Speaker 1: Welcome to you stuff you should know friend House Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Speaker 1: Josh Clark. There's Charles Chuck Bryant, and this is stuff
Speaker 1: you should have grant women's brain, man's brains friend, Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: Chuck zombie Chuck? Now that was what was it? Tonto
Speaker 1: Frankenstein And yeah, yeah, I know we've talked about this before.
Speaker 1: I can never remember, Ponto Frankenstein. Oh man, why are
Speaker 1: you doing this to us? There's somebody screaming at their alright,
Speaker 1: Conto Frankenstein. Yeah, well's just get on with it. I'll
Speaker 1: remember as soon as I look at up Tarzan boom.
Speaker 1: That's it. I don't have anything. I just sturb it
Speaker 1: my all your little man's brain with all the great
Speaker 1: matter parted out. Honest, this is a very god this
Speaker 1: is gonna be touchy navigating this one. Well, the implications
Speaker 1: are really huge, you know, especially not necessarily the scientific implications,
Speaker 1: but the potential policy implications of misguided people who don't
Speaker 1: understand what they're hearing. Yeah, but I say this as
Speaker 1: our general This is what I gather from this whole
Speaker 1: thing is it sounds like men and women's brains are different,
Speaker 1: and who cares. Men might be better at some things
Speaker 1: and women. Women might be better at some things and
Speaker 1: men women might process this faster, men might process this faster.
Speaker 1: Who cares. That's why we're all here together to put
Speaker 1: these brains together to lead us forward into the future. Like,
Speaker 1: don't get all worked up about it. Women are seems
Speaker 1: to be better at some things, and men seem to
Speaker 1: be better like big well, and some of them supposedly
Speaker 1: are like very cliche. Sure, Like men supposedly are better
Speaker 1: at orienting objects in space in their mind, and that
Speaker 1: means you can read a map be Women are generally
Speaker 1: better at language tests, which probably means that they may
Speaker 1: be better at communicating things. Okay, so I really really
Speaker 1: feel though we should caveat this with this is a
Speaker 1: look at the state of a pretty nascent field still
Speaker 1: comparing the brains of men and women like. It was
Speaker 1: only in the nineties that um A Dr. Sandra Whittleston
Speaker 1: started comparing more than a hundred normal men's and women's
Speaker 1: brains and actually accidentally stumbled upon the fact that they
Speaker 1: are different in their their organization the makeup. And since
Speaker 1: then it's been such a touchy subject that there's still
Speaker 1: a lot of the field who won't say anything more
Speaker 1: than that may be true, but um, there's really no
Speaker 1: difference or whatever. And there's people that they're starting to
Speaker 1: get louder and louder they're saying, no, there are differences.
Speaker 1: It's not necessarily an intelligence. It's not necessarily in cognitive ability.
Speaker 1: I will even go one better and say, I'm not
Speaker 1: even willing to say that women don't read maps as
Speaker 1: well as men, but there are structural and compositional differences
Speaker 1: between men's and women's friends. It's been improven and what
Speaker 1: are the implications of that? Yeah, And I say, like, yes,
Speaker 1: study this because there are so many benefits you can
Speaker 1: garner from learning more specifically about everything. But exactly so,
Speaker 1: that's kind of where we're at right now. We're just
Speaker 1: reporting on the state of this Nason field and and
Speaker 1: a lot of it's not improven, but one thing that
Speaker 1: has been shown and we I really feel like we
Speaker 1: should kick it off with this. If you if you
Speaker 1: look at longitude longitudinal studies, huge studies UM that have
Speaker 1: been done over the decades UM, and you compare cognitive
Speaker 1: abilities intelligence between boys and girls, the differences are almost
Speaker 1: negligible overall. Yeah, I Q score stuff like that. It's
Speaker 1: all about the same, right, And Um, there's differences, say
Speaker 1: between math skills and um, between boys and girls and
Speaker 1: those we don't even know whether those are culturally bound
Speaker 1: or what. But we'll we'll get to that. Let's talk
Speaker 1: about how the brain is different, because, like we said,
Speaker 1: that has been proven men's brains and women's brains do
Speaker 1: differ in some ways. Yeah, and um, like you said,
Speaker 1: this is new. For a while, they've known that they're different,
Speaker 1: but they used to think it was sort of justin
Speaker 1: the hypothalamus where uh, sex drive and food intake are controlled.
