New ways of looking at the brain focus on connections between structures rather than just the size of the structures themselves. Neuroscientists today have started decoding the brain’s ‘chatter, the way in which different frequencies of brain activity seem to pass on messages and bring back answers. We are getting better models of how the brain does what it does, and we are beginning to have access to huge data sets, so comparisons can be made and models can be tested using hundreds if not thousands of brains, rather than the handfuls that were available previously. Could these advances shed any light on the vexed question of the myth or the reality of the ‘female’ and the ‘male’ brain?
One major breakthrough in recent years has been the realisation that the brain is much more ‘proactive’ or forward-thinking with respect to information gathering than we had first realised. It doesn’t just respond to the information when it arrives, it generates predictions about what might be coming next, based on the kind of patterns it has identified on previous occasions. If it turns out that things didn’t quite work out as planned, then this ‘prediction error’ will be noted and the guidelines adjusted accordingly.
Your brain is continuously making guesses as to what might be coming next, building templates or ‘guide images’ to help us take shortcuts to get on with navigating our lives. We could think of the brain as some kind of ‘predictive texter’ or high-end satnav, helpfully completing our words or sentences, or finishing off a visual pattern to let us get on with life quickly, or guiding us down the safest paths for ‘people like us’. Of course, in order to make predictions you need to learn some kind of rules about what usually happens, about the normal course of events. So what our brain does with our world very much depends on what it finds in that world.
We now know that, even in adulthood, our brains are continually being changed, not just by the education we receive, but also by the jobs we do, the hobbies we have, the sports we play. The brain of a working London taxi driver will be different from that of a trainee and from that of a retired taxi driver; we can track differences among people who play videogames or are learning origami or to play the violin. Supposing these brain-changing experiences are different for different people, or groups of people? If, for example, being male means that you have much greater experience of constructing things or manipulating complex 3D representations (such as playing with Lego), it is very likely that this will be shown in your brain. Brains reflect the lives they have lived, not just the sex of their owners.
Seeing the life-long impressions made on our plastic brains by the experiences and attitudes they encounter makes us realise that we need to take a really close look at what is going on outside our heads as well as inside. We can no longer cast the sex differences debate as nature versus nurture – we need to acknowledge that the relationship between a brain and its world is not a one-way street, but a constant two-way flow of traffic.
Perhaps an inevitable consequence of looking at how the outside world is entangled with the brain and its processes is a greater focus on social behaviour and on the brains behind it. There is an emerging theory that humans have been successful because we evolved to be a co-operative species. We can decode invisible social rules, ‘mind-read’ our fellow humans to know what they might do, what they might be thinking or feeling, or what they might want us to do (or not to do). Mapping the structures and networks of this social brain has revealed how it is involved with forging our self-identity, with spotting members of our in-group (are they male or female?), and with guiding our behaviour to be appropriate to the social and cultural networks to which we belong (girls don’t do that’), or to which we wish to belong. This is a key process to monitor in any attempt to understand gender gaps, and it appears to be a process that starts from birth, or even before.
Even the very youngest members of our world, highly dependent newborn babies, are in fact much more sophisticated socialites than we ever realised. Despite their fuzzy vision, rather rudimentary hearing and absence of pretty much all basic survival skills, babies are quickly picking up on useful social information: as well as key facts such as whose face and voice might signal the arrival of food and comfort, they start to register who is part of their in-crowd, to recognise different emotions in others. They appear to be tiny social sponges, quickly soaking up the cultural information from the world around them.
Source : The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience That Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain by Gina Rippon
Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40554115-the-gendered-brain
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