February 4, 2009 • 14 mins
When it comes to gender differences, there's no subject more fraught than our brains. Are men really better at reading maps? Are women wired to gab? Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast to get to the heart of the matter (brain matter, that is).
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 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stop? Mom never told you?
From housetop works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
This is Molly and I'm Kristen and Christine. Today I
(00:21):
wanted to talk to you about some recent history. In
two thousand five, I don't know if you remember this,
there was a big controversy when the president of Harvard
made some remarks that suggested that there were innate reasons
for why women did not perform as well as men
on tests of math and science. I do remember that,
and I vote, just with personal experience as my background,
(00:41):
I vote that this is not true, that there's no
biological reason for why uh men and womanship performed any
differently on science. Because I was on the math team
when I was younger. Well that was you're talking about science,
that was that's math. Molly different. You think that you
want to the boys and girls do just as well.
I do. The math team was made up of half
girls have boys. And I will say, although I was
(01:03):
not a science team member, science leaked. I feel that
the class breakdown and that was also even interesting interesting.
I was. I was homeschooled, so I was not a mathlete.
I was on I had my own math team. But um,
I I do think though, that that there's something to
the idea that that men and women at least think differently. Okay, Like,
(01:23):
right before we came in here, I decided to do
a little Google search, UM on a very scientific magazine
called Cosmopolitan that you may have seen, um, because there
seems to be sort of an obsession with especially with
like those types of female magazines, that guys definitely think differently.
And so I just looked through a few covers and um,
(01:44):
almost every single one of them had some kind of
headline about an article relating to, you know, decoding the
male brain. Um. So I think that I think there's
at least a belief out there that men and women's
brains are different. Okay, So let's investigate today whether they
think differently, and if they do, if they are better
at math and science. Okay, Okay, Christen, Let's start our
(02:05):
investigation with just some generic stats from the New York
Times their studies where they find that men score better
at tasks that involve orienting objects in space, which would
seem to indicate, you know, more aptitude for math and
science and that kind of reasoning. And the women score
better at language tests, which might explain, you know, why
women talk too much. Whoa Molly, I mean, that's that's
(02:26):
kind of a stereotype. You know, men men can read maps,
women talk too much. I don't. I don't. I don't
know that. I fully buy that. Well, and that's when
you're on the same side with scientists. They are very
hesitant to sort of draw major conclusions from that because
they don't want to look as if they're they're sexists somehow. Well,
let's let's go back, you know, let's go back to
studies and let's go back to the science. Um. In fact,
(02:48):
the matter is, men do have larger brains. As much
as I hate to say it, they really do proportionately. Um,
they got they got slightly bigger brains. Yeah, even when
you account differences and body size, and wait, the size
of the brain is bigger. And again, scientists are kind
of hesitant here because you know, they have found that
the old adage holds true that size does matter. Size
(03:11):
has been linked to bigger intelligence. Basically. But before we
go too far, that does not mean though that men
as a sex are more intelligent than women. Why not, Kristen,
Because I think we have to now go inside of
the brain to look at the different you know, parts
parts of our brains that that are different between men
(03:31):
and women, because I don't think that you can just
judge it by size alone. What if it's size of
certain sections, look look at that. Well. In two thousand one,
researchers from Harvard found that yes, indeed, men and women
have um different parts of our brains are larger depending
on your sex. For instance, for women, um, we have
(03:53):
larger frontal lobes, which are responsible for our problem solving
and decision making. So that's pretty awesome. And our limbic
cortex is also larger, and olymbic cortex is responsible for
regulating emotions. Figure, maybe that's why we're more emotional than men.
Is that what they're saying? I don't know, Well, what's what?
What about what they find for men? So men have
(04:15):
a bigger parietal cortex, which is responsible again for this
sort of idea of space perception and being able to
orient an object in space and visually or you know,
looking at everything and knowing where it is. And the
amygdala is bigger, and that regulates sexual and social behavior.
I really don't want to draw any conclusions about that,
not being a researcher, but so basically they're saying that,
(04:38):
you know, the house may be slightly bigger, but women
have rooms that kind of make up for for not
having as big a house as men. And uh, there's
also a difference in the amount of gray matter and
white matter between men and women. Um. Men have approximately
six point five times more gray matter than women. Um.
