April 11, 2013 • 23 mins
It's a pretty touchy subject because of the possible implications - if you find differences between the brains of men and women, does that mean there are differences in their intellect? Surprisingly, though there are demonstrable differences between male and female brains, they use them differently to achieve the same ends equally well.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to you stuff you should know friend House Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clark. There's Charles Chuck Bryant, and this is stuff
you should have grant women's brain, man's brains friend, Yes, yes,
(00:23):
Chuck zombie Chuck? Now that was what was it? Tonto
Frankenstein And yeah, yeah, I know we've talked about this before.
I can never remember, Ponto Frankenstein. Oh man, why are
you doing this to us? There's somebody screaming at their alright,
Conto Frankenstein. Yeah, well's just get on with it. I'll
(00:48):
remember as soon as I look at up Tarzan boom.
That's it. I don't have anything. I just sturb it
my all your little man's brain with all the great
matter parted out. Honest, this is a very god this
is gonna be touchy navigating this one. Well, the implications
(01:08):
are really huge, you know, especially not necessarily the scientific implications,
but the potential policy implications of misguided people who don't
understand what they're hearing. Yeah, but I say this as
our general This is what I gather from this whole
thing is it sounds like men and women's brains are different,
(01:30):
and who cares. Men might be better at some things
and women. Women might be better at some things and
men women might process this faster, men might process this faster.
Who cares. That's why we're all here together to put
these brains together to lead us forward into the future. Like,
don't get all worked up about it. Women are seems
(01:50):
to be better at some things, and men seem to
be better like big well, and some of them supposedly
are like very cliche. Sure, Like men supposedly are better
at orienting objects in space in their mind, and that
means you can read a map be Women are generally
better at language tests, which probably means that they may
(02:11):
be better at communicating things. Okay, so I really really
feel though we should caveat this with this is a
look at the state of a pretty nascent field still
comparing the brains of men and women like. It was
only in the nineties that um A Dr. Sandra Whittleston
(02:33):
started comparing more than a hundred normal men's and women's
brains and actually accidentally stumbled upon the fact that they
are different in their their organization the makeup. And since
then it's been such a touchy subject that there's still
a lot of the field who won't say anything more
than that may be true, but um, there's really no
(02:56):
difference or whatever. And there's people that they're starting to
get louder and louder they're saying, no, there are differences.
It's not necessarily an intelligence. It's not necessarily in cognitive ability.
I will even go one better and say, I'm not
even willing to say that women don't read maps as
well as men, but there are structural and compositional differences
(03:19):
between men's and women's friends. It's been improven and what
are the implications of that? Yeah, And I say, like, yes,
study this because there are so many benefits you can
garner from learning more specifically about everything. But exactly so,
that's kind of where we're at right now. We're just
reporting on the state of this Nason field and and
(03:40):
a lot of it's not improven, but one thing that
has been shown and we I really feel like we
should kick it off with this. If you if you
look at longitude longitudinal studies, huge studies UM that have
been done over the decades UM, and you compare cognitive
abilities intelligence between boys and girls, the differences are almost
(04:03):
negligible overall. Yeah, I Q score stuff like that. It's
all about the same, right, And Um, there's differences, say
between math skills and um, between boys and girls and
those we don't even know whether those are culturally bound
or what. But we'll we'll get to that. Let's talk
about how the brain is different, because, like we said,
(04:24):
that has been proven men's brains and women's brains do
differ in some ways. Yeah, and um, like you said,
this is new. For a while, they've known that they're different,
but they used to think it was sort of justin
the hypothalamus where uh, sex drive and food intake are controlled.
And that seems like such a kind of a cop out,
Like you know, their brains are different because men like
(04:45):
to eat more and have sex more. Well, I mean
it's not true. The structurally they are different. There are
the super chismatic nucleus is different and that helps regulate
reproductive cycles for katiean rhythm. Um, there's different patterns of
androgen receptors, uh, which are responsible for sexual preferences. Um,
(05:06):
there's there's there's two times more UM like neurons and
cells in certain areas in the hypothalamus of a man
than a woman. So they are different. But that's what
they thought for a long time, like that was the
only difference in the brain. Yeah, and they've also found
out that taking into consideration weight differences and height differences,
(05:28):
men's brains are probably a little bigger. But that doesn't
equate to intelligent or cogni abilities. It's just one of
those things. Now, remember the myths of the brain episode
we did. We were saying, like, humans don't have the
biggest brain a whale does, but it's all about ratio
body size. Well, we missed something. It's about the ratio
of neurons to body size more than brain size. I
(05:51):
think someone pointed out who was it. It was some
animal that kind of disproved it was just the size.