Speaker 1: And that seems like such a kind of a cop out,
Speaker 1: Like you know, their brains are different because men like
Speaker 1: to eat more and have sex more. Well, I mean
Speaker 1: it's not true. The structurally they are different. There are
Speaker 1: the super chismatic nucleus is different and that helps regulate
Speaker 1: reproductive cycles for katiean rhythm. Um, there's different patterns of
Speaker 1: androgen receptors, uh, which are responsible for sexual preferences. Um,
Speaker 1: there's there's there's two times more UM like neurons and
Speaker 1: cells in certain areas in the hypothalamus of a man
Speaker 1: than a woman. So they are different. But that's what
Speaker 1: they thought for a long time, like that was the
Speaker 1: only difference in the brain. Yeah, and they've also found
Speaker 1: out that taking into consideration weight differences and height differences,
Speaker 1: men's brains are probably a little bigger. But that doesn't
Speaker 1: equate to intelligent or cogni abilities. It's just one of
Speaker 1: those things. Now, remember the myths of the brain episode
Speaker 1: we did. We were saying, like, humans don't have the
Speaker 1: biggest brain a whale does, but it's all about ratio
Speaker 1: body size. Well, we missed something. It's about the ratio
Speaker 1: of neurons to body size more than brain size. I
Speaker 1: think someone pointed out who was it. It was some
Speaker 1: animal that kind of disproved it was just the size.
Speaker 1: I don't remember what the animals, I wonder. Two people
Speaker 1: wrote in with that. Okay, so this this actually kind
Speaker 1: of raises a very troubling question I did at first. Well,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, if a man's brain is bigger than
Speaker 1: a woman's, and even if you take into account like
Speaker 1: weight and height and all that stuff, it's still larger,
Speaker 1: then you know, does that mean that men are smarter
Speaker 1: than women or should be? No? Why? Well, because in
Speaker 1: two thousand one. They found that certain parts of men's
Speaker 1: brains might be larger or smaller, certain parts of women's
Speaker 1: brains are larger or smaller, and that could balance out
Speaker 1: the overall difference in In the end, that's why you're
Speaker 1: not gonna see any kind you know, any differences on
Speaker 1: like intelligence levels and stuff like that. So parts of
Speaker 1: the frontal lobe um, which is decision making, problem solving,
Speaker 1: and the olympic cortex, which is for regulating emotions, are
Speaker 1: larger in women, whereas in men the parietal cortex, which
Speaker 1: is space perception in the amygdala, which impacts sexual if
Speaker 1: you're in social behavior, were larger. So certain parts of
Speaker 1: arge a bigger, parts of the ladies are bigger. Okay,
Speaker 1: there's another big difference that they found. Um, men have
Speaker 1: about six and a half times more gray matter, which
Speaker 1: is neurons, than women do, but women have about ten
Speaker 1: times more white matter, which is the connections between those neurons,
Speaker 1: than men do. That's right, and it seems that men
Speaker 1: actually think with the gray matter and women think with
Speaker 1: the white matter. And uh so, taking a step back
Speaker 1: from the outside, it looks like women's brains might be
Speaker 1: more complicated and how it's set up and how they think.
Speaker 1: But they may be faster than men, right, they would
Speaker 1: work more efficiently. So in this sense, if you're looking
Speaker 1: at this gray matter, that's where the neurons, the thinking
Speaker 1: cells are, but there's less communication among them in men
Speaker 1: that makes sense, whereas women may have, depending on the
Speaker 1: part of the brain, fewer neurons but a more efficient
Speaker 1: communication system. Which is weird because then that would mean
Speaker 1: that you could make the case that they would roughly
Speaker 1: arrive at the same conclusion at about the same time,
Speaker 1: even though there were these two completely different structures. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but they also point out that some women might have
Speaker 1: more neurons, as much as twelve percent more neurons. It
Speaker 1: depends and I was surprised, um that that sentence was
Speaker 1: written like that. There. It depends on the region of
Speaker 1: the brain that um the I think she's a biologist, physiologist,
Speaker 1: Sandra whittleson that McMaster in Ontario, psychologist, psychologist, she's the
Speaker 1: brain lady. Um. She found that there are parts of
Speaker 1: the cortex in women, um, pretty much across the board
Speaker 1: where you're gonna find about twelve percent more neurons packed
Speaker 1: in there. So in this region they may have less
Speaker 1: gray matter overall, but their neurons are more densely packed.
