The Brains Of The Sexes....An Article Based on Research

Hi!

If you have time, I'm inviting you to read this article for a few minutes and simply think about it or amuse yourself as I did while writing it.
Feel free to "scan" this article or read it entirely if you wish.

It took me a while to research all of these and to actually make an opinion. There's no debate here, just a perspective.

I want to share with you a very important issue. It’s one of the most controversial topics in neuroscience, and every year a new book is published proclaiming that men’s and women’s brains are profoundly different when it comes to everything: the way we think, how we emotionally respond, our preferences in mates, everything!

source

👎And as far as websites are concerned, it’s 90% pseudoscience, and even front-page covers of major magazines misinterpret and exaggerate the differences, even though they are accurately quoting from studies published in highly esteemed journals.

⁉️❓❔ For every neuroscientific study claiming to show anatomical differences between male and female brains and how males and females exhibit different cognitive strengths or weaknesses, you will find newer studies to refute it. Here is what this 2021 review of the literature has found, according to researchers at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science:

“With the explosion of neuroimaging, differences between male and female brains have been exhaustively analyzed. Here we synthesize three decades of human MRI and postmortem data, emphasizing meta-analyses and other large studies, which collectively reveal few reliable sex/gender differences and a history of unreplicated claims. Males' brains are larger than females' from birth, stabilizing around 11% in adults. This size difference accounts for other reproducible findings: higher white/gray matter ratio, intra- versus interhemispheric connectivity, and regional cortical and subcortical volumes in males. But when structural and lateralization differences are present independent of size, sex/gender explains only about 1% of total variance. Connectome differences and multivariate sex/gender prediction are largely based on brain size, and perform poorly across diverse populations. Task-based fMRI has especially failed to find reproducible activation differences between men and women in verbal, spatial or emotion processing due to high rates of false discovery. Overall, male/female brain differences appear trivial and population-specific. The human brain is not "sexually dimorphic."
source --- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33621637/

And yet, the following paper also appeared in 2021 in a highly respected journal challenging the above meta-analytic study:

“Neuroscience is uncovering sex influences at all levels of mammalian brain function at an accelerating rate. Unfortunately, persistent biases against the topic remain among some investigators. One is that sex influences are small and unreliable, despite the existence of no evidence supporting this general assertion. In this volume, Spets and Slotnick provide clear evidence for a consistent sex influence on one aspect of human cognition, retrieval from long-term memory.”
source---https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33416033/

And what about the most obvious difference: sexual arousal? You’ll find many excellent PubMed studies showing clear distinctions between what erotically stimulates men’s and women’s brains when looking at sexual pictures and videos, ? This 2019 meta-analytic study says no:

“Sexual arousal is a dynamical, highly coordinated neurophysiological process that is often induced by visual stimuli. Numerous studies have proposed that the cognitive processing stage of responding to sexual stimuli is the first stage, in which sex differences occur, and the divergence between men and women has been attributed to differences in the concerted activity of neural networks. The present comprehensive metaanalysis challenges this hypothesis and provides robust quantitative evidence that the neuronal circuitries activated by visual sexual stimuli are independent of biological sex.”
source ---- https://www.x-mol.com/paper/5771068 I have saved that paper before it was removed. The only place I can cite it now is that website. But you can clearly see who wrote it and where it has been published.

⏩⏩⏩ So why should we be highly skeptical of all of these studies? Two reasons: First, you cannot clearly draw a connection between brain structure and function with a particular kind of behavior. The evidence is, at best, correlational, not causal, meaning that a certain brain structure predicts a specific type of behavior. As researchers at the University of Pennsylvania point out in this 2017 article published in the Journal of Neuroscience Research, “The studies to date provide demonstrations of somewhat disjointed effects in relatively small samples, and few direct causal links, which bridge from the neural to the behavioral level, have been established.” source --- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5129843/

Another culprit, as Emory professor Donna Maney documents in an important 2016 commentary, is reflected in Mark Twain’s famous quote: “There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.” Maney explains:

“If a statistical test returns a low p-value, we are likely to make statements such as, ‘females outperform males on the memory task’ or ‘women are more susceptible than men to the side effects’. Taken literally, these statements imply that with respect to the trait measured, males and females constitute distinct groups. In nearly all cases, however, that interpretation is wildly incorrect. Conversely, when the p-value is not low enough to reject the null hypothesis of sameness, we often conclude that the sexes are the same even when sex could explain some important variation. The problem here is that we are asking a yes-or-no question when both ‘yes’ and ‘no’ are the wrong answer. To truly understand the nature of most sex differences, which arguably are not actual ‘differences’, we need to ask how much the sexes differ, not whether or not they do.”
source --- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4785904/

🙈🙉🙊 Simply put, statistical analyses can be legitimately manipulated in many ways that the general public does not understand, giving the reader a wrong impression. And perhaps the most important “damned lie” revolves around the expression “statistical significance.” All that means is that the findings, no matter how small, are beyond chance. Thus a 50.1% consistency that averages dozens or hundreds of test subjects may be relevant for publication but irrelevant when it comes to having any practical meaning in our lives. In fact, the sex differences between male and female brains are often less than 1%. Here are some excerpts from Maney’s commentary describing a few of the popular misconceptions we have seen published about the brain (it’s worth reading the whole article to understand why the statistical findings in neurological studies make it seem that men and women function differently in the world: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2015.0119). They have all come from assertions published in respected neuroscience journals by highly acclaimed researchers:

“It is commonly asserted, for example, that women listen with both sides of the brain, whereas men use only the left side and that women use white matter to think, whereas men use grey. Women allegedly have 10 times as much white matter as do men, whereas men have 6.5 times as much grey matter as do women...Whereas women navigate using cerebral cortex, men use ‘an entirely different area’ that is ‘not activated in women's brains'. Such assertions, although inaccurate, are easy to find on the Internet and in the popular press.”
source

Add to this equation Panksepp’s important neuroscience research demonstrating that we can “quite literally be born with a male-typical brain in a female-type body or a female-typical brain in a male body, as well as abundant gradations between the ‘extremes’.” source -

🏁 Finally, there is one more important dimension that is rarely mentioned in any neuroscience paper: Every human brain functions in a unique way, and every human brain has unique structural differences. Every human brain learns in a unique way and constructs values and beliefs that are, again, unique to each individual. Thus, when you do brain scan studies of a hundred people and then generalize the findings, the uniqueness disappears. Nobody falls into the “median” or “mean” average. For example: The U.S. Census Bureau lists the annual real median personal income at $35,977 in 2019. But each individual has a different income that can change every year and that average number tells you nothing about the person’s behavior or age or occupation or sexual orientation.

The same is true for brain scan studies. Every year your brain goes through neurological changes that affect your behavior, and every personal experience you have can influence the functioning of your brain. When your moods and desires change throughout the day, the functioning of your brain also changes. There is no “normal” or “optimal” brain state and we all have a male and a female brain. We all have selfish and altruistic tendencies and we all hold unique beliefs and values that both complement and oppose other people with whom we interact.

Thank you so much for reading!

With respect,
@regenerette