I don't remember what the animals, I wonder. Two people
wrote in with that. Okay, so this this actually kind
of raises a very troubling question I did at first. Well,
wait a minute, if a man's brain is bigger than
a woman's, and even if you take into account like
(06:12):
weight and height and all that stuff, it's still larger,
then you know, does that mean that men are smarter
than women or should be? No? Why? Well, because in
two thousand one. They found that certain parts of men's
brains might be larger or smaller, certain parts of women's
brains are larger or smaller, and that could balance out
(06:34):
the overall difference in In the end, that's why you're
not gonna see any kind you know, any differences on
like intelligence levels and stuff like that. So parts of
the frontal lobe um, which is decision making, problem solving,
and the olympic cortex, which is for regulating emotions, are
larger in women, whereas in men the parietal cortex, which
(06:55):
is space perception in the amygdala, which impacts sexual if
you're in social behavior, were larger. So certain parts of
arge a bigger, parts of the ladies are bigger. Okay,
there's another big difference that they found. Um, men have
about six and a half times more gray matter, which
is neurons, than women do, but women have about ten
(07:18):
times more white matter, which is the connections between those neurons,
than men do. That's right, and it seems that men
actually think with the gray matter and women think with
the white matter. And uh so, taking a step back
from the outside, it looks like women's brains might be
more complicated and how it's set up and how they think.
(07:39):
But they may be faster than men, right, they would
work more efficiently. So in this sense, if you're looking
at this gray matter, that's where the neurons, the thinking
cells are, but there's less communication among them in men
that makes sense, whereas women may have, depending on the
part of the brain, fewer neurons but a more efficient
(08:02):
communication system. Which is weird because then that would mean
that you could make the case that they would roughly
arrive at the same conclusion at about the same time,
even though there were these two completely different structures. Yeah,
but they also point out that some women might have
more neurons, as much as twelve percent more neurons. It
depends and I was surprised, um that that sentence was
(08:25):
written like that. There. It depends on the region of
the brain that um the I think she's a biologist, physiologist,
Sandra whittleson that McMaster in Ontario, psychologist, psychologist, she's the
brain lady. Um. She found that there are parts of
the cortex in women, um, pretty much across the board
(08:46):
where you're gonna find about twelve percent more neurons packed
in there. So in this region they may have less
gray matter overall, but their neurons are more densely packed.
But what she found that was interesting was that these
areas where they have more neurons were associated with signals
coming into and out of the brain, which means that
(09:07):
women would be more efficient at combining information rather than
internal calculation. Yeah. That makes sense to me too. When
I hear all these things out loud and think about
my marriage, I think, yeah, like Emily's like way faster
at processing things in a conversation than I am, and like,
I don't know, it all kind of makes sense to me. See,
I feel like that that is that this is the
(09:29):
reason why a lot of people are so whoa, whoa, whoa,
Because we're at this point where we, like, just in
the nineties Whittleson discovered more neurons in this one thing
we did. We did. We know so little about the
brain as it stands, let alone the differences between men
and women that it's like, I feel like we need
to amass all of the info we can and then
(09:52):
start extrapolating, you know what I mean? Yeah, Well, because
I Emily's way better reading maps than me, and that
has counter to what usually what people might think I
have to worse. It's direction on the planet, like we
call it the opposite thing. If I say go right,
it's left. And I'll even try and trick myself and
say I think it's right, and I'll say go left
and it's right. So it's I'm a wonder of nature.
(10:14):
And how bad my sense of direction is. I didn't
know that, dude. I've been on road trips and gotting
off the highway to get gas and gotten back on
and gone right back the way I came from no
way for miles before I realized it. I feel like
I know you a little more. Yeah, I'm really bad
when it comes to that stuff. That means you've got
a lady brain, and I do. And I have to
hold the map like I have to orient the map
(10:35):
to where like pointed in the direction to make sense
of it. I know you mean, I know what you
mean about the having to orient the map in that direction. Yeah,
but wow, I had no idea. Oh yeah, I'm awful. Okay,
so um oh, here's another one. This one. This is
the most amazing difference to me between a man's brain
(10:59):
and a woman's brain. Back in I think the nineties,
like right, around the turn of that year. Um, some
Yale researchers gave a test, I guess, a language skilled
test of some sort where basically they said, um, here
say say Germany without the muh. It was like a
(11:21):
test of removing phonemes Germany Gurney Journey. Yeah. I was
just be in stupid. I was having trouble with it
just now. But they did this though under the at
the time brand spanking new wonder machine. It was new
at the time. Yeah, And the weird thing that they
found was that women and men had the same ability.
(11:45):
They did just as good a job in removing phonemes
from words, but they used different parts of their brain.