Speaker 1: But what she found that was interesting was that these
Speaker 1: areas where they have more neurons were associated with signals
Speaker 1: coming into and out of the brain, which means that
Speaker 1: women would be more efficient at combining information rather than
Speaker 1: internal calculation. Yeah. That makes sense to me too. When
Speaker 1: I hear all these things out loud and think about
Speaker 1: my marriage, I think, yeah, like Emily's like way faster
Speaker 1: at processing things in a conversation than I am, and like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, it all kind of makes sense to me. See,
Speaker 1: I feel like that that is that this is the
Speaker 1: reason why a lot of people are so whoa, whoa, whoa,
Speaker 1: Because we're at this point where we, like, just in
Speaker 1: the nineties Whittleson discovered more neurons in this one thing
Speaker 1: we did. We did. We know so little about the
Speaker 1: brain as it stands, let alone the differences between men
Speaker 1: and women that it's like, I feel like we need
Speaker 1: to amass all of the info we can and then
Speaker 1: start extrapolating, you know what I mean? Yeah, Well, because
Speaker 1: I Emily's way better reading maps than me, and that
Speaker 1: has counter to what usually what people might think I
Speaker 1: have to worse. It's direction on the planet, like we
Speaker 1: call it the opposite thing. If I say go right,
Speaker 1: it's left. And I'll even try and trick myself and
Speaker 1: say I think it's right, and I'll say go left
Speaker 1: and it's right. So it's I'm a wonder of nature.
Speaker 1: And how bad my sense of direction is. I didn't
Speaker 1: know that, dude. I've been on road trips and gotting
Speaker 1: off the highway to get gas and gotten back on
Speaker 1: and gone right back the way I came from no
Speaker 1: way for miles before I realized it. I feel like
Speaker 1: I know you a little more. Yeah, I'm really bad
Speaker 1: when it comes to that stuff. That means you've got
Speaker 1: a lady brain, and I do. And I have to
Speaker 1: hold the map like I have to orient the map
Speaker 1: to where like pointed in the direction to make sense
Speaker 1: of it. I know you mean, I know what you
Speaker 1: mean about the having to orient the map in that direction. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but wow, I had no idea. Oh yeah, I'm awful. Okay,
Speaker 1: so um oh, here's another one. This one. This is
Speaker 1: the most amazing difference to me between a man's brain
Speaker 1: and a woman's brain. Back in I think the nineties,
Speaker 1: like right, around the turn of that year. Um, some
Speaker 1: Yale researchers gave a test, I guess, a language skilled
Speaker 1: test of some sort where basically they said, um, here
Speaker 1: say say Germany without the muh. It was like a
Speaker 1: test of removing phonemes Germany Gurney Journey. Yeah. I was
Speaker 1: just be in stupid. I was having trouble with it
Speaker 1: just now. But they did this though under the at
Speaker 1: the time brand spanking new wonder machine. It was new
Speaker 1: at the time. Yeah, And the weird thing that they
Speaker 1: found was that women and men had the same ability.
Speaker 1: They did just as good a job in removing phonemes
Speaker 1: from words, but they used different parts of their brain.
Speaker 1: Whereas men used just one small region of one of
Speaker 1: the hemispheres I'm not sure which one, the left, women
Speaker 1: used regions in both the left and the right to
Speaker 1: do the exact same thing. And the researchers pointed this
Speaker 1: out there, like, okay, we would get this at what
Speaker 1: we were testing was something really ancient, like something that
Speaker 1: had to do with reproduction or acquiring food or defense
Speaker 1: or fear, something like that, something really old. But reading.
Speaker 1: Reading is a skill that humans have acquired, probably do
Speaker 1: within the last few thousand years. It's brand new, and
Speaker 1: men and women have evolved in just that recent in
Speaker 1: time to use their brains differently to do the same thing.
Speaker 1: Why that makes no sense whatsoever. What it suggests is
Speaker 1: that men and women have different brains exactly. It's remarkable.
Speaker 1: You know, you would think they kind of worked in
Speaker 1: the same way, but they really don't. Yeah, that's staggering
Speaker 1: to me. Because we're human beings, were the same species.
