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Science

Women's Brains Are Different Than Those Of Men 25

Posted by timothy from the if-she-buys-kippers-it-will-not-rain dept.
GreyPoopon writes: "Check out this article on BBC Online regarding a gender divide in brain usage between male and female. Basically, the article talks about how the males and females use the brain differently to execute the same tasks. Differences between males and females are always a subject of controversy, and the article does a good job of presenting facts without trolling." As the article points out, in the case of brain injuries, the treatments appropriate for men and women ought perhaps vary to accomodate these newly discovered usage patterns.
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Women's Brains Are Different Than Those Of Men More

Women's Brains Are Different Than Those Of Men

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  • Stats (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The researchers, from the State University of New York at Buffalo studied 17 boys and 18 girls between the ages of eight and 11 years.

    How did they ever collate all the data from such a massive sample?

  • And it took all that research to find that out?

    Major difference is that the male one works!

    (hence the oxymoron "female logic")

    (And now watch the female moderators / members flame me to death. *grin*)

    Trian

  • Wasn't there some "study" where they raised boys as girls and verse-visa? Would that have any effect on brain usage? What about those people who say they are one gender "trapped" in the other gender's body?



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  • Boys tend to use more of their right brain, while girls use more of their left brain.

    Well here's my bone with the article. They mentioned how many boys and girls were in the study but they didn't seem to factor in whether those boys and girls were left/right handed or ambidextrous. That makes a *huge* difference in which side of the brain one uses more. Or rather, the side of the brain one uses more determines handedness. I've also read previously more girls are left handed than boys. Left handed generally means right brained. But their study is concluding girls use their left brain more.

    If they studied all right handed subjects, then this study may hold true. But if they mixed handedness, these results may not mean a thing.

  • Interesting.

    'Women's Brains Are Different Than Those Of Men'. I wonder if a female would have posted 'Men's Brains Are Different Than Those Of Women'. The title seems to have a pejorative sense of the former being different from the latter. I think the title would best have been 'Women's and Men's Brains Are Different'.

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  • I had to read and write a paper on that study for my biology class last year. They didn't talk about using different sides of the brains but they did talk about the amount of hormones used. Since the brain and hormones are pretty closely linked, I'm going to go with "yes" :P

    You might wanna check out this article: http://www.symposion.com/ijt/ijtc0106.htm [symposion.com] or try searching on google for something like brain sides AND hormones AND gender.

  • I think the title would best have been "People who care about that kind of PC bullshit are fucking morons"

    The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
  • Did they take sexual preference into account?

    That may sound like an odd thing to consider, but research has shown differences in brain physiology between homosexual and heterosexual men - specifically, in the interstitial nuclei of the anterior hypothalamus.

    There are plenty of other factors around sex, sex preference, and sex-organ related endocrinology that affect physiology and function as well. Polycystic ovarian syndrome comes to mind (affects ~8-10% of women in the US), as do hyper- and hypogonadism, hermaphroditism, etc. Admittedly, those are oddball cases, but then oddball cases sometimes isolate specific mechanisms for better study. Anyone know anything about science being done around these factors?

    That doesn't even scratch the surface, the more I think of it... Early exposure to music can affect neurophysiology of the aural centers, there are various factors that affect the proportion of glial cells (Einstein had an abnormal excess of them; babies of alcoholic mothers tend to develop fewer), et cetera ad nauseum.

    Anyway, rambling aside, it sounds like there's still a lot to learn here; A gross study of gender-based brain differences is just scratching the surface, and I'd be skeptical of strictly gender-based treatment regimens that took nothing else into account.

    OK,
    - B
    --

  • There have been similar studies in the domain of Transexuals. The BSTc portion of the hypothalamus seems to hold a clue to the difference there.

    Link to BSTc study [symposion.com]

    Most people lump Transexualism up with homosexuality, though the two are completely unrelated. So this two may hold some the reasoning why those pathways are slightly different. The only problem with this study limited number of Transexual participants. One can only study this part of the brain through death. With Transexuals being somewhere in the 1 in 30,000 range its very difficult to find cadavers for this study.
  • >Did they take sexual preference into account?

    Since the subjects were aged 8-11, I think they didn't.
  • Nice of you to mention your sources. I found the abstract [apa.org] for the study in the journal, but obviously have no access to the journal at this point. The BBC article definitely doesn't mention handedness.

    I'll give the brain hemisphere bit... it's tricky. See http://www.indiana.edu/~primate/brain.html [indiana.edu]

  • maybe their genitals will be different, too. Oh, wait...

    Duh, people. Men and women are physiologically different, I don't see any reason why we shouldn't expect to the brain, as a particularly intricate and environment-sensitive organ, to also differ between the genders.

  • I don't see any reason why we shouldn't expect to the brain, as a particularly intricate and environment-sensitive organ, to also differ between the genders.

    The "environmentally-sensitive" bit is something that most people are oblivious about. Given that brains develop differently in response to differing stimulous, and given that men and women are treated so differently from birth (if not before), it's not exactly a big surprise that there are detectable differences.

    The $64,000 question is how much of a difference there would be if men and women weren't treated so differently. The nature-vs-nurture question is still wide open.

