Gina Rippon on the Gendered Brain on Today Prog 27th Feb

[NeurotrashWarrior]

There's just too much news at the mo!

Now moved to tomorrow morning, I believe Simon Baron Cohen (who came up with the autism is an extreme male brain idea - debunked) is also interviewed.

twitter.com/ginarippon1/status/1100100789555642369?s=21

Thanks NeurotrashWarrior I blinked, heard someone talk about bilingualism, and then the programme ended. I thought "Surely that can't be it?"

I imagine it got bumped off today's programme because of India-Pakistan talking up a fair bit of time.

Actually it was very interesting regarding how the brain can change when learning a new language even protecting against dementia. So I sort of wondered if it was her, except she's not Canadian .

This was just on today in the last 10 mins.

sorry I missed this thread was running:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3524690-R4-Today-now-important-discussion-re-sex-gendered-brains

Waiting for them to release the episode now! Just missed it

Baron-Cohen said differences males brains being slighter larger brain was the white matter.
The journalist later went on to say grey matter.

I may have misheard.

But if I heard right then the journalist was sloppy.

Wow - it was actually on - I was getting ready for the boiler repairman to come and missed it!!!! will have to catch up

Reporter said grey, he said grey and white.

But I'll also add that there's a phenotype of autism where the brain is larger. Interestingly only in males.

I do know that the main point Gina is making in her book is the impact of this research on other things, one of which obviously is the trans and gender stereotypes debate.

The thing is brain plasticity is so individual how can we ever take account of individual experiences? For example, trauma increases the size of the amygdala, mindfulness has been shown physically to reduce it. Some individuals are more sensitive to stress. Cosleeping positively impacts young boys more than girls in terms of emotional regulation - is it the stereotypes you're correcting there (be a hard tough man) or is the young male brain more predisposed to stress?

I don't think it can ever be black and white. Or pink and blue. The main argument Gina puts forward is how much A gendered world impacts and creates a gendered brain.

Didn’t hear interview on the 27th but Today had a follow up item today with Gina Rippon and Simon Baron Cohen. It was a good interview - with GR pointing out the effects of gender stereotypes and SBC suggesting that there are some differences at birth. Definitely no pink lady brains from either. It starts at about 2hours 50 minutes in.

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0002z2x

I was surprised that there was more agreement between them than I'd expected from previous reporting. The thing I don't understand is that if a male brain is biologically bigger (on average) does that mean anything about having more neurons / connections or is it that the processing power is still the same, everything is just physically bigger without this making any difference to function? This seems to be a key question, there might be physical differences but what functional difference does that make to anything?

Nettie, it was pre recorded and moved to today due to too much news. And probably the presenter.

Gina goes into a lot of it in her book which I'm not reading as spending too much time on mn

It was a vety short interview tbh. I believe they has a debate last Thursday.

I feel Baron Cohen isn't seeing the bigger picture of how ideas of gendered brains feeds into sexist narratives and also perpetuates stereotypes - which ironically creates a gendered brain!

One bit I did read in the book was how test subjects perform if told they're participating in a test that looks at stereotypes and how the stereotypes aren't true v just doing a test and being told that the sexes perform differently. Bit like the placebo effect in reverse.

There's also the effect where Asian women do better at a maths test when their Asian identity (stereotypically good at maths) is reinforced and worse when their female identity (stereotypically bad at maths ) is emphasised, econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/full/10.1027/1864-9335/a000184

Thanks neurotrashwarrior - I kept on wondering why I’d missed it [embarrassed]. Gina’s book sounds interesting. As for SBC, friend whose son has autism laughed about his ‘associative mating’ theory. He said it was ‘shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted’ and didn’t he have any practical advice to help parents who had already had children with autism !

That's really interesting Ever. Yeah I feel SBC is kind of back tracking a bit.