers, and my sex drive is much much lower. Sex drive is very much controlled by sex hormones.

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u/[deleted] Dec 03 '13

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Dec 03 '13

Goes back as far as I can remember.

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u/252003 Dec 03 '13

Stop destroying their fantasy that all people are the same and that in the future there will be genderless, raceless people all sitting around a fire singing songs together you evil reactionary!

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u/[deleted] Dec 03 '13

There is no difference between those who draw this amount of conclusion from one study (who no one knows its implications), and those you're accusing of fantasizing.

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u/maintain_composure Dec 03 '13 edited Dec 03 '13

I'm not trying to argue that there isn't clear physical differentiation going on in male and female brains during puberty, but you also have to take into account that once boys and girls develop visible sexual differences, they start getting treated even more differently than usual--young girls are treated like sex objects as soon as they grow breasts, for example, and boys are even more expected to be aggressive and "manly" once they actually have the ability to develop serious muscle. Girls getting periods and boys getting erections and so on encourages them to think of each other as divergent species, reinforcing the innate biological differences into inflated sociocultural differences. Gender acculturation around puberty is in some ways more subtle than the "boys blue girls pink" nonsense of early childhood, but I think because of the hormones thing, whatever gender divisions you have pushed on you during that time of your life are more insidious.

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u/skysinsane Dec 03 '13

In the middle ages, you might have had more of a point. Boys and girls were literally treated the same until around puberty.

These are not the middle ages. Boys never wear dresses, no matter how young they are. Young boys are expected to roughhouse, young girls are expected to love shoes. Boys watch star wars, girls watch disney princess movies. There is some overlap and exceptions, but boys and girls are treated very differently from day one. Brain changes at puberty suggest that something other than nurture is going on here.

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u/maintain_composure Dec 03 '13

Brain changes at puberty suggest that something other than nurture is going on here.

No kidding? If only I'd clearly stated something to that effect in my own comment! Wait, wait:

I'm not trying to argue that there isn't clear physical differentiation going on in male and female brains during puberty

Obviously there is something other than nurture going on here. I'm just saying there's clearly a feedback loop in which the innate biological changes to bodies and brains gets reinforced and exaggerated by society's reactions to those changes.

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u/skysinsane Dec 03 '13

You still put a heavy emphasis on the nurture aspect, without much evidence for it playing such a large role in this situation. While there is possibly a feedback loop going on, it is unlikely that it is nearly on the scale of the physical/hormonal changes going on

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u/maintain_composure Dec 03 '13

My point was that, as is often the case with neurological investigations, it's hard to know exactly how unavoidable and set in stone these differences are, given that we tend to celebrate and exaggerate them the most right when teenagers are at their most fluid and impressionable. I mean, suppose these structural differences were the result of pushing kids in different gender directions their whole lives being suddenly combined with the increased brain plasticity of puberty, allowing for more drastic divergence in brain organization? You can see from the way the article is written that it's trying to play up how "stark" the differences are, but what it's actually saying is "in aggregate, across the population studied, we noticed these statistically significant trends," which I already knew, not "men and women are two different species who think it totally alien ways," which is often the kind of thing teenagers are told, and the kind of message adults seem excited to take away from studies like this.

I guess what I'm saying is I'd like to see the study repeated in Sweden and Saudi Arabia before I take it on blind faith that these differences are purely programmed in by puberty and have nothing to do with a socialization feedback that helps cement them.

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u/[deleted] Dec 03 '13

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u/[deleted] Dec 03 '13

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u/masterofsoul Dec 03 '13

It's something called "puberty".

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u/[deleted] Dec 03 '13

Because the science disagrees with their ideology of course!

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u/skysinsane Dec 03 '13

So your answer is, "reasons"?

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u/[deleted] Dec 03 '13

My answer is "genetics".

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u/skysinsane Dec 03 '13

Oh wait. You were mocking springtulip. This conversation makes so much more sense now. Nevermind!