Fighting the Neurotrash industry

[AskBasil]

Perfect term for it.

Professor Gina Rippon

I have no idea what other binary differences are studied with respect to play either. Do blue eyed toddlers
play with musical toys and brown eyed more with jigsaws? Do children of an Asian background pick doctor outfits from the dressing up box more than children of a white background?

What if male Muslim babies were more drawn to "war" toys than male Christian babies? Would there be a bunch of "we told you they were terrorists and now there's proof" headlines in the Daily Mail? Would they be justified (clue: no)?

More to the point, would such research proposals even get funding and, if they got funding, would they get coverage once complete (as was said upthread, null results get published a lot less often).

but there is also a biological component

however

I thought it was clear that the male/female differences I have been talking about and were being discussed in that link are not differences in physical appearance of the brain, like amount of white and grey matter, but well-documented cognitive differences.

You are confused. Cognitition is not biology. What do you mean by a biological component and how is it measured?

I asm bemused about the monkey tests. Surely the really interesting thing about those tests is- what makes things with wheels instrinsically masculine in such a way that male monkies would be attracted to them? I mean, there are no evolutionary advantages as trucks and wheels are a relatively new invention...

Yeah, the saucepans too.
I mean, were the monkeys actually pretending to cook with them, or did they put them on their heads and pretend to be knights?

I may be getting monkey studies mixed up, but we seem to be saying: a. A wheeled toy is for boys and b. A plush toy is for girls and c. Boy monkeys like wheels or dislike extended plush toys. We can't be sure which.

It would seem to me that human boys do not like wheels more than girls do - popular wheeled girls toys are mini prams, mini pushchairs, rollerskates, bikes, shopping carts, barbie on a bike, push along animals,, barbie cars, disney princesses on rolling feet in a giant fairy dance studio. I see no evidence that boys spend more times on wheeled vehicles. I also see no evidence that young girls play with plush toys more than young boys do. Teddies etc are unisex toys for young children,, as are other soft items like security blankets.

I don't know why boy monkeys prefer wheels to plush, but i also don't see that it has a relationship to humans.

I'm also a little bemused about the toys used. As a PP has said, plush toys are, in humans, pretty unisex, often they are bedtime companions, maybe the female rhesus monkeys were more sleepy during the experiment? Or craving the sensory input from their mother's fur! The wheeled toys are also an odd choice. How many trucks do rhesus monkeys see? What context do they have in symbolic play for monkeys? Perhaps what the results show is that, on that day, at that time, those rhesus monkeys wanted to fiddle about with something utterly useless to them. Do rhesus monkeys learn through schemas? If so, maybe the males and females were experimenting with different ones, and a week later they might have learned all they needed and moved on to a different one? The science seems too floppy to be of much use. Plus, as another PP states, it's always important to look at the agenda of the research funders, as that can often be illuminating when interpreting results!

I think that nobody has claimed the following is not true:

1. There is no distinguishing feature between an individual male and a female brain. Nobody can look at one brain and say with certainty that it is female or male.
2. There are proportions of the brain that are more common in one sex than the other.
3. No study has ever demonstrated these proportions to any actual behavioural differences between men and women.
4. There are differences in behaviour between the average man and average woman and we have no evidence to connect these to any brain function.

So people can do as many studies as they want that demonstrate more men do X than women do, but unless that can be shown to be linked to an actual innate brain function, there is no evidence at all from neurobiology that there are innate differences in the brain that cause most men and most women to think, feel or behave differently.

Struggling with the same bit, Kim - I think you can paraphrase it as "We all agree that..."

almondcake - I agree with the points you've made although I think there may be some people who have claimed those things, though not on this board.

1. There are proportions of the brain that are more common in one sex than the other.
2. No study has ever demonstrated these proportions to any actual behavioural differences between men and women.
3. There are differences in behaviour between the average man and average woman and we have no evidence to connect these to any brain function.

^^ this.

I think we all know the answer to that one Buffy and it starts with a P!!

It's just silly nonsense all this divvying all the traits up like they're mutually exclusive. Like one person can't be emotional and rational at the same time, like one person can't like wheelie things or dolls, or like numbers and words. It's all a bit dippy really.

51% of women on that Cambridge questionnaire (if it's the one that Baron Cohen did) didn't have "female" brains and he's a clutz to refer to "an essential difference" when even by his findings there was a hell of a lot of fluidity.

Maybe they should examine the brain structures of feminists to see how they differ from the rest of the population!!

Purely anecdotal, but my son is far more attached to his teddy than DD has ever been to hers. She has never played with dolls either, and DS has never been big on wheels. He has autism so is less influenced by social constraints

My DSs like wheels and soft toys. Shock horror! They will never be whichever type of monkeys who are supposed to reflect them.

Buffy, I do think it is important that the supposedly feminine traits are not given a lower status.

But the generalisation of there being a male brain and a female brain is still annoying in its own right. The vast majority of people have seem me heavily pregnant. That is quite enough information about my femaleness for prejudiced people to know about me and make judgements about. I would quite like my brain and what may or may not be going on it and what male or female mental traits I may or may not have to be nobody else's business unless I choose to define them in that way and disclose them.

If testing people for these traits has any value at all (and maybe it does in some kind of learning environment), why do they need gender labels? There seems to be no value to gendering traits other than to allow people to extend their ability to stereotype others.

Kim, sorry for the clunky sentence in the last post.

I agree with you almondcake.

When people make assumptions about what you can or cannot do, what you do or do not feel, what you do or do not prefer, solely because you are a woman or a man - that gives me the rage.

I would carry on ranting but I am still reeling at the 51% statistic.

Would this make any sense for any other category? If I said I had discovered what the 'dog brain' was, but then said that most dogs don't have a dog brain, that would be considered ludicrous. But it is okay to set a benchmark of female traits that most females don't reach? Setting benchmarks for femininity that most women can't reach is just old fashioned sexism.

"If I said I had discovered what the 'dog brain' was, but then said that most dogs don't have a dog brain, that would be considered ludicrous. But it is okay to set a benchmark of female traits that most females don't reach? Setting benchmarks for femininity that most women can't reach is just old fashioned sexism."

Yes. And yet it goes so unchallenged so often.