Whereas men used just one small region of one of
the hemispheres I'm not sure which one, the left, women
used regions in both the left and the right to
do the exact same thing. And the researchers pointed this
(12:08):
out there, like, okay, we would get this at what
we were testing was something really ancient, like something that
had to do with reproduction or acquiring food or defense
or fear, something like that, something really old. But reading.
Reading is a skill that humans have acquired, probably do
(12:28):
within the last few thousand years. It's brand new, and
men and women have evolved in just that recent in
time to use their brains differently to do the same thing.
Why that makes no sense whatsoever. What it suggests is
that men and women have different brains exactly. It's remarkable.
(12:49):
You know, you would think they kind of worked in
the same way, but they really don't. Yeah, that's staggering
to me. Because we're human beings, were the same species.
We can mate and produced new versions of our species,
you know, like the fact that we have different brains
just because of the differing sexes, And that's just mind
(13:11):
boggling to me. I have no idea just because of
different sexes or there's the old nature versus nurture argument.
So uh, who wrote this was a Connor Molly Edmonds
Molly Edmonds, formerly of Stuff Mom Never Told You. Um.
She points out that even if you're like super super
open minded and I really want to just raise my
(13:31):
child not you know, as you're boys you have to
play with trucks, or you're a girl you have to
play with dolls, there's still probably gonna be some of
that that the child absorbs. Even among the most like
gender neutral parents, among us. You rarely like pick up
a little girl by her left ankle and dangle her
upside down, right exactly. But um, no matter how hard
(13:53):
you try, society is going to impact and shape a
child like that in some way. But uh so that
you know, maybe that plays a part in it. Okay,
So okay, all right, I'll shoot a hole right into that.
That doesn't account for the brain changing being different in structure,
or does it. Well. Sandra Whittleston studied Einstein's brain. We've
done a podcast on Einstein's brain and the fact that
(14:16):
it's had in a garage for a number of years
like a jar, but she actually got a piece of
it like other people have to study it. In Her
argument is now our brains are structured at birth, because
look at Einstein's brain, it was actually structurally different and
it had nothing to do with nature at all, I'm sorry,
nurture at all. It was just shaped in differently in
(14:39):
some ways. And that's, you know, maybe why he was
so smart, and maybe that's why there aren't Einstein's all
over the place. And so this is something that we
get from birth, and it doesn't matter how you're raised,
it's going to be different. But see the jury is
still out on that one. Whittleston, that's her belief. There's
also another camp that says, well, no, because there's such
a thing as brain plasticity, and you have neural connections
(15:01):
that are remember the person with UM just one hemisphere,
but binocular vision um. Your your brain goes through the
process of pruning, so it gets rid of neural connections.
And if everybody's telling a little girl that she's not
good at math because she's a girl, her brain may
very ruthlessly cut out a lot of those connections and
she may, through this brain's version of a self fulfilling prophecy,
(15:24):
be the last good at math. Well, when that's where
and the brain structure would still look the same exactly,
that's where nurture comes back in. Like you said, if
little girls are taught they don't want to do math,
maybe there are more boys in class, and then that
perpetuates it further to where they did one study where
they found that female students who were math and science
and engineering majors did not want to sign up for
(15:45):
these summer conferences in math and science because they were
shown videos where it was a bunch of corny little
nerdy boys, right. I was wondering there, like, I don't
exactly you want to be surrounded by those goons. So
these are math and science and engineering majors, and they
didn't want to do that because again, they're just fed
(16:06):
that line that now it's just all boys, and boys
are interested in this kind of thing. And there were
there's been other studies to that found like UM girls
who are told that a a math test generally does
show gender differences score more poorly than ones who weren't
told that, or if they were told as gender neutral,
they improve, right, and boys are not immune to this
(16:27):
kind of thing too. Apparently they did a study where
they told UM white males taking a math test that
their scores were going to be compared to Asian males,
and they did much more poorly than people like males
who weren't told that. Right, So again it's that self
fulfilling prophecy that we can, I guess make happen. So
we're we're the path that we're going down right now,
(16:48):
when we're saying, well, no, it's just nurture, it's just society.
It's just there's a danger to it. It's not necessarily
wrong but there's a danger of following it too far
along to where you ignore the fact that they're are
for whatever reason, real differences, but in the male brain
and the female brain, and is here where some people, Um,
(17:09):
there's a guy named Cahill. I can't remember his first name,
but he's that you see, Irvine, He's one of the
louder people to shout like, no, we need to be
paying attention to the differences to understand how to say
better treat males and females suffering from the same thing. Yeah,
like drugs, for instance, I didn't know this. Apparently most
of the studies they do on on drugs are done
(17:33):
on males and male animals because they don't want a
skewed result during the minstrual cycle. And so these drugs,
like they need to study both the female brain and
the male brain because they could potentially tailor a drug
toward a female brain to act better and be received
better than they would for just the standard male brain.
