Neurology is amazing: it enables serious scientists to study the brain and its interconnections with other bodily units, the external world, its internal connections. In turn they can use this data to understand how certain disorders, diseases, and injuries affect our main neural center. These results can then be used to help create treatments, medicine, etc.
But sometimes journalists overlook the obvious and think findings about the brain also give us some important insight, some explanations of why we are the way we are as persons. And when they do this they put the cart before the horse. (Note: scientists also do this occasionally.)
See this latest piece of scientific journalism: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/02/men-women-brains-wired-differently?CMP=fb_us
One cannot help but think of the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal's excellent comic on such cases.
The clever scientist - Ragini Verma - then goes on and makes a claim reaching the level of a first-year Introduction to Anthropology class: "If you look at functional studies, the left of the brain is more for logical thinking, the right of the brain is for more intuitive thinking. So if there's a task that involves doing both of those things, it would seem that women are hardwired to do those better," Verma said. Don't get me wrong: Verma seems to be clever and I respect their results about the differences. It is just the inferences she and her team makes based on these particular results that I debate.
There are three major problems with all this:
1. It is not any big news that there are differences in average activity patterns in male and female brains. There were many earlier experiments (not targeted usually at this difference for its own sake) that indicated this (remember for example Baron-Cohen's work on Autism).
2. That the brain can be easily divided into a logical and an intuitive half is only true if you use very confused, ambiguous notions of logic, intuition, and emotion. People doing serious work on theoretical or practical reasoning, on belief formation, on emotions, or on plan formation all know that there are many-many systematic rules involved in all of these processes and activities. It is not the case, as laymen usually suppose, that emotional reactions are unsystematic. It is also not the case that you can think 'anything', or that the decisions which you make aren't regulated by several steps of filtering in different pieces of information (perceptual inputs, preferences, risk assessments, etc.). Strictly speaking, there is nothing unreasonable or irrational going on in these processes.
How can we then make distinctions between them? Based on their functions. Where do we get the labels for the functions and the ideas for how they work? From everyday, folk psychology. And if you carve up your brain based on which parts realize these functions you will end up with a picture of the brain as doing exactly what people thought it is doing. ("Oh my god, it really is thinking!") This leads us on to my last point.
3. If you use folk scientific concepts to identify brain activities you have zero reason to be surprised when you discover that woman and man are like what we think woman and man are. Why so? Because our everyday views are largely correct (largely means that on average they can be applied successfully more than with bad results). That they are correct does not show that they are natural, or that it is good that things are this way. Feminists think it isn't, and they seem to have good reasons for this. Also, it does not mean that from women exhibiting more emotional reactions it follows that their decision making is more influenced by emotions than men's. This is an inference not warranted by the thesis that more emotional reactions can be observed in female behavior.
"So what," you might say "the results are still interesting". After all our stereotypes are confirmed. Maybe we are right and man and women are just naturally different exactly in the ways in which our second-half of the twentieth century stereotypes suggested. The experiment was done on young people (between 8-22 years old) so you could think cultural influences cannot have a very significant effect at that age.
Not so fast. This concept of 'natural' is highly problematic. The way we lead our lives nowadays is in no sense like what it was when our body (including our brain) reached its current level of evolution (of course evolution is going on, but not much changes in evolutionarily short times, like a couple of thousands of years). So, what our brain functions show isn't behavior that is natural in evolutionary terms, since we do not live according to our most basic behavioral patterns that were successful two-, five- or ten-thousand years ago. They show what was successful in the past, in very different environments and for very different lives. Surely no one advocated that just because some of the major evolutionary changes took place in our brains a few thousands (or tens of thousands of years ago) we should live the way we lived then.
The other thing is the studied age: by the age of 8, culture weighs in massively in the behavior and development of people. Many people working on child development show that after 5 the personality is pretty much in place. Studies about implicit gender bias show that at 5-6 years of age children are already affected by gender role stereotypes. So, the functional differences can be in part the sign of very flexible young brains working in different ways when exhibiting behavior appropriate to the different gender roles according to which they have developed. The functional areas responsible for certain ways of thinking and behaving in girls who follow the gender-roles adapted by them will be more developed than in males who follow male gender-roles and hence engage in different behavior systematically. And this is not a big finding. Anyone worth her wits could have told you this is what you will see at the end of the study. (How much money and time did we put into this research? Which useless research areas are the most expensive? Where should we make cuts?)
Of course the objection and the last question is not entirely fair. We still need lots of data about the brain in order to better understand its working. Therefore such a big scale study is useful in the sense that it gathered much interesting information that can be put to good use in research aimed at healing and therapy. It is only useless if you try to make it work as an explanation of behavior based on gender.
Note: I'm not saying there are no differences between males and females within the human species with a biological basis, or that all stereotypically female values are bad, or that there might be in a society specifically female or male values, or that all traditional gender-role based identities are evil. The claim I'm making is only this: if you look at how the brains of young people work on the level involved in most of their everyday activities (higher order functions and perceptual functions) very likely you will find exactly the differences that underlie the lifestyles and roles expected from them.
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