(04:58):
And the gray matter is is the part of the
brain that it's active. It's full of active neurons, which
does you know, the active thinking. Yeah, they're there, have
they have more space to have brilliant thoughts. That doesn't
make women Dollard's wait listen to this. In fact, women
have about ten times more white matter than men do. Yeah,
that's a lot of white matter. And here's what the
(05:19):
white matter does. It's basically the connections between all these
active neurons. So basically we may not have as many
active thought places, but we have a lot of connections
between them all. So everything moves much faster in our brain.
And another reason why women's brains seem to work faster
is because we have up to twelve percent more neurons
(05:42):
than men. Basically, our neurons are just more uh, more
condensed and more tightly packed into our brains than men.
So maybe that makes up for the size difference. Men
have larger brains, but we have more neurons in a
smaller space. Yeah, And all of these you know details
about the gray matter and the white matter came from
this article in the l A Times about a researcher
(06:02):
who was um thinking about exactly where these neurons might
be different in a male brain versus a female brain,
and this psychologist, Sander Wittelston, basically found that on certain
layers of the cortex, especially for the ones that involve
you know, incoming outgoing signals, um, there's more of them
in women on those layers. Basically, if if you thought
of the brain like an onion and you peeled away
(06:24):
the different layers, there would be some layers that are
just crowded with neurons on a female brain that aren't
that way on a male brain. Right. But just because
we have differences in in our brain anatomies doesn't mean
that we the outcome the actual you know, intelligence, the
way we process things at the end, is all that
different from each other? Um. There was a study reported
(06:46):
in the New York Times UM evaluating the different ways
uh the different brain parts that lied up in men
and women when they are pronouncing a word. In men,
a very small part of their brain UM was active
when they were pronouncing a word, whereas for women, a
much much larger area in the brain on both sides
was active. But at the same time they were both
(07:09):
both men and women were successful at pronouncing the words.
Just because men were using a small amount of their
brain than women didn't mean that one was performing better
or worse than the other. Yeah, basically there's more than
one way to get to the same answer. And this may,
you know, help explain why you know, we think of
a guy as better at reading a map. It might
just be that his area the brain is better at
looking at that, whereas women have different associations with landmarks
(07:32):
and just view how to get there differently. Because all
in all, men and women have basically the same average
IQ scores. So you know, these these brain differences aren't
aren't making you know, one sex smarter than the other. Okay,
So then if it's not basically the brain structure. If
that's sort of there and set, and you know, it
(07:52):
evens out in the end, could it be society that
makes girls better at language and men better at math
and science? Yeah, I think that they're The environment might
have something to do with it. But what was her name?
Sander Wyteleston would disagree with that? She would disagree? Why
would disagree? Because she studied Albert Einstein's brain and basically
(08:12):
she found that he had a different brain and it
was like that from birth. It's not like anything happened
in Albert Einstein's upbringing that made him think differently and
you know, or made him better at math than a
female Albert Einstein might have been. Basically, he was always
going to sort of have this brain structure. And so
it doesn't matter how girly or raised or how you know,
(08:33):
manly or raised, if such an upbringing exists, UM, that
structure your brain is always going to be there. Well,
I think we also have to take into account um
brain development. Obviously, the brain that we're born with is
not the brain that we die with, hopefully um. And
so the case may be that girls and boys brains
are simply developing a different rate. And while that's happening.