(17:53):
And conversely to UM, like, if you take a like schizophrenia, UM,
that's different for men, it's different for women. The onsets
usually earlier for men. Men usually have worse symptoms. Women
usually fare better. With schizophrenia, and um, they think that
it's because women respond better to the drugs prescribed to
treat schizophrenia than men. That would be because of the
(18:15):
differences in the brain. And if we understand the male
brain versus the female brain, we could better tailor schizophrenia
ments to treat men better and have better outcomes. Yeah.
Physical therapy is another good example. In the article, Um,
they found that our brains actually work differently, Like when
we do simple things like reaching for an object, A
woman's brain tackles that differently than a men's, just in
(18:36):
the same way that I guess we do when we're
reading Germany Uriney. Yeah, it is journey, so don't stop believing.
So it physically me reaching for this phone is different
than when Jerry comes over and reaches for this phone.
Then if we had we're both punched in the brain,
we might need different physical therapy. Uh techniques, Well, you
(19:01):
said it punched in the brain to women, Um, especially
in frontal lobe injuries, have are devastated by those way
more than men. They think, because there's more neural activity
packed into the frontal lobe of women, and that's where
they do a lot more they're thinking than men do,
and that's evidenced by people who suffered the exact same
(19:21):
kind of brain injury. But a woman will just be
zong in. A man will be like, Oh, that kind
of hurt, but I'm going to get back to walking,
you know. Yeah, so I I mean, I'll go back
to the beginning. I stand by it. I say everyone
needs to just settle down and and start studying this
stuff because it could provide huge medical benefits and physical
(19:41):
therapy benefits and things like that if we just accepted
the fact that, yeah, our brains are a little different,
and that's just the deal. You know, Yeah, our brains
are different, but they're also trainable. Like if a girl
was told that she was bad at math, and she
decided that she wanted to take a lot of math classes,
I guarantee you she would excel it math. Yeah, and
(20:01):
I could probably train my brain to be more spatially
oriented as far as maps and direction goes. Do it?
I just I don't care, because now I have GPS
and Emily right to tell me I'm dumb. Um, let's
see you got anything else. I don't embraced differences people,
That's what I say. Um, that's very nice, serious nickers,
(20:22):
she's behind that. Uh. If you want to learn more
about embracing differences, specifically with the male and female brain,
you can type that into the search bar at how
stuff works dot com and it will bring up this article.
Oh and and now it's time for listening to mail
right all right, this is from I'm gonna call this
uh Stuff you Should Know jingle. Oh yeah, we got
(20:42):
a jingle written for us. I can't wait to start
using this. Um, hey, pal's I play music for a
living mostly up in Canada. On a recent tour down
to south By, Southwest and Austin, or keyboard player Alex
introduced me to the podcast and I had heard that
word podcast, but I honestly never knew what it was.
A way to go ale. I then spent the night
next two nights listening to Stuff you Should Know. Every
(21:04):
moment that I could really made the drives go by
a lot faster. And I love that you guys can
make any topic very interesting. UM, I have a lot
of time to kill, so I listened to nearly thirty
episodes in just over a week. So anyway, guys, one
of the last episodes I was listening to us how
commercial jingles work. I think Josh mentioned under his breath
that he wished you guys had a jingle. So when
(21:25):
I got home, I wrote you a jingle. Awesome. I
tried to combine the familiarity of something like the Cheers
theme song with the immediacy and simplicity of a commercial jingle.
I hope you enjoy it. I'm glad to discover the show,
and I'll be listening as long as you're talking. And
this bit of goodness is from Rusty Ah Machia's m
A t y a sid he pronounced that matches Mighty
(21:49):
Mas Media's from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, North America, art US.
And so we want to play the little jingle right now,
and uh, we may try and work this in somehow
and use this on the show. I think we're absolutely
going to like this thing is goal alright, alrighty everyone, Yeah,
(22:11):
here it is. Here we go. So that was pretty awesome.
That's great. We got our own jingle. Yeah, we're gonna
let's hear it again again. It's great, even if it's
(22:39):
even better the second time. It is so um, I
think that we should start using this. Hopefully your listeners
will hear it pop up and thank you very much, Rusty,
and thank you Alex for inadvertently getting us our own jingle. Agreed,
Hey he said some under your breath. Um. If you
want to send us a song or some been there anything, whatever.