Speaker 1: We can mate and produced new versions of our species,
Speaker 1: you know, like the fact that we have different brains
Speaker 1: just because of the differing sexes, And that's just mind
Speaker 1: boggling to me. I have no idea just because of
Speaker 1: different sexes or there's the old nature versus nurture argument.
Speaker 1: So uh, who wrote this was a Connor Molly Edmonds
Speaker 1: Molly Edmonds, formerly of Stuff Mom Never Told You. Um.
Speaker 1: She points out that even if you're like super super
Speaker 1: open minded and I really want to just raise my
Speaker 1: child not you know, as you're boys you have to
Speaker 1: play with trucks, or you're a girl you have to
Speaker 1: play with dolls, there's still probably gonna be some of
Speaker 1: that that the child absorbs. Even among the most like
Speaker 1: gender neutral parents, among us. You rarely like pick up
Speaker 1: a little girl by her left ankle and dangle her
Speaker 1: upside down, right exactly. But um, no matter how hard
Speaker 1: you try, society is going to impact and shape a
Speaker 1: child like that in some way. But uh so that
Speaker 1: you know, maybe that plays a part in it. Okay,
Speaker 1: So okay, all right, I'll shoot a hole right into that.
Speaker 1: That doesn't account for the brain changing being different in structure,
Speaker 1: or does it. Well. Sandra Whittleston studied Einstein's brain. We've
Speaker 1: done a podcast on Einstein's brain and the fact that
Speaker 1: it's had in a garage for a number of years
Speaker 1: like a jar, but she actually got a piece of
Speaker 1: it like other people have to study it. In Her
Speaker 1: argument is now our brains are structured at birth, because
Speaker 1: look at Einstein's brain, it was actually structurally different and
Speaker 1: it had nothing to do with nature at all, I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: nurture at all. It was just shaped in differently in
Speaker 1: some ways. And that's, you know, maybe why he was
Speaker 1: so smart, and maybe that's why there aren't Einstein's all
Speaker 1: over the place. And so this is something that we
Speaker 1: get from birth, and it doesn't matter how you're raised,
Speaker 1: it's going to be different. But see the jury is
Speaker 1: still out on that one. Whittleston, that's her belief. There's
Speaker 1: also another camp that says, well, no, because there's such
Speaker 1: a thing as brain plasticity, and you have neural connections
Speaker 1: that are remember the person with UM just one hemisphere,
Speaker 1: but binocular vision um. Your your brain goes through the
Speaker 1: process of pruning, so it gets rid of neural connections.
Speaker 1: And if everybody's telling a little girl that she's not
Speaker 1: good at math because she's a girl, her brain may
Speaker 1: very ruthlessly cut out a lot of those connections and
Speaker 1: she may, through this brain's version of a self fulfilling prophecy,
Speaker 1: be the last good at math. Well, when that's where
Speaker 1: and the brain structure would still look the same exactly,
Speaker 1: that's where nurture comes back in. Like you said, if
Speaker 1: little girls are taught they don't want to do math,
Speaker 1: maybe there are more boys in class, and then that
Speaker 1: perpetuates it further to where they did one study where
Speaker 1: they found that female students who were math and science
Speaker 1: and engineering majors did not want to sign up for
Speaker 1: these summer conferences in math and science because they were
Speaker 1: shown videos where it was a bunch of corny little
Speaker 1: nerdy boys, right. I was wondering there, like, I don't
Speaker 1: exactly you want to be surrounded by those goons. So
Speaker 1: these are math and science and engineering majors, and they
Speaker 1: didn't want to do that because again, they're just fed
Speaker 1: that line that now it's just all boys, and boys
Speaker 1: are interested in this kind of thing. And there were
Speaker 1: there's been other studies to that found like UM girls
Speaker 1: who are told that a a math test generally does
Speaker 1: show gender differences score more poorly than ones who weren't
Speaker 1: told that, or if they were told as gender neutral,
Speaker 1: they improve, right, and boys are not immune to this
Speaker 1: kind of thing too. Apparently they did a study where
Speaker 1: they told UM white males taking a math test that
Speaker 1: their scores were going to be compared to Asian males,
Speaker 1: and they did much more poorly than people like males
Speaker 1: who weren't told that. Right, So again it's that self
Speaker 1: fulfilling prophecy that we can, I guess make happen. So
Speaker 1: we're we're the path that we're going down right now,
Speaker 1: when we're saying, well, no, it's just nurture, it's just society.
