The brain really is a remarkable thing.
Well, most people’s brains.
A brain is composed of nothing more than a jumble of neurons and blood vessels, and yet
somehow it’s the root of our consciousness, our personality, and reasoning.
Plus it’s also the only organ to have named itself.
Mine’s called Brian.
Brian the brain.
It’s an anagram…
Forget it….
But that’s downright foolish, I hear you cry!
Brains can’t have names like Brian, they’ve got no gender!
In the age-old - and I should add very important - debate about gender equality, surely our
brains should be front and centre of that chat?
So what do we know?
Are male and female brains really different?
Now wait, I know what you’re thinking.
You’re saying Greg mate, get with the times, what’s with this rigid man-woman thing?
Gender’s fluid, don’t put us in a box.
But historically, there have only been two boxes, and men and women have been treated
like they come from different planets, so I want to know if there’s any basis for
it inside our skulls.
/ When it comes to what men and women can and cannot do, stereotypes abound.
We’ve all heard how men are supposed to have better spatial reasoning, while women
are much more caring and are better at multitasking.
But nobody likes to feel genetically inferior, just because of the contents of their underwear.
So, countless scientific studies have set out to really dig down into the truth of our
gender differences.
And here’s the thing - when it comes to behaviour, some of the stereotypes do seem
to be supported by the evidence.
Men, for instance, do seem to be better at navigating.
In a study that asked participants to navigate a virtual maze, men performed 50% better than
women.
That was partly down to how men attempted to find their way, choosing to use compass
directions to head in roughly the right direction, whereas women attempted to memorize a specific
route to follow.
And women really are better at multitasking.
Researchers gave both men and women eight minutes to complete three tasks – solving
maths problems, finding restaurants on a map, and figuring out how to find a lost key in
a field.
But they then surprised the participants with a phone call in the middle of the task.
If they answered, they were subjected to a general knowledge quiz.
The results revealed that the women coped pretty well with juggling all four tasks at
once, but the men crumbled and became illogical in looking for the lost key – something
their superior spatial reasoning should have helped them with.
/ Here’s one bit of good news for us blokes and our spatial reasoning though.
We are in fact a bit better at putting together flat pack furniture than the female of the
species.
Yeah, in an investigation sponsored by IKEA, men were able to assemble a trolley more accurately,
and more quickly, than women, both with and without the instructions…
That’s that one settled...
with actual data!!....
right?
...
Well, while these types of conclusions may seem compelling, they should be taken with
a pinch, nay a handful, of salt.
Thanks to behaviour studies’ complicated experimental design, the number of participants
is usually small.
In general, when it comes to this kind of research, the more people studied – the
larger the sample size – then the better idea we have of what’s really going on.
But with just a small sample size, we can’t be sure of how the findings translate to the
population as a whole, or how they might differ between ethnic groups or people of different
ages.
Plus - and this is a big one - just because men or women might be more likely to behave
in a certain way, doesn’t mean that that behaviour is cause by their gender.
It’s incredibly tricky to separate any real gender differences from the effects of our
cultural conditioning.
Trust me, dressing a girl in pink and giving a boy a toy car is just the tip of the iceberg
when it comes to society’s gender norms.
Growing up within these norms does shape our behaviour, so it becomes difficult to align
any particular actions with any ‘hard-wired’ differences in our brains
To find those, we need to turn our attention to brain structure, as opposed to its function.
The latest studies have used magnetic resonance imaging to study the brains of thousands of
participants.
And the results that are emerging seem to go against our gendered brain stereotypes.
There are some slight differences between the brains of self-identified men and women
– men’s brains tend to be larger overall, while women’s have thicker cortexes - the
outer layer of the brain that’s involved with cognitive function.
But the remarkable thing is that there seems to be no purely ‘male brains’ versus ‘female
brains’.
While some features are more COMMONLY seen in either men, or women, each individual will
have a combination of typically male and typically female features patched together in their
brain, like a mosaic.
And there are so many possible pictures that this mosaic can form, that there’s scope
for limitless variation.
If I handed you a brain right now - and you weren’t completely grossed out - I’d be
willing to bet that you couldn’t tell if it was a Brian or a Bryony.
And that’s probably refreshing news to many.
The fact that a brain isn’t ‘male’ or ‘female’, it isn’t binary, is totally
in line with our growing awareness and appreciation of how gender itself can be non-binary.
If you enjoyed this video, be sure to give it a like, share it with your mates and subscribe
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But now, me and Brian are off to assemble a Billy bookcase and a Poäng armchair - although
there’s probably still a screw missing...