Study finds differences in female and male brains
An UCI study has found that women and men use their brains differently:
“These findings suggest that human evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior,” said Richard Haier, professor of psychology in the Department of Pediatrics and longtime human intelligence researcher, who led the study with colleagues at UCI and the University of New Mexico. “In addition, by pinpointing these gender-based intelligence areas, the study has the potential to aid research on dementia and other cognitive-impairment diseases in the brain.”
Study results appear on the online version of NeuroImage.
In general, men have approximately 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence than women, and women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence than men. Gray matter represents information processing centers in the brain, and white matter represents the networking of – or connections between – these processing centers.
This, according to Rex Jung, a UNM neuropsychologist and co-author of the study, may help to explain why men tend to excel in tasks requiring more local processing (like mathematics), while women tend to excel at integrating and assimilating information from distributed gray-matter regions in the brain, such as required for language facility. These two very different neurological pathways and activity centers, however, result in equivalent overall performance on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as those found on intelligence tests.
The study also identified regional differences with intelligence. For example, 84 percent of gray-matter regions and 86 percent of white-matter regions involved with intellectual performance in women were found in the brain’s frontal lobes, compared to 45 percent and zero percent for males, respectively. The gray matter driving male intellectual performance is distributed throughout more of the brain.
Did you notice the matter-of-fact way the press release noted that men tend to excel at math?
Earlier this week, Harvard President Lawrence Summers landed himself in extremely hot water by merely suggesting the possibility that differences between sexes could explain something about the lack of women in sciences.
During nearly four years as president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers has earned a reputation for blunt, sometimes brutal comments. After upsetting African Americans early in his tenure, he has provoked a new storm of controversy by suggesting that the shortage of elite female scientists may stem in part from "innate" differences between men and women.
"I felt I was going to be sick," said Nancy Hopkins, a biology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who listened to part of Summers's speech Friday at a session on the progress of women in academia organized by the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass. She walked out in what she described as a physical sense of disgust.
Summers was quickly bullied into submission, and he apologised for stating what is pretty much the opinion of mainstream science.
Harvard University President Lawrence Summers has written a lengthy apology, admitting he was wrong to suggest women do not have the same natural ability in math and sciences as men.
When politics trumps science, you know academia is in trouble.
Undoubtedly, there exists good arguments that social factors play a big, or even dominant, role in explaining why there are so few women among elite scientists. That is not the point. The worry is that outspoken feminists prohibit even the debate about the role of biology in explaining differences between men and women. The idea that all such differences must come down to sexism and discrimination has been elevated to the stature of secular dogma. Any heresy is met with emotional and hysterical reactions, as Nancy Hopkins above demonstrates, ironically playing to the worst stereotypes about women.
Link via BoingBoing.
PS: The UCI study press release carefully notes that the general intelligence, what is typically measured by IQ tests, is the same for men and women. That is true, but doesn't tell us anything. You see, the definition of general intelligence and its tests are weighed and designed to make sure that women and men come out with exactly the same average intelligence, even as they typically have different strengths.
Update: Slate's Will Saletan puts this argument in slightly more polite terms.
Let's be clear about what this isn't. It isn't a claim about overall intelligence. Nor is it a justification for tolerating discrimination between two people of equal ability or accomplishment. Nor is it a concession that genetic handicaps can't be overcome. Nor is it a statement that girls are inferior at math and science: It doesn't dictate the limits of any individual, and it doesn't entail that men are on average better than women at math or science. It's a claim that the distribution of male scores is more spread out than the distribution of female scores—a greater percentage at both the bottom and the top. Nobody bats an eye at the overrepresentation of men in prison. But suggest that the excess might go both ways, and you're a pig.
The Volokh conspirators have been following this story from the start.
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