(23:01):
If you just want to say hi, don't just say hi,
it's been done. You can tweet to us at s
Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook
dot com, slash and Stuff you Should Know. You can
send us a good old fashioned email to Stuff Podcasts
at Discovery dot com, and join us on our good
old fashioned website home of Stuff you Should Know. The
animated series are blog tons of other great stuff. You
(23:23):
can find that at Stuff you Should Know dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, is
it how Stuff Works dot com m
Welcome to you stuff you should know friend House Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clark. There's Charles Chuck Bryant, and this is stuff
you should have grant women's brain, man's brains friend, Yes, yes,
(00:23):
Chuck zombie Chuck? Now that was what was it? Tonto
Frankenstein And yeah, yeah, I know we've talked about this before.
I can never remember, Ponto Frankenstein. Oh man, why are
you doing this to us? There's somebody screaming at their alright,
Conto Frankenstein. Yeah, well's just get on with it. I'll
(00:48):
remember as soon as I look at up Tarzan boom.
That's it. I don't have anything. I just sturb it
my all your little man's brain with all the great
matter parted out. Honest, this is a very god this
is gonna be touchy navigating this one. Well, the implications
(01:08):
are really huge, you know, especially not necessarily the scientific implications,
but the potential policy implications of misguided people who don't
understand what they're hearing. Yeah, but I say this as
our general This is what I gather from this whole
thing is it sounds like men and women's brains are different,
(01:30):
and who cares. Men might be better at some things
and women. Women might be better at some things and
men women might process this faster, men might process this faster.
Who cares. That's why we're all here together to put
these brains together to lead us forward into the future. Like,
don't get all worked up about it. Women are seems
(01:50):
to be better at some things, and men seem to
be better like big well, and some of them supposedly
are like very cliche. Sure, Like men supposedly are better
at orienting objects in space in their mind, and that
means you can read a map be Women are generally
better at language tests, which probably means that they may
(02:11):
be better at communicating things. Okay, so I really really
feel though we should caveat this with this is a
look at the state of a pretty nascent field still
comparing the brains of men and women like. It was
only in the nineties that um A Dr. Sandra Whittleston
(02:33):
started comparing more than a hundred normal men's and women's
brains and actually accidentally stumbled upon the fact that they
are different in their their organization the makeup. And since
then it's been such a touchy subject that there's still
a lot of the field who won't say anything more
than that may be true, but um, there's really no
(02:56):
difference or whatever. And there's people that they're starting to
get louder and louder they're saying, no, there are differences.
It's not necessarily an intelligence. It's not necessarily in cognitive ability.
I will even go one better and say, I'm not
even willing to say that women don't read maps as
well as men, but there are structural and compositional differences
(03:19):
between men's and women's friends. It's been improven and what
are the implications of that? Yeah, And I say, like, yes,
study this because there are so many benefits you can
garner from learning more specifically about everything. But exactly so,
that's kind of where we're at right now. We're just
reporting on the state of this Nason field and and
(03:40):
a lot of it's not improven, but one thing that
has been shown and we I really feel like we
should kick it off with this. If you if you
look at longitude longitudinal studies, huge studies UM that have
been done over the decades UM, and you compare cognitive
abilities intelligence between boys and girls, the differences are almost
(04:03):
negligible overall. Yeah, I Q score stuff like that. It's
all about the same, right, And Um, there's differences, say
between math skills and um, between boys and girls and
those we don't even know whether those are culturally bound
or what. But we'll we'll get to that. Let's talk
about how the brain is different, because, like we said,
(04:24):
that has been proven men's brains and women's brains do
differ in some ways. Yeah, and um, like you said,
this is new. For a while, they've known that they're different,
but they used to think it was sort of justin
the hypothalamus where uh, sex drive and food intake are controlled.
And that seems like such a kind of a cop out,
Like you know, their brains are different because men like
(04:45):
to eat more and have sex more. Well, I mean
it's not true. The structurally they are different. There are
the super chismatic nucleus is different and that helps regulate
reproductive cycles for katiean rhythm. Um, there's different patterns of
androgen receptors, uh, which are responsible for sexual preferences. Um,
(05:06):
there's there's there's two times more UM like neurons and
cells in certain areas in the hypothalamus of a man
than a woman. So they are different. But that's what
they thought for a long time, like that was the
only difference in the brain. Yeah, and they've also found
out that taking into consideration weight differences and height differences,
(05:28):
men's brains are probably a little bigger. But that doesn't
equate to intelligent or cogni abilities. It's just one of
those things. Now, remember the myths of the brain episode
we did. We were saying, like, humans don't have the
biggest brain a whale does, but it's all about ratio
body size. Well, we missed something. It's about the ratio
of neurons to body size more than brain size. I
(05:51):
think someone pointed out who was it. It was some
animal that kind of disproved it was just the size.
