Diversity of human brains

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http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/11/24/1509654112
"... Human brains do not belong to one of two distinct categories: male brain/female brain. Most brains are comprised of unique “mosaics” of features. These findings are corroborated by a similar analysis of personality traits, attitudes, interests, and behaviours of more than 5,500 individuals, which reveals that internal consistency is extremely rare ..."

Even made it into mainstream media: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015 ... and-female
"We can see social issues more clearly when we stop viewing them through the distorting lens of sex categories, and start fully appreciating human variability and diversity."

The notion of each brain as a unique a mosaic of features makes a lot of sense, and the implications are surely not limited to the categories of sex.

Brain science proves once again that there really are as many ways to be human as there are humans. It's going to take a while for this to sink in and become accepted even by the larger scientific community, let alone the majority of the human population.

It is time to step back and recognise that the commonalities between most humans may need to expressed in a completely new way:

1. Humans are animals, and as such have corresponding basic bodily functions
2. Humans have feelings and emotions, and how these are experienced varies from individual to individual
3. Humans process sensations via an array of sensory organs, the sensitivity and reliability of which is subject to individual variation
4. Humans form mental models of the world, these models are based individual experiences
5. Humans have individually unique cognitive lenses, which influence the mental model building process
6. Humans communicate, to varying degrees and in various ways

Each of these meta commonalities represent one or more dimensions of variability. I find this to be a useful working assumption for interacting with others.

Nerdy stuff.

https://spectrumnews.org/news/an-overdu ... is-autism/

It is interesting to watch how this is being presented in the media as, "no male or female brains" when what the researchers actually said was, "there are exceedingly few people who have either a 100% male brain or a 100% female brain".

It's been known (ie found in data, replicated, expanded upon) since 1994* that brains have sex dimorphic sites and attributes, and that each one charts out as two highly overlapping bell curves for a random population. One curve correlates to a gender identity of male, the other with an identity of female (again, even those are bell curve spectra). It has also been observed that the sites don't necessarily have to develop the same in utero (or later!); that is, they are semi-independent, yet still tend to group together (hence the 'mosaic' description for any given individual). Which, if you think about it, is why we tend to label them as male or female in the first place - they form convenient groups that often work good enough. The pit our culture fell into over the last fifteen years or so was the assumption that there is any sort of true, biological, pure, binary to match those two categories. It begs the question of who such a strange distortion would benefit.

*Zhou, et all 1994. Plus several thousand more since, in an expanding scope that now includes neurology, genetics, developmental biology & genetics.

The closest I ever came to a religious experience was in neuroscience lab, working with sheep brains.

Brains are just so feckin' cool! and we are still so very far from understanding all their mysteries. (hence, the religious experience)

I'm rather ashamed to say that the closest I ever came to vomiting from visual stimulus was when I helped to prep a duck head to use for an educational skull display. Even typing this, I'm getting a bit...uh...ohhhh...noooo....