    • A control. Where's the control, here, guys? A control group is a group of individuals that are totally mixed, which prevents any bias in the selection process, on the part of the observers or the equiptment used.
    • Handedness. Someone else mentioned this, but it's worth mentioning again. If there's a bias in the f:m ratio on handedness, it may bias the results.
    • Other brain quirks. Similar to the above. There are a LOT of very difficult-to-allow-for quirks and oddities that can occur in the brain. OCD, ADHD, Synaesthesia, Bipolar, Autism Spectrum (which also includes Asperger's Syndrome), Borderline Personality Disorders, etc. The diagnostics manual for classified disorders is thicker than the entire Xt reference manual! *ANY* gender bias in these disorders will result in meaningless results, if you're doing a straight analysis.

    Ok, critisism is easy, but how would I do it?

    Essentially, this is NOT a simple case of H0 (the default hypothesis) being that the brain usage is the same. Rather, it is one of H0 being that the brain usage is the same, when the brains are functioning in the same way.

    This means that you have an N-way analysis of variance to do, where N is the number of mental conditions you are allowing for.

    (For example, do you allow for tetrachromatic women? Sure, that might only affect the vision portions of the brain, but can you be SURE of that??)

    That, in turn, affects the sample size you would need. You -really- want a sample size of at least 100, per category. Some categories, though, make up less than 0.01% of the population. This means you will need a TOTAL sample size of around 2,000,000+, to get statistically meaningful results. (Anything less, and your numbers will skew your results, in unpredictable ways.)

    Two million individuals is a LOT of people. Sure, there are 60 million people in Britain, so you're only talking 1:30 being involved in the study. Still, that's no small number. I honestly have never heard of any serious medical or mental studies done on this kind of scale. Which is a shame, because (as I've said), it's only on this scale that you can get useful results.

  • It's not a matter of are they, but *how* are they?
  • There was a book about ten years ago, called Brainsex (Amazon UK) [amazon.co.uk], by Anne Moir and David Jessel, a couple of quite respectable TV journalists. (There might have been a related TV series ?)

    I've never read it, though I think I did see some magazine extracts. The reader's review on Amazon found it interesting, but was dubious about how much weight the experimental evidence deserved.

    Can anybody else give an opinion on the book ?

  • Subscribers to the journal Neuropsychology can access in press articles before they are actually printed. The authors state in the manuscript that all subjects were right-handed.
  • What are brain waves? Most of these studies are done with MRI or CT scans, as far as I know. I'm curious what sophisticated techniques they're using for collecting their data.
  • What are brain waves? Most of these studies are done with MRI or CT scans, as far as I know. I'm curious what sophisticated techniques they're using for collecting their data.

    I'm pretty sure they used electrodes located at various points on the scalp and measured potentials between those points. They were measuring brain activity, and not mapping the physical constructs of the brain (as would happen with MRI or CT). I think the technique they used was closer to an EEG.

    GreyPoopon
    --

  • Go ask any parent who has had boys and girls. I have, and they tell me they really are different.

    Transsexuals are treated conventionally and yet they still think they are the wrong sex.

    The differences probably occur very very early maybe even in the womb.

    I'm not saying it's impossible to change but it's hard. And what is the benefit? Let girls be women, and boys be men.

    I figure rather than focusing on having an environment that treats them the same, it's better to have an environment that is good for both.

    Even if they are different they are not that different: plenty of love, food, water, shelter, care, etc, all that works well for either.

    Many of those nature vs nurture debaters seem to forget the main meaning of nurture.

    Cheerio,
    Link.
  • Significant parts of men's brains are between their legs while portions of women's brains switch on and off depending on the time of the month :).

    That said it's an interesting study, pity the small sample. They need a bigger sample and more info (handedness) to really be conclusive. And in fact follow up till adulthood. That would be interesting.

    Cheerio,
    Link.
  • 1) All were right-handed 2) Left-handed = Right Brained is not accurate. Roughly 70% (or more) left-handed individuals are left-hemisphere dominant for language.

    Either way you look at it, it's potentially a flaw in the study.
    (1) Boys are more likely to be left-handed than girls are. This is not a cause of increased right-hemisphere involvement in language, but probably an effect of whatever the "true" cause is. (2) left-handed people have more right-hemisphere involvement in language function than do righties. As you say, 70% of lefties are leftside-dominant -- but 90% of righties are.

  • Re:Title naming (Score:3)

    by peccary ( 161168 ) on Tuesday July 10, 2001 @02:55AM (#98396)
    Maybe if a female had posted the article, she would at least have managed proper English grammar.
    'Women's Brains Are Different From Those Of Men.'
  • OK. There may be mental differences between average male and females. These may be genetic, they may be due to upbringing, I really don't know. But even if they exist, they are buried by the vastly greater random differences between individuals. So when dealing with real people on a day to day basis, this is all pretty irrelivent.

    Basically, I'm sure you'd find that a male geek and a female geek be mentally, fairly similar. Certainly they'd share many more similarities then say a male geek and a male actor.

  • Go ask any parent who has had boys and girls. I have, and they tell me they really are different.

    [laugh] Right. As if parents are disinterested observers.

    In any case, many parents I've talked to say that the differences between individual siblings significantly overshadow any theoretical gender-based differences. That's what it all boils down to -- treating people as individuals rather than as members of a group that may or may not be relevant.

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