(08:55):
You know, the education system isn't exactly UM compensating for that. Right, So, say,
you know, if you're you know, a third grade girl
and you're just not doing well at math, and it
just might be that those areas you brain haven't really
caught up to to those skill sets. UM. If you're
not doing well, it's not like your teacher is going
to recognize exactly what's having in your brain and things
down for you. So that might discourage the student and
(09:18):
she'll give up. Yeah, you get frustrated. You don't want
to keep trying in these classes where you're you're just
not mentally, I guess your brain is not ready for
the material yet. And I think that, uh that just
social bias in general can also impact this difference between
UM performance in math and science between girls and boys. Right, Yeah,
I mean I think that you know, if you walk
(09:39):
into a classroom and you see that you're the omen girl,
that's going to be sort of further challenging for you,
just on a social aspect that you're saying. And there's
this one study that was reported in UM on Live
science dot com that kind of backs that up. They
looked at these female students who at a college level
or pursuing degrees and very you know, typically male um
fields like math, science, engineer, ring, um. And they showed
(10:01):
one group of the female students of video where they
could go to the summer program to really develop their
skills in their fields, and the classroom was evenly distributed
males females. And then they showed another group of video
where there was just like, you know, two females in
a classroom full of males. And who do you think
wanted to go to the workshop after seeing those videos,
(10:24):
I'm gonna guess the one where it was gender neutral.
It was, and you know, they wanted to guess somewhere
where they could be um, you know, not the odd
man out or the odd female out, if you will, Right,
But females aren't the only you know, we aren't the
only ones who are susceptible to those kind of environmental influences.
One study conducted at n y U evaluated white men's
(10:44):
mass scores when they were taking a test um when
they knew that they would just be scored on their
own performance, and then again when they thought that they
were going to be scored against Asian students scores Asian
men's scores, to be specific, and their scores actually dropped
when they thought that they were going to be evaluated
against the Asian or so you might always have sort of, uh,
(11:05):
you know, conscious thought that there's someone out there that's
better than you. Add this because in the same study, um,
when females were told that the exam was gender neutral,
they did much better when they told, you know, when
they weren't going to be evaluated against males. But on
the upside, that tells us that either male, whether male
or female, we can overcome these biological differences. You know.
(11:27):
It might just be things in our environment that are
that are sort of holding us back, right, it's all
on our head, um. And but the thing about it, Christen,
is that not everyone is as enlightened as you and
I are. And some worry that if you know that
a female brain is different than a male brain, even
if you know they get to the same place eventually,
it might you know, be sort of a discrimination factor.
(11:47):
Would you not hire a female for a certain job,
would you not take a female to a certain school,
And that's you know, that's a danger. But I think
what we really should worry about here is that if
men and women have these different brains, then it can
really affect them physically. Uh. For instance, most research for
new medication is conducted just on male test subjects and
(12:10):
male animals because the thinking goes that women would make
um bad test subjects because of our periods or whatever
stage in our menstrual cycle where and you know it
could make you could skew the results because our our
brains are behaving erratically. So they're just testing on men
and not taking into account the differences between male and
female brains. Yeah, and at some point, you know, a
(12:32):
woman on a in a menstrual cycle, we'll have to
take a pill that's only been tested um on a man.
So while disorders like depression and chronic anxiety are diagnosed
a lot more often in women, UM disorders such as autism, dyslexia,
and schizophrenia are for more likely to be diagnosed in men. Yeah.
(12:52):
And also there's some evidence that if there was like
a brain injury, like if you had a stroke, then
your brain would come back from that differently depending on
whether you're male or female. Um. You know, maybe if
you were trying to learn how to pick up something again,
and we have these differences in sort of visual spatial reasoning.
Your arm might do different things based on what your
brain is telling you if you're a male or female. Right, So,
(13:15):
it seems like from what we've learned, UH, to some extent,
we need to embrace and recognize the differences between men
and women's brains, because it doesn't necessarily mean that one
sex is more intelligent than the other. They simply work differently, exactly,
I would. I think we worked with that matter out
(13:35):
with our white matter. But whether you're male or female,
white matter, gray matter, there's one thing that can be
the same for everyone. With the checking out this article
and other articles about the brain at how stuff works
dot com for moral this and thousands of other topics.
(13:56):
Doesn't how stuff works dot com m brought to you
by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camry. It's ready, are
you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stop? Mom never told you?
From housetop works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
This is Molly and I'm Kristen and Christine. Today I
(00:21):
wanted to talk to you about some recent history. In
two thousand five, I don't know if you remember this,
there was a big controversy when the president of Harvard
made some remarks that suggested that there were innate reasons
for why women did not perform as well as men
on tests of math and science. I do remember that,
and I vote, just with personal experience as my background,
(00:41):
I vote that this is not true, that there's no
biological reason for why uh men and womanship performed any
differently on science. Because I was on the math team
when I was younger. Well that was you're talking about science,
that was that's math. Molly different. You think that you
want to the boys and girls do just as well.
