Do men and women have different brains?

Conto Frankenstein. Yeah, well's just get on with it. I'll remember as soon as I look at up Tarzan boom. That's it. I don't have anything. I just sturb it my all your little man's brain with all the great matter parted out. Honest, this is a very god this is gonna be touchy navigating this one. Well, the implications are really huge, you know, especially not necessarily the scientific implications, but the potential policy implications of misguided people who don't

understand what they're hearing. Yeah, but I say this as our general This is what I gather from this whole thing is it sounds like men and women's brains are different, and who cares. Men might be better at some things and women. Women might be better at some things and men women might process this faster, men might process this faster. Who cares. That's why we're all here together to put these brains together to lead us forward into the future. Like,

don't get all worked up about it. Women are seems to be better at some things, and men seem to be better like big well, and some of them supposedly are like very cliche. Sure, Like men supposedly are better at orienting objects in space in their mind, and that means you can read a map be Women are generally better at language tests, which probably means that they may

be better at communicating things. Okay, so I really really feel though we should caveat this with this is a look at the state of a pretty nascent field still comparing the brains of men and women like. It was only in the nineties that um A Dr. Sandra Whittleston started comparing more than a hundred normal men's and women's brains and actually accidentally stumbled upon the fact that they

are different in their their organization the makeup. And since then it's been such a touchy subject that there's still a lot of the field who won't say anything more than that may be true, but um, there's really no difference or whatever. And there's people that they're starting to get louder and louder they're saying, no, there are differences. It's not necessarily an intelligence. It's not necessarily in cognitive ability.

I will even go one better and say, I'm not even willing to say that women don't read maps as well as men, but there are structural and compositional differences between men's and women's friends. It's been improven and what are the implications of that? Yeah, And I say, like, yes, study this because there are so many benefits you can garner from learning more specifically about everything. But exactly so,

that's kind of where we're at right now. We're just reporting on the state of this Nason field and and a lot of it's not improven, but one thing that has been shown and we I really feel like we should kick it off with this. If you if you look at longitude longitudinal studies, huge studies UM that have been done over the decades UM, and you compare cognitive abilities intelligence between boys and girls, the differences are almost

negligible overall. Yeah, I Q score stuff like that. It's all about the same, right, And Um, there's differences, say between math skills and um, between boys and girls and those we don't even know whether those are culturally bound or what. But we'll we'll get to that. Let's talk about how the brain is different, because, like we said, that has been proven men's brains and women's brains do differ in some ways. Yeah, and um, like you said,

this is new. For a while, they've known that they're different, but they used to think it was sort of justin the hypothalamus where uh, sex drive and food intake are controlled. And that seems like such a kind of a cop out, Like you know, their brains are different because men like to eat more and have sex more. Well, I mean it's not true. The structurally they are different. There are the super chismatic nucleus is different and that helps regulate

reproductive cycles for katiean rhythm. Um, there's different patterns of androgen receptors, uh, which are responsible for sexual preferences. Um, there's there's there's two times more UM like neurons and cells in certain areas in the hypothalamus of a man than a woman. So they are different. But that's what they thought for a long time, like that was the only difference in the brain. Yeah, and they've also found out that taking into consideration weight differences and height differences,

men's brains are probably a little bigger. But that doesn't equate to intelligent or cogni abilities. It's just one of those things. Now, remember the myths of the brain episode we did. We were saying, like, humans don't have the biggest brain a whale does, but it's all about ratio body size. Well, we missed something. It's about the ratio of neurons to body size more than brain size. I think someone pointed out who was it. It was some animal that kind of disproved it was just the size.

I don't remember what the animals, I wonder. Two people wrote in with that. Okay, so this this actually kind of raises a very troubling question I did at first. Well, wait a minute, if a man's brain is bigger than a woman's, and even if you take into account like weight and height and all that stuff, it's still larger, then you know, does that mean that men are smarter than women or should be? No? Why? Well, because in

two thousand one. They found that certain parts of men's brains might be larger or smaller, certain parts of women's brains are larger or smaller, and that could balance out the overall difference in In the end, that's why you're not gonna see any kind you know, any differences on

like intelligence levels and stuff like that. So parts of the frontal lobe um, which is decision making, problem solving, and the olympic cortex, which is for regulating emotions, are larger in women, whereas in men the parietal cortex, which is space perception in the amygdala, which impacts sexual if you're in social behavior, were larger. So certain parts of arge a bigger, parts of the ladies are bigger. Okay,

there's another big difference that they found. Um, men have about six and a half times more gray matter, which is neurons, than women do, but women have about ten times more white matter, which is the connections between those neurons, than men do. That's right, and it seems that men actually think with the gray matter and women think with

the white matter. And uh so, taking a step back from the outside, it looks like women's brains might be more complicated and how it's set up and how they think. But they may be faster than men, right, they would

