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."

Re:Cause and effect?

[mythosaz]

It does not "beg" any questions....

Re:What about the not-wholly-one-gender brain?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not as simple as you believe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex#Conditions [wikipedia.org]

Re:Cause and effect?

[Artifakt]

Thank you. Just thank you.

Median or Mean is not the Individual

[WillAffleckUW]

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.

They're interested

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

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.

Re:Obvious, albeit boring, explanation

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it doesn't say they change throughout life. It says that they change when the sex hormones ramp up at adolescence. It has nothing to do with the tasks they are spending time on.

Re:The differences between genders...

[Prune]

This idea is disproved by the same argument that was applied to discredit the idea that genetic variation between individuals of a population group with close genealogy (i.e. a human race) is greater than variation between groups. Edwards showed that, while allele variations on any given genetic locus are greater within a racial group than among groups, these variations are correlated and it only takes several loci taken together to form clear clustering. See Edwards, A. W. F. (2003). "Human genetic diversity: Lewontin's fallacy". BioEssays 25 (8): 798â"801. If you do this cluster analysis on the differences between the human sexes, you'll get analogous results. What you say is technically true only when you pick one or very few dimensions on which to compare, which is incredibly misleading, as taking more than a few together makes sexual dimorphism as clear as night and day--even when restricted to only the scope of neurology and ignoring any other physiological differences.

Re:Oh noooos!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have had gender dysphoria my entire life. It is literally part of my very earliest memories. I was raised by the same parents as my two hyper-masculine brothers (one older, one younger). Like them, I was taught to dress as a boy my entire life. Unlike them, I hated it, and would frequently hide in my mom's closet and dress up in her clothes and wonder why they wouldn't let me dress like that all the time. There is no childhood trauma, or history of neglect or abuse, or distant, unaffectionate parents, or anything else to account for this. There was absolutely nothing in my environment that would have persuaded me to feel female. I just do. I have recently started taking estradiol, and like magic, my brain has started feeling better. And yet, I have a perfectly functional penis with which I have fathered three children. I'd say my brothers and I are definitely wired differently. It's not all about socialization.