I do. The math team was made up of half
girls have boys. And I will say, although I was
(01:03):
not a science team member, science leaked. I feel that
the class breakdown and that was also even interesting interesting.
I was. I was homeschooled, so I was not a mathlete.
I was on I had my own math team. But um,
I I do think though, that that there's something to
the idea that that men and women at least think differently. Okay, Like,
(01:23):
right before we came in here, I decided to do
a little Google search, UM on a very scientific magazine
called Cosmopolitan that you may have seen, um, because there
seems to be sort of an obsession with especially with
like those types of female magazines, that guys definitely think differently.
And so I just looked through a few covers and um,
(01:44):
almost every single one of them had some kind of
headline about an article relating to, you know, decoding the
male brain. Um. So I think that I think there's
at least a belief out there that men and women's
brains are different. Okay, So let's investigate today whether they
think differently, and if they do, if they are better
at math and science. Okay, Okay, Christen, Let's start our
(02:05):
investigation with just some generic stats from the New York
Times their studies where they find that men score better
at tasks that involve orienting objects in space, which would
seem to indicate, you know, more aptitude for math and
science and that kind of reasoning. And the women score
better at language tests, which might explain, you know, why
women talk too much. Whoa Molly, I mean, that's that's
(02:26):
kind of a stereotype. You know, men men can read maps,
women talk too much. I don't. I don't. I don't
know that. I fully buy that. Well, and that's when
you're on the same side with scientists. They are very
hesitant to sort of draw major conclusions from that because
they don't want to look as if they're they're sexists somehow. Well,
let's let's go back, you know, let's go back to
studies and let's go back to the science. Um. In fact,
(02:48):
the matter is, men do have larger brains. As much
as I hate to say it, they really do proportionately. Um,
they got they got slightly bigger brains. Yeah, even when
you account differences and body size, and wait, the size
of the brain is bigger. And again, scientists are kind
of hesitant here because you know, they have found that
the old adage holds true that size does matter. Size
(03:11):
has been linked to bigger intelligence. Basically. But before we
go too far, that does not mean though that men
as a sex are more intelligent than women. Why not, Kristen,
Because I think we have to now go inside of
the brain to look at the different you know, parts
parts of our brains that that are different between men
(03:31):
and women, because I don't think that you can just
judge it by size alone. What if it's size of
certain sections, look look at that. Well. In two thousand one,
researchers from Harvard found that yes, indeed, men and women
have um different parts of our brains are larger depending
on your sex. For instance, for women, um, we have
(03:53):
larger frontal lobes, which are responsible for our problem solving
and decision making. So that's pretty awesome. And our limbic
cortex is also larger, and olymbic cortex is responsible for
regulating emotions. Figure, maybe that's why we're more emotional than men.
Is that what they're saying? I don't know, Well, what's what?
What about what they find for men? So men have
(04:15):
a bigger parietal cortex, which is responsible again for this
sort of idea of space perception and being able to
orient an object in space and visually or you know,
looking at everything and knowing where it is. And the
amygdala is bigger, and that regulates sexual and social behavior.
I really don't want to draw any conclusions about that,
not being a researcher, but so basically they're saying that,
(04:38):
you know, the house may be slightly bigger, but women
have rooms that kind of make up for for not
having as big a house as men. And uh, there's
also a difference in the amount of gray matter and
white matter between men and women. Um. Men have approximately
six point five times more gray matter than women. Um.
(04:58):
And the gray matter is is the part of the
brain that it's active. It's full of active neurons, which
does you know, the active thinking. Yeah, they're there, have
they have more space to have brilliant thoughts. That doesn't
make women Dollard's wait listen to this. In fact, women
have about ten times more white matter than men do. Yeah,
that's a lot of white matter. And here's what the
(05:19):
white matter does. It's basically the connections between all these
active neurons. So basically we may not have as many
active thought places, but we have a lot of connections
between them all. So everything moves much faster in our brain.
