Name: Are male and female brains different? - BBC REEL
Uploaded: 2025-03-04T21:01:30.000Z
Duration: 3 min 16 s
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I think in the 21st century, we have an opportunity to

The imperative

rethink our understanding of the gendered brain,

Modal verbs - A2

because neuroscience can tell us much more about what our brains are for and and how the world affects our brains.

I think the most common myths that I've come across is that neuroscience has proved, in inverted commas, that there are clear-cut differences between the brains of men and the brains of women, and that just isn't the case.

When I talk about the pink and blue tsunami,

it's really a reflection of how our culture codes differences between girls and boys.

So that right from the moment a child is born, when people arrive with those awful it's a girl pink, it's a boy blue cards, they are very quickly being introduced to a gendered world.

The multitasking versus map reading dichotomy, where women are supposedly very good at doing lots of different things at once, and men are brilliant at map reading and any kind of spatial tasks.

And yet when we look at the data that we have for that, we'll see that how you measure those skills makes a difference, and if we look at the brain imaging data, we'll find that really there are no clear-cut findings.

Have we actually found any differences between the brains of men and the brains of women?

On average, women's brains were 5 ounces lighter than men's.

And the early scientists got really excited and thought, oh, that's the explanation for all the gender gaps.

But then somebody pointed out two things: first of all, if you just thought it was a size matters issue, then sperm whales and elephants have got bigger brains than men, and they're not renowned for being that much brighter.

If you then look at human brains, you'll see that there's a big overlap in the kind of measurements that you get, so you get a distribution of size in men's brains and a distribution of size in women's brains, but they overlap.

So that you get women with big brains and and men with small brains.

If you assume that every, as I do, that every brain is different from every other brain, what you need to understand is how you arrived at the identity or the feeling that you have of of what gender you are.

I think one of the problems we have in the 21st century is that what I call gender bombardment is much more intense, um there's much more in the social media, um and a whole range of of marketing initiatives, which make a very clear prescriptive list of what it's like to be male or what it's like to be female.

And if somebody looks at that list and thinks, well, I'm supposedly a male, but none of the above is true of me, very often people think that there is something wrong with them.

My claim is actually we should be looking at the list a lot more carefully and saying that perhaps what we've assumed was a very clear distinction between males and females is nothing like as clear as has been claimed.

So an understanding that every brain is different from every other brain and not necessarily just a function of the sex of the brain's owners is a really important step forward in the 21st century.