Fighting the Neurotrash industry

[AskBasil]

Perfect term for it.

Professor Gina Rippon

Very interesting, thanks.

Just to ring the changes in all those threads where we recommend Cordelia Fine....!

Great stuff. Neurotrash is absolutely right.

I honestly think some people don't realise how harmful all this brain stuff is. It's not very long ago that different brains was used as an excuse for all manner of exclusion of women.

I hope she, and others, will do for all this 'women's brains are different' stuff what Bad Science did for Gillian McKeith. If any of you ever doubted that real sexist social attitudes still hold sway, read the comments at the end of the article. if you want to chuck yourself off a cliff in despair, that is

Ah Eurotrash with Antoine De Caunes and (RIP) Lolo Ferrari.

Wait, Neurotrash? What is that?

There's a link. Clicky thing. Explains what we are all talking about.

Whenever people start talking about "Oh well, women's brains are just different aren't they?" I remind them that's what people used to say about black people, and Jews and all other groups they wanted to marginalise in order to justify awful things.

Neurotrash is a rather wonderful term, I'll be adopting it.

Indeed, Callani.
Cordelia Fine has written about similarities between Victorian brain-measuring and -weighing pseudoscience and the neurotwaddle stuff.

Love Neurotrash!

I have always wanted one of those little phrenology heads

Like this one

I bet the guidance says the domestic propensities in women are much larger.

The point is, the neurosexism displayed by journalists who report on brain research and some researchers themselves, has been named.

Beautifully.

Also I'll accept that she might be wrong, if we can test it.

Do away with patriarchy and sexism and level the playing field so that boys and girls are not gender policed as soon as they come out of the womb (or indeed before they come out of the womb) and then see how they all behave and how the neural pathways in their brains develop.

Then we'll know for sure won't we. We can never know for sure while we still live in a sexist society.

Kim, I haven't read her work but I've read Cordelia Fine, and she appears to be saying much the same thing, which is NOT that hormones have no effect on the brain. It's that the amount of difference between male and female brains is 1. much smaller than popular science would have you believe and 2. either undetectable at birth or detectable only to a minute degree.
Fine talks about the 'hardwired' metaphor being misleading because the brain is plastic.

Epigenetics is mind-blowing.
What else will they know by the time we're all 80?

"Petite, smiley, softly spoken and smartly dressed in black trousers and a red cardigan, Rippon, 60, does not come across either as an out-of-touch nerd or a "Millie Tant" feminist."

Why in an otherwise decent artical is her clothes and appearance still necessary?

And she's petite - let's not forget that.

FFS.

To be a bit fair to the journalist - the petite soft spoken but is kinda relevant to her Robert Winston response - but it does get repeated there.

Love this though:
"But even before the baby is born everyone is asking: 'is it a girl or a boy?' I'd much rather know if it going to sleep well or not. That would be far more useful in determining what motherhood will be like for you, than your baby's gender.

The telegraph cannot seem to get the spelling right in their headline: "Neutrotrash"? That just does not make any sense!

Still, how come from the earliest age my girls gravitated towards dolls, while the little boys we knew preferred trucks and guns? "It's anecdotal," Rippon insists. "By the time the children were old enough to make those sorts of choices they'd already been exposed to nursery, television, other relatives.

Maybe she says this because this interview is from 2010 and she doesn't yet know about the monkey studies that showed adolescent male monkeys preferring trucks and female monkeys preferring dolls.