And another reason why women's brains seem to work faster
is because we have up to twelve percent more neurons
(05:42):
than men. Basically, our neurons are just more uh, more
condensed and more tightly packed into our brains than men.
So maybe that makes up for the size difference. Men
have larger brains, but we have more neurons in a
smaller space. Yeah, And all of these you know details
about the gray matter and the white matter came from
this article in the l A Times about a researcher
(06:02):
who was um thinking about exactly where these neurons might
be different in a male brain versus a female brain,
and this psychologist, Sander Wittelston, basically found that on certain
layers of the cortex, especially for the ones that involve
you know, incoming outgoing signals, um, there's more of them
in women on those layers. Basically, if if you thought
of the brain like an onion and you peeled away
(06:24):
the different layers, there would be some layers that are
just crowded with neurons on a female brain that aren't
that way on a male brain. Right. But just because
we have differences in in our brain anatomies doesn't mean
that we the outcome the actual you know, intelligence, the
way we process things at the end, is all that
different from each other? Um. There was a study reported
(06:46):
in the New York Times UM evaluating the different ways
uh the different brain parts that lied up in men
and women when they are pronouncing a word. In men,
a very small part of their brain UM was active
when they were pronouncing a word, whereas for women, a
much much larger area in the brain on both sides
was active. But at the same time they were both
(07:09):
both men and women were successful at pronouncing the words.
Just because men were using a small amount of their
brain than women didn't mean that one was performing better
or worse than the other. Yeah, basically there's more than
one way to get to the same answer. And this may,
you know, help explain why you know, we think of
a guy as better at reading a map. It might
just be that his area the brain is better at
looking at that, whereas women have different associations with landmarks
(07:32):
and just view how to get there differently. Because all
in all, men and women have basically the same average
IQ scores. So you know, these these brain differences aren't
aren't making you know, one sex smarter than the other. Okay,
So then if it's not basically the brain structure. If
that's sort of there and set, and you know, it
(07:52):
evens out in the end, could it be society that
makes girls better at language and men better at math
and science? Yeah, I think that they're The environment might
have something to do with it. But what was her name?
Sander Wyteleston would disagree with that? She would disagree? Why
would disagree? Because she studied Albert Einstein's brain and basically
(08:12):
she found that he had a different brain and it
was like that from birth. It's not like anything happened
in Albert Einstein's upbringing that made him think differently and
you know, or made him better at math than a
female Albert Einstein might have been. Basically, he was always
going to sort of have this brain structure. And so
it doesn't matter how girly or raised or how you know,
(08:33):
manly or raised, if such an upbringing exists, UM, that
structure your brain is always going to be there. Well,
I think we also have to take into account um
brain development. Obviously, the brain that we're born with is
not the brain that we die with, hopefully um. And
so the case may be that girls and boys brains
are simply developing a different rate. And while that's happening.
(08:55):
You know, the education system isn't exactly UM compensating for that. Right, So, say,
you know, if you're you know, a third grade girl
and you're just not doing well at math, and it
just might be that those areas you brain haven't really
caught up to to those skill sets. UM. If you're
not doing well, it's not like your teacher is going
to recognize exactly what's having in your brain and things
down for you. So that might discourage the student and
(09:18):
she'll give up. Yeah, you get frustrated. You don't want
to keep trying in these classes where you're you're just
not mentally, I guess your brain is not ready for
the material yet. And I think that, uh that just
social bias in general can also impact this difference between
UM performance in math and science between girls and boys. Right, Yeah,
I mean I think that you know, if you walk
(09:39):
into a classroom and you see that you're the omen girl,
that's going to be sort of further challenging for you,
just on a social aspect that you're saying. And there's
this one study that was reported in UM on Live
science dot com that kind of backs that up. They
looked at these female students who at a college level
or pursuing degrees and very you know, typically male um
fields like math, science, engineer, ring, um. And they showed
(10:01):
one group of the female students of video where they
could go to the summer program to really develop their
skills in their fields, and the classroom was evenly distributed
males females. And then they showed another group of video
where there was just like, you know, two females in
a classroom full of males. And who do you think
wanted to go to the workshop after seeing those videos,
(10:24):
I'm gonna guess the one where it was gender neutral.