I don't remember what the animals, I wonder. Two people
wrote in with that. Okay, so this this actually kind
of raises a very troubling question I did at first. Well,
wait a minute, if a man's brain is bigger than
a woman's, and even if you take into account like
(06:12):
weight and height and all that stuff, it's still larger,
then you know, does that mean that men are smarter
than women or should be? No? Why? Well, because in
two thousand one. They found that certain parts of men's
brains might be larger or smaller, certain parts of women's
brains are larger or smaller, and that could balance out
(06:34):
the overall difference in In the end, that's why you're
not gonna see any kind you know, any differences on
like intelligence levels and stuff like that. So parts of
the frontal lobe um, which is decision making, problem solving,
and the olympic cortex, which is for regulating emotions, are
larger in women, whereas in men the parietal cortex, which
(06:55):
is space perception in the amygdala, which impacts sexual if
you're in social behavior, were larger. So certain parts of
arge a bigger, parts of the ladies are bigger. Okay,
there's another big difference that they found. Um, men have
about six and a half times more gray matter, which
is neurons, than women do, but women have about ten
(07:18):
times more white matter, which is the connections between those neurons,
than men do. That's right, and it seems that men
actually think with the gray matter and women think with
the white matter. And uh so, taking a step back
from the outside, it looks like women's brains might be
more complicated and how it's set up and how they think.
(07:39):
But they may be faster than men, right, they would
work more efficiently. So in this sense, if you're looking
at this gray matter, that's where the neurons, the thinking
cells are, but there's less communication among them in men
that makes sense, whereas women may have, depending on the
part of the brain, fewer neurons but a more efficient
(08:02):
communication system. Which is weird because then that would mean
that you could make the case that they would roughly
arrive at the same conclusion at about the same time,
even though there were these two completely different structures. Yeah,
but they also point out that some women might have
more neurons, as much as twelve percent more neurons. It
depends and I was surprised, um that that sentence was
(08:25):
written like that. There. It depends on the region of
the brain that um the I think she's a biologist, physiologist,
Sandra whittleson that McMaster in Ontario, psychologist, psychologist, she's the
brain lady. Um. She found that there are parts of
the cortex in women, um, pretty much across the board
(08:46):
where you're gonna find about twelve percent more neurons packed
in there. So in this region they may have less
gray matter overall, but their neurons are more densely packed.
But what she found that was interesting was that these
areas where they have more neurons were associated with signals
coming into and out of the brain, which means that
(09:07):
women would be more efficient at combining information rather than
internal calculation. Yeah. That makes sense to me too. When
I hear all these things out loud and think about
my marriage, I think, yeah, like Emily's like way faster
at processing things in a conversation than I am, and like,
I don't know, it all kind of makes sense to me. See,
I feel like that that is that this is the
(09:29):
reason why a lot of people are so whoa, whoa, whoa,
Because we're at this point where we, like, just in
the nineties Whittleson discovered more neurons in this one thing
we did. We did. We know so little about the
brain as it stands, let alone the differences between men
and women that it's like, I feel like we need
to amass all of the info we can and then
(09:52):
start extrapolating, you know what I mean? Yeah, Well, because
I Emily's way better reading maps than me, and that
has counter to what usually what people might think I
have to worse. It's direction on the planet, like we
call it the opposite thing. If I say go right,
it's left. And I'll even try and trick myself and
say I think it's right, and I'll say go left
and it's right. So it's I'm a wonder of nature.
(10:14):
And how bad my sense of direction is. I didn't
know that, dude. I've been on road trips and gotting
off the highway to get gas and gotten back on
and gone right back the way I came from no
way for miles before I realized it. I feel like
I know you a little more. Yeah, I'm really bad
when it comes to that stuff. That means you've got
a lady brain, and I do. And I have to
hold the map like I have to orient the map
(10:35):
to where like pointed in the direction to make sense
of it. I know you mean, I know what you
mean about the having to orient the map in that direction. Yeah,
but wow, I had no idea. Oh yeah, I'm awful. Okay,
so um oh, here's another one. This one. This is
the most amazing difference to me between a man's brain
(10:59):
and a woman's brain. Back in I think the nineties,
like right, around the turn of that year. Um, some
Yale researchers gave a test, I guess, a language skilled
test of some sort where basically they said, um, here
say say Germany without the muh. It was like a
(11:21):
test of removing phonemes Germany Gurney Journey. Yeah. I was
just be in stupid. I was having trouble with it
just now. But they did this though under the at
the time brand spanking new wonder machine. It was new
at the time. Yeah, And the weird thing that they
found was that women and men had the same ability.
(11:45):
They did just as good a job in removing phonemes
from words, but they used different parts of their brain.
Whereas men used just one small region of one of
the hemispheres I'm not sure which one, the left, women
used regions in both the left and the right to
do the exact same thing. And the researchers pointed this
(12:08):
out there, like, okay, we would get this at what
we were testing was something really ancient, like something that
had to do with reproduction or acquiring food or defense
or fear, something like that, something really old. But reading.