work more efficiently. So in this sense, if you're looking at this gray matter, that's where the neurons, the thinking cells are, but there's less communication among them in men that makes sense, whereas women may have, depending on the part of the brain, fewer neurons but a more efficient communication system. Which is weird because then that would mean that you could make the case that they would roughly arrive at the same conclusion at about the same time,

even though there were these two completely different structures. Yeah, but they also point out that some women might have more neurons, as much as twelve percent more neurons. It depends and I was surprised, um that that sentence was written like that. There. It depends on the region of the brain that um the I think she's a biologist, physiologist, Sandra whittleson that McMaster in Ontario, psychologist, psychologist, she's the

brain lady. Um. She found that there are parts of the cortex in women, um, pretty much across the board where you're gonna find about twelve percent more neurons packed in there. So in this region they may have less gray matter overall, but their neurons are more densely packed.

But what she found that was interesting was that these areas where they have more neurons were associated with signals coming into and out of the brain, which means that women would be more efficient at combining information rather than internal calculation. Yeah. That makes sense to me too. When I hear all these things out loud and think about my marriage, I think, yeah, like Emily's like way faster at processing things in a conversation than I am, and like,

I don't know, it all kind of makes sense to me. See, I feel like that that is that this is the reason why a lot of people are so whoa, whoa, whoa, Because we're at this point where we, like, just in the nineties Whittleson discovered more neurons in this one thing we did. We did. We know so little about the brain as it stands, let alone the differences between men and women that it's like, I feel like we need to amass all of the info we can and then

start extrapolating, you know what I mean? Yeah, Well, because I Emily's way better reading maps than me, and that has counter to what usually what people might think I have to worse. It's direction on the planet, like we call it the opposite thing. If I say go right, it's left. And I'll even try and trick myself and say I think it's right, and I'll say go left and it's right. So it's I'm a wonder of nature. And how bad my sense of direction is. I didn't

know that, dude. I've been on road trips and gotting off the highway to get gas and gotten back on and gone right back the way I came from no way for miles before I realized it. I feel like I know you a little more. Yeah, I'm really bad when it comes to that stuff. That means you've got a lady brain, and I do. And I have to hold the map like I have to orient the map to where like pointed in the direction to make sense of it. I know you mean, I know what you

mean about the having to orient the map in that direction. Yeah, but wow, I had no idea. Oh yeah, I'm awful. Okay, so um oh, here's another one. This one. This is the most amazing difference to me between a man's brain and a woman's brain. Back in I think the nineties, like right, around the turn of that year. Um, some Yale researchers gave a test, I guess, a language skilled test of some sort where basically they said, um, here say say Germany without the muh. It was like a

test of removing phonemes Germany Gurney Journey. Yeah. I was just be in stupid. I was having trouble with it just now. But they did this though under the at the time brand spanking new wonder machine. It was new at the time. Yeah, And the weird thing that they found was that women and men had the same ability. They did just as good a job in removing phonemes from words, but they used different parts of their brain.

Whereas men used just one small region of one of the hemispheres I'm not sure which one, the left, women used regions in both the left and the right to do the exact same thing. And the researchers pointed this out there, like, okay, we would get this at what we were testing was something really ancient, like something that had to do with reproduction or acquiring food or defense or fear, something like that, something really old. But reading.

Reading is a skill that humans have acquired, probably do within the last few thousand years. It's brand new, and men and women have evolved in just that recent in time to use their brains differently to do the same thing. Why that makes no sense whatsoever. What it suggests is that men and women have different brains exactly. It's remarkable. You know, you would think they kind of worked in the same way, but they really don't. Yeah, that's staggering

to me. Because we're human beings, were the same species. We can mate and produced new versions of our species, you know, like the fact that we have different brains just because of the differing sexes, And that's just mind boggling to me. I have no idea just because of different sexes or there's the old nature versus nurture argument. So uh, who wrote this was a Connor Molly Edmonds

Molly Edmonds, formerly of Stuff Mom Never Told You. Um. She points out that even if you're like super super open minded and I really want to just raise my child not you know, as you're boys you have to play with trucks, or you're a girl you have to play with dolls, there's still probably gonna be some of that that the child absorbs. Even among the most like gender neutral parents, among us. You rarely like pick up a little girl by her left ankle and dangle her

upside down, right exactly. But um, no matter how hard you try, society is going to impact and shape a child like that in some way. But uh so that you know, maybe that plays a part in it. Okay, So okay, all right, I'll shoot a hole right into that. That doesn't account for the brain changing being different in structure,

or does it. Well. Sandra Whittleston studied Einstein's brain. We've done a podcast on Einstein's brain and the fact that it's had in a garage for a number of years like a jar, but she actually got a piece of it like other people have to study it. In Her argument is now our brains are structured at birth, because look at Einstein's brain, it was actually structurally different and it had nothing to do with nature at all, I'm sorry, nurture at all. It was just shaped in differently in

some ways. And that's, you know, maybe why he was so smart, and maybe that's why there aren't Einstein's all over the place. And so this is something that we get from birth, and it doesn't matter how you're raised, it's going to be different. But see the jury is

still out on that one. Whittleston, that's her belief. There's also another camp that says, well, no, because there's such a thing as brain plasticity, and you have neural connections that are remember the person with UM just one hemisphere, but binocular vision um. Your your brain goes through the process of pruning, so it gets rid of neural connections.

