“Are you going to believe me, or your own eyes?”, is one of my favorite Groucho Marks lines. I thought of it today as I read the LA Times Column One story about brain differentiation between the sexes, Dark Secrets of His and Her Brains.

Author Robert Lee Hotz describes brain researcher Sandra Witelson’s work over a period of ten years, trying to understand the physical makeup of the mind, especially where different levels of cognitive functions and abilities come from. What she discovered was that there are distinct and discernible constructional differences between the human male and female brains, and that these differences correlate to behavioral and cognitive differences observed between the sexes.

Wherever she looked, she discerned subtle patterns that only gender seemed to explain.

“We actually didn’t set out to find sex differences,” she said. “Sometimes as a scientist, you are doing one thing and you bump into something else.”

She made some rather interesting discoveries, among them being:

• “Men’s brains, for instance, are typically bigger — but on the whole, no smarter. “
• ” Women’s brains, for instance, seem to be faster and more efficient than men’s.”
• “… men appear to have more gray matter, made up of active neurons, and women more of the white matter responsible for communication between different areas of the brain.”
• “Men and women appear to use different parts of the brain to encode memories, sense emotions, recognize faces, solve certain problems and make decisions.”

Indeed, when men and women of similar intelligence and aptitude perform equally well, their brains appear to go about it differently, as if nature had separate blueprints, researchers at UC Irvine reported this year.

“If you find that men and women have fundamentally different brain architectures while still accomplishing the same things,” said neuroscientist Richard Haier, who conducted the study, “this challenges the assumption that all human brains are fundamentally the same.”

Pretty compelling case so far, so where does the Groucho quote come into play? With the cognitive dissonance showcased in the piece. As per Dr. Witelson:

“What is astonishing to me,” Witelson said, “is that it is so obvious that there are sex differences in the brain and these are likely to be translated into some cognitive differences, because the brain helps us think and feel and move and act.

“Yet there is a large segment of the population that wants to pretend this is not true.”

Like who?

Some activists fear that research like Witelson’s could be used to justify discrimination based on gender differences, just as ill-conceived notions of human genetics once influenced laws codifying racial stereotypes about blacks, Asians and Jews.

Other experts argue that the physical differences Witelson observed may result not from the brain’s basic design but from conditioning that begins in infancy, when the brain produces neurons at a rate of half a million a minute and reaches out to make connections 2 million times a second.

Goin’ back to the old argument of heredity vs. environment. I guess that little Johnnie playing with his plastic gun generates more neurons and gray matter than little Suzi playing tea party? Hmmmmmmm, not verrrrrry interesting! But hey, let’s not even contemplate what might happen if we accept that some differences actually occur along racial, as well as gender, lines. But I digress. More dissonance, please . . .

“The brain is being sculpted gradually through sets of interactions,” said Anne Fausto-Sterling, a gender studies expert at Brown University. “Even when something in the brain appears biological, it may have come to be that way because of how the body has experienced the world.”

“Appears biological”? Hey, Groucho . . . cue your line! Enough already. If you are at all intrigued, go and read all the rest, including some extremely interesting info about Einstein’s brain. Dr. Witelson was allowed the largest selection and variety sampling of the genius’s brain matter to date for use in her studies. His brain was normal sized, but his intellect was certainly not. I imagine that Einstein, if he could examine Witelson’s research, would believe his own eyes, instead of the activist spinmeisters. (db)

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