Reading is a skill that humans have acquired, probably do
(12:28):
within the last few thousand years. It's brand new, and
men and women have evolved in just that recent in
time to use their brains differently to do the same thing.
Why that makes no sense whatsoever. What it suggests is
that men and women have different brains exactly. It's remarkable.
(12:49):
You know, you would think they kind of worked in
the same way, but they really don't. Yeah, that's staggering
to me. Because we're human beings, were the same species.
We can mate and produced new versions of our species,
you know, like the fact that we have different brains
just because of the differing sexes, And that's just mind
(13:11):
boggling to me. I have no idea just because of
different sexes or there's the old nature versus nurture argument.
So uh, who wrote this was a Connor Molly Edmonds
Molly Edmonds, formerly of Stuff Mom Never Told You. Um.
She points out that even if you're like super super
open minded and I really want to just raise my
(13:31):
child not you know, as you're boys you have to
play with trucks, or you're a girl you have to
play with dolls, there's still probably gonna be some of
that that the child absorbs. Even among the most like
gender neutral parents, among us. You rarely like pick up
a little girl by her left ankle and dangle her
upside down, right exactly. But um, no matter how hard
(13:53):
you try, society is going to impact and shape a
child like that in some way. But uh so that
you know, maybe that plays a part in it. Okay,
So okay, all right, I'll shoot a hole right into that.
That doesn't account for the brain changing being different in structure,
or does it. Well. Sandra Whittleston studied Einstein's brain. We've
done a podcast on Einstein's brain and the fact that
(14:16):
it's had in a garage for a number of years
like a jar, but she actually got a piece of
it like other people have to study it. In Her
argument is now our brains are structured at birth, because
look at Einstein's brain, it was actually structurally different and
it had nothing to do with nature at all, I'm sorry,
nurture at all. It was just shaped in differently in
(14:39):
some ways. And that's, you know, maybe why he was
so smart, and maybe that's why there aren't Einstein's all
over the place. And so this is something that we
get from birth, and it doesn't matter how you're raised,
it's going to be different. But see the jury is
still out on that one. Whittleston, that's her belief. There's
also another camp that says, well, no, because there's such
a thing as brain plasticity, and you have neural connections
(15:01):
that are remember the person with UM just one hemisphere,
but binocular vision um. Your your brain goes through the
process of pruning, so it gets rid of neural connections.
And if everybody's telling a little girl that she's not
good at math because she's a girl, her brain may
very ruthlessly cut out a lot of those connections and
she may, through this brain's version of a self fulfilling prophecy,
(15:24):
be the last good at math. Well, when that's where
and the brain structure would still look the same exactly,
that's where nurture comes back in. Like you said, if
little girls are taught they don't want to do math,
maybe there are more boys in class, and then that
perpetuates it further to where they did one study where
they found that female students who were math and science
and engineering majors did not want to sign up for
(15:45):
these summer conferences in math and science because they were
shown videos where it was a bunch of corny little
nerdy boys, right. I was wondering there, like, I don't
exactly you want to be surrounded by those goons. So
these are math and science and engineering majors, and they
didn't want to do that because again, they're just fed
(16:06):
that line that now it's just all boys, and boys
are interested in this kind of thing. And there were
there's been other studies to that found like UM girls
who are told that a a math test generally does
show gender differences score more poorly than ones who weren't
told that, or if they were told as gender neutral,
they improve, right, and boys are not immune to this
(16:27):
kind of thing too. Apparently they did a study where
they told UM white males taking a math test that
their scores were going to be compared to Asian males,
and they did much more poorly than people like males
who weren't told that. Right, So again it's that self
fulfilling prophecy that we can, I guess make happen. So
we're we're the path that we're going down right now,
(16:48):
when we're saying, well, no, it's just nurture, it's just society.
It's just there's a danger to it. It's not necessarily
wrong but there's a danger of following it too far
along to where you ignore the fact that they're are
for whatever reason, real differences, but in the male brain
and the female brain, and is here where some people, Um,
(17:09):
there's a guy named Cahill. I can't remember his first name,
but he's that you see, Irvine, He's one of the
louder people to shout like, no, we need to be
paying attention to the differences to understand how to say
better treat males and females suffering from the same thing. Yeah,
like drugs, for instance, I didn't know this. Apparently most
of the studies they do on on drugs are done
(17:33):
on males and male animals because they don't want a
skewed result during the minstrual cycle. And so these drugs,
like they need to study both the female brain and
the male brain because they could potentially tailor a drug
toward a female brain to act better and be received
better than they would for just the standard male brain.