It was, and you know, they wanted to guess somewhere
where they could be um, you know, not the odd
man out or the odd female out, if you will, Right,
But females aren't the only you know, we aren't the
only ones who are susceptible to those kind of environmental influences.
One study conducted at n y U evaluated white men's
(10:44):
mass scores when they were taking a test um when
they knew that they would just be scored on their
own performance, and then again when they thought that they
were going to be scored against Asian students scores Asian
men's scores, to be specific, and their scores actually dropped
when they thought that they were going to be evaluated
against the Asian or so you might always have sort of, uh,
(11:05):
you know, conscious thought that there's someone out there that's
better than you. Add this because in the same study, um,
when females were told that the exam was gender neutral,
they did much better when they told, you know, when
they weren't going to be evaluated against males. But on
the upside, that tells us that either male, whether male
or female, we can overcome these biological differences. You know.
(11:27):
It might just be things in our environment that are
that are sort of holding us back, right, it's all
on our head, um. And but the thing about it, Christen,
is that not everyone is as enlightened as you and
I are. And some worry that if you know that
a female brain is different than a male brain, even
if you know they get to the same place eventually,
it might you know, be sort of a discrimination factor.
(11:47):
Would you not hire a female for a certain job,
would you not take a female to a certain school,
And that's you know, that's a danger. But I think
what we really should worry about here is that if
men and women have these different brains, then it can
really affect them physically. Uh. For instance, most research for
new medication is conducted just on male test subjects and
(12:10):
male animals because the thinking goes that women would make
um bad test subjects because of our periods or whatever
stage in our menstrual cycle where and you know it
could make you could skew the results because our our
brains are behaving erratically. So they're just testing on men
and not taking into account the differences between male and
female brains. Yeah, and at some point, you know, a
(12:32):
woman on a in a menstrual cycle, we'll have to
take a pill that's only been tested um on a man.
So while disorders like depression and chronic anxiety are diagnosed
a lot more often in women, UM disorders such as autism, dyslexia,
and schizophrenia are for more likely to be diagnosed in men. Yeah.
(12:52):
And also there's some evidence that if there was like
a brain injury, like if you had a stroke, then
your brain would come back from that differently depending on
whether you're male or female. Um. You know, maybe if
you were trying to learn how to pick up something again,
and we have these differences in sort of visual spatial reasoning.
Your arm might do different things based on what your
brain is telling you if you're a male or female. Right, So,
(13:15):
it seems like from what we've learned, UH, to some extent,
we need to embrace and recognize the differences between men
and women's brains, because it doesn't necessarily mean that one
sex is more intelligent than the other. They simply work differently, exactly,
I would. I think we worked with that matter out
(13:35):
with our white matter. But whether you're male or female,
white matter, gray matter, there's one thing that can be
the same for everyone. With the checking out this article
and other articles about the brain at how stuff works
dot com for moral this and thousands of other topics.
(13:56):
Doesn't how stuff works dot com m brought to you
by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camry. It's ready, are
you
Stuff Mom Never Told You News
Hosts And Creators
Anney Reese
Samantha McVey
Popular Podcasts
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
Amy Robach & T.J. Holmes present: Aubrey O’Day, Covering the Diddy Trial
Introducing… Aubrey O’Day Diddy’s former protege, television personality, platinum selling music artist, Danity Kane alum Aubrey O’Day joins veteran journalists Amy Robach and TJ Holmes to provide a unique perspective on the trial that has captivated the attention of the nation. Join them throughout the trial as they discuss, debate, and dissect every detail, every aspect of the proceedings. Aubrey will offer her opinions and expertise, as only she is qualified to do given her first-hand knowledge. From her days on Making the Band, as she emerged as the breakout star, the truth of the situation would be the opposite of the glitz and glamour. Listen throughout every minute of the trial, for this exclusive coverage. Amy Robach and TJ Holmes present Aubrey O’Day, Covering the Diddy Trial, an iHeartRadio podcast.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.