"Male / Female Brain" may be invalid

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http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/11/24/1509654112
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/m ... n/?ref=yfp

I have to say I have always been skeptical of "male brain theory" of autism, of the type Simon Baron-Cohen champions.

This position has nothing to do with identity politics, I'm just a skeptic. I have no idea if more men or women have it. There could be more undiagnosed women or proportionally it could be a more male demographic.

The problem I have is the simplistic "extreme maleness". For one the "male brain" is an ill defined idea. I'm not even saying there aren't masculine traits and behaviour and inherent in our neurology, after all our "self" is function within our brains.

I just don't see the scientific value of labeling autistic traits as male. Autistic traits are autistic. There are plenty of masculine traits that are not. Well actually, without knowing the exact relationship between individual traits you can't assume they are bolted together in a set way, so you need treat them as free moving until you can establish otherwise.

I feel the same way about neanderthal theory of autism. These are hypothesis are relying on assumptions to make assumptions. There is more ground work that could be done before these leaps.

Hah! Saw this coming. Nothing more than some crummy hypothesis that had no scientific proof to back it up. Finally real science stepped in and actually tested it. Still waiting for a valid AS test.

Biology and evolution don't stop at the neck.

I quite agree with you. Neither the male brain theory nor the neanderthal theory seems to have any good proof and quite frankly I don't believe in either of them. Not that I don't believe in differences between male and female brains (on an average basis). It is _not_ just genitalia which differs between male and female but the whole physical body (to more or lesser extent). Things like shape of the hips, hairs on the arms, height, muscle strength and so on. I find it very unlikely for there to be no biological correlation between how the brain is wired and sex. (Though I do not deny there are also differences enforced upon us from society.) However I agree that it does not make sense that autism should be an extreme form of either sex (but it may be correlated).

I was quite disappointed when I noticed that the neanderthal theory and the aspie quiz originates from the same man. While the Neanderthal theory has some interesting ideas it seems to me that it is just a single man who has come up with a fairytale lacking scientific rigour, not that the level of rigour in psychological studies are usually very impressive, but this is even worse. The lack of scientific method is a pity because even if parts of it should be true it could be a professional suicide for any serious autism researches to pursue those interesting parts more scientifically.

As for the Aspie quiz I think he is onto something. I've had a very brief look at his paper and sees that he is using principal component analysis. As far as I could tell it is only based on an internet questionaire which means that one cannot truly distinguish professionally diagnosed aspies from people with asperger traits, but no professional diagnosis (like myself). One might also question where the questions comes from (pun intended), but quite frankly I think that's irrelevant. I rather find it quite surprising and interesting which peculiar things in this test were so incredibly true for me, such as "do/did you have a fascination about traps?" which is rather odd, and which I would believe applies to very few. However, it is very true for me, and the same with many other questions. Do others feel this way about the Aspie quiz? Again, most professional researchers probably would not dare working with the correlations found for the questions in the aspie quiz due to the unreliable source, which in this case I believe is a pity.

I think that perhaps you may have misunderstood the results and conclusion of the paper. What they said was that very few people have a 100% male or 100% female brain. Rather, each sex-dimorphic attribute plots out as two overlapping bell curves (or a dumbbell, depending on presentation) and they do the same in aggregate, too. This is not new. It also does not refute that there are 20+ known sex dimorphic sites that highly correlate with say, a person's gender identity (and not necessarily the sex assigned at birth 100% of the time, as that's based on a different somatic site) and a handful more that correlate with sexuality (which itself is a sex-dimorphic attribute). In general, these same findings hold true in all sex dimorphic animals all the way down to 2mm nematodes with only 400 neurons.

(by the way, I'm using sex-dimorphic even though the term itself has long been known to not actually describe a biological binary; it's just convenient shorthand)

I daresay many scientists and health care professionals would agree with this statement, actually. I certainly do (although I don't belong to either category).

How "the" human brain functions to produce a "mind" is still very much under debate, with an exponential growth of understanding and new conceptual tools being fueled by recent advancements in AI, computer, and genetic research, along with an increasing trend toward examining a more representative sample by using cross-cultural studies.

Even if there were a 'female' and 'male' brain, and even if most of us did belong to one or the other of those categories, the idea that it would automatically follow that there must logically exist a female/male division among minds, is far from proven.

A lot of people taking aspie quiz want to get an aspie score so they answer the questions the aspie way to get an aspie score. If there is any weird question asking if you like some weird stuff, answer yes to get aspie score.

That's actually exactly what this study *does* find; that brains (individual sites and aggregated as a whole brain) exist on a M/F spectrum, not on one side or the other of a division. And within a single brain each site can exist anywhere on the M/F spectrum for that site. And finally, when large populations are aggregated, the findings continue; two highly overlapping bell curves, one for M one for F based on sex assigned at birth.

