Name: 【TEDx】TEDxJaffa -- Daphna Joel -- Are brains male or female?
Uploaded: 2016-04-10T10:18:56.000Z
Duration: 14 min 48 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Did you know that 15 minutes of stress are enough to change the sex

From the male form to the female form or from the female form to the male form?

I didn't know that either, but when I discovered this fact

it transformed the way I was thinking about sex and brain.

when I decided to give a course on the psychology of gender.

I stayed home for almost a year and read books and scientific papers

on the development of men and women from the moment of conception.

As a neuroscientist I was, of course, interested

I soon found out that many scientists, just like most of us,

believe that there are male brains and female brains,

and that this is the reason for the fundamental differences

According to a very popular version of this story,

the female brain has a large emotion center

and a large communications center; it is hard-wired for empathy.

The male brain, on the other hand, has a large aggression center,

and a large sex center; it is hard-wired for building systems.

Maybe you thought of something else but this is a scientific theory after all.

This is a very popular theory or very popular story, because it gives us

a very simple explanation to the world we live in.

It explains why women are more sensitive and emotional

Why most teachers are women and most engineers men.

Already in the womb, the story continues, the huge surge of testosterone

from the default female form to the male form.

So boys are born with a male brain and girls are born with a female brain.

Whereas the notion of a male brain and a female brain

fits well the popular view of men from Mars, women from Venus,

it does not fit scientific data, which tell us that men and women

In the past 50 years or so, over 50,000 papers have been published

I haven't read them all, even a year is not enough,

but others have and their conclusion based on this enormous number of studies

in almost everything psychologists can measure.

Intellectual abilities, cognitive abilities,

emotional abilities, personality characteristics,

There are only a few domains in which consistent sex differences are found.

men are on average, not all of them, but on average, more aggressive

than women. So we call aggression a masculine trait.

Women are on average more compassionate than men,

But also in these domains men and women are highly similar,

Even more important, we now know that each of us is a unique mosaic

of both masculine and feminine characteristics;

we are not all masculine and are not all feminine.

I guess you already knew that, not about me, but about yourself,

that you have a feminine side and a masculine side.

I will come back to this image of ourself as a unique mosaic

of masculine and feminine characteristics a little later.

scientists discovered a difference between the brains of men

They discovered that the brains of men were on average larger

Some scientists took this as evidence to support and explain

the then widely held belief that men are smarter than women.

One scientist even went as far as stating that women, because of the small brain,

do not have the intellectual and academic skills necessary for academic studies.

If this logic sounds familiar, this is not an accident.

that men and women are fundamentally different

because men have male brains and women have female brains.

However this is an old version of the myth, so it sounds absurd.

Today, when women not only go to universities,

but outnumber men at all level of academic studies,

it sounds ridiculous that scientists could have believed

that women could not go to universities because their brains

were on average smaller than the brains of men.

are still on average smaller than men brains.

What has changed is not the size of the brain;

what has changed is social norms and laws that prohibited

In the more than 100 years that have passed

scientists continue to discover differences

between the brains of males and females in both humans and animals.

For example, compared to men, women have a thicker cortex,

a higher proportion of grey matter, and a lower proportion of white matter.

Compared to women, men have larger ventricles.

I see that some of you that were very happy to discover

about the fact that men have bigger brains than women

are not really happy with this discovery.

And I can understand this because if you believe,

like the scientists from the 19th century,

then indeed you will be embarrassed to discover that your bigger brains

come together with the bigger -- what shall we call them? Empty spaces?