Yet, as The Gendered Brain reveals, conclusive findings about sex-linked brain differences have failed to materialize. And it has exploded in the past three decades, since MRI research joined the fray. As Rippon shows, this hunt for brain differences “has been vigorously pursued down the ages with all the techniques that science could muster”. A brain study purports to discover a difference between men and women it is publicized as, ‘At last, the truth!’, taunting political correctness other researchers expose some hyped extrapolation or fatal design flaw and, with luck, the faulty claim fades away - until the next post hoc analysis produces another ‘Aha!’ moment and the cycle repeats. Rippon, a leading voice against the bad neuroscience of sex differences, uncovers so many examples in this ambitious book that she uses a whack-a-mole metaphor to evoke the eternal cycle. The history of sex-difference research is rife with innumeracy, misinterpretation, publication bias, weak statistical power, inadequate controls and worse. Never mind that these differences would demand that women’s heads were about 50% larger, or that the Irvine team didn’t even compare brain volumes, but investigated a correlation between IQ and measures of grey or white matter. Next came the obvious quips about men’s talent at mathematics and women’s uncanny ability to multitask. The presenter, Harry Smith, gushed as medical correspondent Jennifer Ashton declared that men have “six-and-a-half times more grey matter” than women, whereas women have “ten times as much white matter” as men. I woke one morning in 2010 to see an especially bad extrapolation of this study on the Early Show, a programme on US television network CBS.
Tiny by today’s standards, this brief communication nonetheless went on quite a publicity tour, from newspapers and blogs to television, books and, eventually, teacher education and corporate leadership conferences. It was a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) analysis of 21 men and 27 women by researchers at the University of California, Irvine ( R. The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience That Shatters The Myth Of The Female Brain Gina Rippon The Bodley Head (2019)Įarly in The Gendered Brain, cognitive neuroscientist Gina Rippon describes one of the myriad brain studies heralded as ‘finally’ explaining the difference between men and women. An artificially coloured 3D magnetic resonance imaging scan of a human brain.
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