Speaker 1: It's just there's a danger to it. It's not necessarily
Speaker 1: wrong but there's a danger of following it too far
Speaker 1: along to where you ignore the fact that they're are
Speaker 1: for whatever reason, real differences, but in the male brain
Speaker 1: and the female brain, and is here where some people, Um,
Speaker 1: there's a guy named Cahill. I can't remember his first name,
Speaker 1: but he's that you see, Irvine, He's one of the
Speaker 1: louder people to shout like, no, we need to be
Speaker 1: paying attention to the differences to understand how to say
Speaker 1: better treat males and females suffering from the same thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like drugs, for instance, I didn't know this. Apparently most
Speaker 1: of the studies they do on on drugs are done
Speaker 1: on males and male animals because they don't want a
Speaker 1: skewed result during the minstrual cycle. And so these drugs,
Speaker 1: like they need to study both the female brain and
Speaker 1: the male brain because they could potentially tailor a drug
Speaker 1: toward a female brain to act better and be received
Speaker 1: better than they would for just the standard male brain.
Speaker 1: And conversely to UM, like, if you take a like schizophrenia, UM,
Speaker 1: that's different for men, it's different for women. The onsets
Speaker 1: usually earlier for men. Men usually have worse symptoms. Women
Speaker 1: usually fare better. With schizophrenia, and um, they think that
Speaker 1: it's because women respond better to the drugs prescribed to
Speaker 1: treat schizophrenia than men. That would be because of the
Speaker 1: differences in the brain. And if we understand the male
Speaker 1: brain versus the female brain, we could better tailor schizophrenia
Speaker 1: ments to treat men better and have better outcomes. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Physical therapy is another good example. In the article, Um,
Speaker 1: they found that our brains actually work differently, Like when
Speaker 1: we do simple things like reaching for an object, A
Speaker 1: woman's brain tackles that differently than a men's, just in
Speaker 1: the same way that I guess we do when we're
Speaker 1: reading Germany Uriney. Yeah, it is journey, so don't stop believing.
Speaker 1: So it physically me reaching for this phone is different
Speaker 1: than when Jerry comes over and reaches for this phone.
Speaker 1: Then if we had we're both punched in the brain,
Speaker 1: we might need different physical therapy. Uh techniques, Well, you
Speaker 1: said it punched in the brain to women, Um, especially
Speaker 1: in frontal lobe injuries, have are devastated by those way
Speaker 1: more than men. They think, because there's more neural activity
Speaker 1: packed into the frontal lobe of women, and that's where
Speaker 1: they do a lot more they're thinking than men do,
Speaker 1: and that's evidenced by people who suffered the exact same
Speaker 1: kind of brain injury. But a woman will just be
Speaker 1: zong in. A man will be like, Oh, that kind
Speaker 1: of hurt, but I'm going to get back to walking,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, so I I mean, I'll go back
Speaker 1: to the beginning. I stand by it. I say everyone
Speaker 1: needs to just settle down and and start studying this
Speaker 1: stuff because it could provide huge medical benefits and physical
Speaker 1: therapy benefits and things like that if we just accepted
Speaker 1: the fact that, yeah, our brains are a little different,
Speaker 1: and that's just the deal. You know, Yeah, our brains
Speaker 1: are different, but they're also trainable. Like if a girl
Speaker 1: was told that she was bad at math, and she
Speaker 1: decided that she wanted to take a lot of math classes,
Speaker 1: I guarantee you she would excel it math. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I could probably train my brain to be more spatially
Speaker 1: oriented as far as maps and direction goes. Do it?
Speaker 1: I just I don't care, because now I have GPS
Speaker 1: and Emily right to tell me I'm dumb. Um, let's
Speaker 1: see you got anything else. I don't embraced differences people,
Speaker 1: That's what I say. Um, that's very nice, serious nickers,
Speaker 1: she's behind that. Uh. If you want to learn more
Speaker 1: about embracing differences, specifically with the male and female brain,
Speaker 1: you can type that into the search bar at how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com and it will bring up this article.
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