Basically this study shows that "sex assigned at birth" is just a convenient abstraction that is only *mostly* accurate even for the bulk of the bell curve.

I misspoke. I meant to say that the idea that each person has, at or before birth, a brain that is hardwired to develop into either a typical male or a typical female configuration, is not proven. What we do have are highly plastic brains in which minds are generated and evolve via the development process, which includes massive social and environmental influences which are increasingly being shown, by work with infants, to have been underestimated in the case of humans.

The statement that there are two overlapping bell curves for behavioural traits of the two sexes, while accurate and undeniable, fails to find its way into popular memes and tropes such as "men are from mars, women are from venus" and "men are more visual than women" and "men are naturally more into sex than women". Popular beliefs about the so-called gender divide exaggerate differences between members of each sex, and underestimate or disregard similarities.

My hope is that as the true diversity and complexity of human brains and minds is revealed, that some of the more egregious, 'brain science' based arguments supporting gender and sex stereotypes will have to be abandoned.

Actually, it's way more fascinating than even that! Following developments in the field has been a minor special interest of mine since the mid '00's. Since around 1994, neurologists have been finding that low level sites actually are hardwired in utero, but the "direction" they develop in is determined by a wonderfully complex dance of a specific, known gene set + a set of genes whose expression blocks the first set + a third whose normal expression blocks the second! And the final expression of this process is/can be moderated by the hormonal environment of the fetus. That environment, in turn, is normally regulated by a different set of (known) gene expressions in both the fetus and placenta (which might as well be a separate organism in some respects). Anyway, above those low level, hardwired (once development direction is triggered) sites such as the brain's neural map of the body are high level ones that can be exceedingly plastic, such as where a given part is at any moment, in relation to the environment & other body parts. That combination of hardwired-low-level + plastic-high-level appears to be more common in more complex animals, btw. It's how we evolved survival traits *and* are able to adapt to our immediate environment.

This is a truly wondrous time in the fields affected. As neurologists, geneticists, endocrinologists and developmental biologists tease apart which sites and attributes are hard coded & which are plastic, it's then handed over to the sociologists, behaviorists and psychologists to then correlate the findings with social trends, beliefs, etc.. It's also why so many social groups are finding that some of their bedrock assumptions (such as the Blank Slate theory championed by 2nd Wave Feminists, and the "God made Man and Woman" binary viewpoint of some Christians) are being shaken, and are finding they are going to have to fight or adapt.

I am looking forward to a lot more interesting discussions with you, since our special interests (or as I usually call my own, obsessions or addictions) seem to overlap quite a bit

Maybe we could exchange reading lists, or something

Also I'd be interested in your thoughts on evolutionary psychology.

Probably true for some. Not for me though. That would render it useless taking the test in the first place as I am interested in learning to know myself better.

I don't mind the guy, but the theory I don't agree with.

Interestingly about 7 year ago I came up concept to treat traits as free moving. This is more scientific then how DSM-5 does it. I made test, but this was just an example of the concept. it displayed the result on a spider/radar graph. This is is something that the Aspie test adopted. The difference is he polarised traits to fit into the theory, so he is not really treating them as free moving becuase he orientating traits he assumes them to be neanderthal/autistic or not.

The whole idea of the radar graph is to look at a demographic and compare a bunch of traits without making assumptions about the relationship between traits.

This is interesting. Actually I quite like the spide graphs. When you say free moving, how do you mean that they move? Do you mean that what's on the axis may actually change depending on what the statistic show? What happened to your test?

i know the female brain is invalid, but it is a surprise that male brains are as well.

This is something that has fascinated me for a long time. Basically because I realised when I was a teenager that I seem to be different to other women. I'm more interested in facts and gathering information and in general women seem to be more interested in people.

This quote intrigues me: " 40 hours after birth girls look longer at a face than boys, while boys look longer at a suspended mechanical mobile." I wonder what baby me would have looked at.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/11087100/Yes-its-official-men-are-from-Mars-and-women-from-Venus-and-heres-the-science-to-prove-it.html

The Mars vs Venus thing doesn't sit well with me. Is there really that much of a difference? I often feel like I have more enjoyable conversations with men about things and women try and make me talk about nail polish, not all women of course, I do have some intelligent female friends, which shows that not all women think alike, but do the nail polish obsessed feel they need to talk about that to conform or are they actually more predisposed to be concerned about such things than I am.

I have a retired female neighbour who, every time I see her, seems to find some comment about gender stereotypes to point out. Last time it was how as a woman she was less interested in cars than her husband. I can name all the cars on the road. I have no idea whether she can't differentiate between them or feels that she has to pretend she can't in order to be more feminine.

How much is down to how the brain works and how much is cultural?

And why am I the way that I am?