(17:53):
And conversely to UM, like, if you take a like schizophrenia, UM,
that's different for men, it's different for women. The onsets
usually earlier for men. Men usually have worse symptoms. Women
usually fare better. With schizophrenia, and um, they think that
it's because women respond better to the drugs prescribed to
treat schizophrenia than men. That would be because of the
(18:15):
differences in the brain. And if we understand the male
brain versus the female brain, we could better tailor schizophrenia
ments to treat men better and have better outcomes. Yeah.
Physical therapy is another good example. In the article, Um,
they found that our brains actually work differently, Like when
we do simple things like reaching for an object, A
woman's brain tackles that differently than a men's, just in
(18:36):
the same way that I guess we do when we're
reading Germany Uriney. Yeah, it is journey, so don't stop believing.
So it physically me reaching for this phone is different
than when Jerry comes over and reaches for this phone.
Then if we had we're both punched in the brain,
we might need different physical therapy. Uh techniques, Well, you
(19:01):
said it punched in the brain to women, Um, especially
in frontal lobe injuries, have are devastated by those way
more than men. They think, because there's more neural activity
packed into the frontal lobe of women, and that's where
they do a lot more they're thinking than men do,
and that's evidenced by people who suffered the exact same
(19:21):
kind of brain injury. But a woman will just be
zong in. A man will be like, Oh, that kind
of hurt, but I'm going to get back to walking,
you know. Yeah, so I I mean, I'll go back
to the beginning. I stand by it. I say everyone
needs to just settle down and and start studying this
stuff because it could provide huge medical benefits and physical
(19:41):
therapy benefits and things like that if we just accepted
the fact that, yeah, our brains are a little different,
and that's just the deal. You know, Yeah, our brains
are different, but they're also trainable. Like if a girl
was told that she was bad at math, and she
decided that she wanted to take a lot of math classes,
I guarantee you she would excel it math. Yeah, and
(20:01):
I could probably train my brain to be more spatially
oriented as far as maps and direction goes. Do it?
I just I don't care, because now I have GPS
and Emily right to tell me I'm dumb. Um, let's
see you got anything else. I don't embraced differences people,
That's what I say. Um, that's very nice, serious nickers,
(20:22):
she's behind that. Uh. If you want to learn more
about embracing differences, specifically with the male and female brain,
you can type that into the search bar at how
stuff works dot com and it will bring up this article.
Oh and and now it's time for listening to mail
right all right, this is from I'm gonna call this
uh Stuff you Should Know jingle. Oh yeah, we got
(20:42):
a jingle written for us. I can't wait to start
using this. Um, hey, pal's I play music for a
living mostly up in Canada. On a recent tour down
to south By, Southwest and Austin, or keyboard player Alex
introduced me to the podcast and I had heard that
word podcast, but I honestly never knew what it was.
A way to go ale. I then spent the night
next two nights listening to Stuff you Should Know. Every
(21:04):
moment that I could really made the drives go by
a lot faster. And I love that you guys can
make any topic very interesting. UM, I have a lot
of time to kill, so I listened to nearly thirty
episodes in just over a week. So anyway, guys, one
of the last episodes I was listening to us how
commercial jingles work. I think Josh mentioned under his breath
that he wished you guys had a jingle. So when
(21:25):
I got home, I wrote you a jingle. Awesome. I
tried to combine the familiarity of something like the Cheers
theme song with the immediacy and simplicity of a commercial jingle.
I hope you enjoy it. I'm glad to discover the show,
and I'll be listening as long as you're talking. And
this bit of goodness is from Rusty Ah Machia's m
A t y a sid he pronounced that matches Mighty
(21:49):
Mas Media's from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, North America, art US.
And so we want to play the little jingle right now,
and uh, we may try and work this in somehow
and use this on the show. I think we're absolutely
going to like this thing is goal alright, alrighty everyone, Yeah,
(22:11):
here it is. Here we go. So that was pretty awesome.
That's great. We got our own jingle. Yeah, we're gonna
let's hear it again again. It's great, even if it's
(22:39):
even better the second time. It is so um, I
think that we should start using this. Hopefully your listeners
will hear it pop up and thank you very much, Rusty,
and thank you Alex for inadvertently getting us our own jingle. Agreed,
Hey he said some under your breath. Um. If you
want to send us a song or some been there anything, whatever.
(23:01):
If you just want to say hi, don't just say hi,
it's been done. You can tweet to us at s
Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook
dot com, slash and Stuff you Should Know. You can
send us a good old fashioned email to Stuff Podcasts
at Discovery dot com, and join us on our good
old fashioned website home of Stuff you Should Know. The
animated series are blog tons of other great stuff. You
(23:23):
can find that at Stuff you Should Know dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, is
it how Stuff Works dot com m
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
Show Links
AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSSPopular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Bobby Bones Show
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.