And if everybody's telling a little girl that she's not good at math because she's a girl, her brain may very ruthlessly cut out a lot of those connections and she may, through this brain's version of a self fulfilling prophecy, be the last good at math. Well, when that's where and the brain structure would still look the same exactly,

that's where nurture comes back in. Like you said, if little girls are taught they don't want to do math, maybe there are more boys in class, and then that perpetuates it further to where they did one study where they found that female students who were math and science and engineering majors did not want to sign up for these summer conferences in math and science because they were shown videos where it was a bunch of corny little nerdy boys, right. I was wondering there, like, I don't

exactly you want to be surrounded by those goons. So these are math and science and engineering majors, and they didn't want to do that because again, they're just fed that line that now it's just all boys, and boys

are interested in this kind of thing. And there were there's been other studies to that found like UM girls who are told that a a math test generally does show gender differences score more poorly than ones who weren't told that, or if they were told as gender neutral, they improve, right, and boys are not immune to this

kind of thing too. Apparently they did a study where they told UM white males taking a math test that their scores were going to be compared to Asian males, and they did much more poorly than people like males who weren't told that. Right, So again it's that self fulfilling prophecy that we can, I guess make happen. So we're we're the path that we're going down right now, when we're saying, well, no, it's just nurture, it's just society.

It's just there's a danger to it. It's not necessarily wrong but there's a danger of following it too far along to where you ignore the fact that they're are for whatever reason, real differences, but in the male brain and the female brain, and is here where some people, Um, there's a guy named Cahill. I can't remember his first name, but he's that you see, Irvine, He's one of the louder people to shout like, no, we need to be paying attention to the differences to understand how to say

better treat males and females suffering from the same thing. Yeah, like drugs, for instance, I didn't know this. Apparently most of the studies they do on on drugs are done on males and male animals because they don't want a

skewed result during the minstrual cycle. And so these drugs, like they need to study both the female brain and the male brain because they could potentially tailor a drug toward a female brain to act better and be received better than they would for just the standard male brain. And conversely to UM, like, if you take a like schizophrenia, UM, that's different for men, it's different for women. The onsets usually earlier for men. Men usually have worse symptoms. Women

usually fare better. With schizophrenia, and um, they think that it's because women respond better to the drugs prescribed to treat schizophrenia than men. That would be because of the differences in the brain. And if we understand the male brain versus the female brain, we could better tailor schizophrenia ments to treat men better and have better outcomes. Yeah.

Physical therapy is another good example. In the article, Um, they found that our brains actually work differently, Like when we do simple things like reaching for an object, A woman's brain tackles that differently than a men's, just in the same way that I guess we do when we're reading Germany Uriney. Yeah, it is journey, so don't stop believing. So it physically me reaching for this phone is different than when Jerry comes over and reaches for this phone.

Then if we had we're both punched in the brain, we might need different physical therapy. Uh techniques, Well, you said it punched in the brain to women, Um, especially in frontal lobe injuries, have are devastated by those way more than men. They think, because there's more neural activity packed into the frontal lobe of women, and that's where they do a lot more they're thinking than men do, and that's evidenced by people who suffered the exact same

kind of brain injury. But a woman will just be zong in. A man will be like, Oh, that kind of hurt, but I'm going to get back to walking, you know. Yeah, so I I mean, I'll go back to the beginning. I stand by it. I say everyone needs to just settle down and and start studying this stuff because it could provide huge medical benefits and physical therapy benefits and things like that if we just accepted the fact that, yeah, our brains are a little different,

and that's just the deal. You know, Yeah, our brains are different, but they're also trainable. Like if a girl was told that she was bad at math, and she decided that she wanted to take a lot of math classes, I guarantee you she would excel it math. Yeah, and I could probably train my brain to be more spatially oriented as far as maps and direction goes. Do it? I just I don't care, because now I have GPS and Emily right to tell me I'm dumb. Um, let's

see you got anything else. I don't embraced differences people, That's what I say. Um, that's very nice, serious nickers, she's behind that. Uh. If you want to learn more about embracing differences, specifically with the male and female brain, you can type that into the search bar at how stuff works dot com and it will bring up this article. Oh and and now it's time for listening to mail right all right, this is from I'm gonna call this uh Stuff you Should Know jingle. Oh yeah, we got

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