Are we more alike than we've been led to think?
Have you ever heard that women are "hardwired" to have better memories?
Or that men are "naturally" better at navigating?
Sure, they're just stereotypes, but they're coming from somewhere. And for a long time we've been led to believe that men's and women's brains are fundamentally different, so why couldn't blanket statements like these hold some truth?
British neuroscientist Gina Rippon, Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Neuroimaging at the Aston Braine Centre, Aston University and noted speaker on the subject of sex differences, offered a different idea in 2014. She believes these patterns are acquired through environmental factors—a woman could become great at multitasking because society expects her to be better at it, for example—not because of any innate wiring in her brain.
According to a 2015 study, research suggests her claims are correct.
A team led by researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel recently concluded that there is no consistent difference between male and female brains.
Could the "male" and "female" brains be a myth?Daniele Oberti/Flickr
The team, led by behavioral neuroscientist Daphna Joel, analyzed the MRI scans of 1,400 individuals, mapping things like gray matter (gooey stuff that handles sensation, emotion ... pretty much everything), white matter (the gooey stuff that carries messages between areas of gray matter), and a host of personality traits along the way.
What did they find?
That it's pretty dang rare for a given brain to demonstrate only male or female characteristics.
So next time someone says to you, "Women's brains do this" or "Men's brains behave like this," feel free to call B.S.
The plain truth is that our brains flat out can't be separated into two distinct gender categories.
Our brains, the researchers say, are more like "mosaics" — wonderful mixtures of the traits we usually associate with men or women.
That's not to say the study found no differences between the brains of men and women, but rather that a brain consisting of almost all male or female features was pretty uncommon, and that it'd be really tough to tell if a person were biologically male or female just by looking at their brain.
Yes, on average there are certain differences in brain size, connections between hemispheres, size of the hippocampus or amygdala.
But this particular study found you couldn't make any concrete predictions about how a person's brain would look or function just based on their biological sex.
Joel summed it up in a follow-up publication in 2021:
"Although there are group-level differences between men and women in brain structure, most brains are composed of unique mosaics of brain features, some in a form more common in women compared to men, and some in a form more common in men compared to women," she wrote.
"Moreover, the brain architectures typical of women are also typical of men, and vice versa... Sex category provides little information on an individual’s specific brain architecture or on how their brain is similar or different from someone else’s."
It's a great reminder that gendering activities and behaviors is a bunch of bunk.
If you're not looking at an individual person holistically for the things that make them them, you're doing it wrong
Better yet, The Washington Postwrites that these findings are "a step towards validating the experiences of those who live outside the gender binary.
In how many areas of life are we creating arbitrary divisions?m01229/flickr
It's just more evidence to support the idea that the biological "parts" you're born with don't really tell us much about who you are.
Turns out that what's inside is much more fluid and malleable than we ever imagined.
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"Most of the men I play ooze machismo, charisma, and power," he said. "And when I look in the mirror, that's just not how I see myself."
