Category Archives: Research

Psychology, Research, Science

Are male and female brains wired differently? 

GENDER BRAINS

Intro: It is often pointed where we differ, but when it comes to our brains, research shows that there are far more similarities than differences

WE are told that men and women are so different, it’s as if they came from separate planets. Martian men are stereotypically target-focused, assertive, and good at navigating; women born on Venus are more empathetic, caring, and expert multitaskers. We are all fascinated by what makes the other sex tick, but back on Earth, when it comes to brains, much of what’s been written about the sex divide is more science fiction than scientific fact.

Websites and news outlets have seeped scientific-sounding theories into common wisdom, such as the idea that women listen with both sides of their brain, whereas men use only one side; or that men and women navigate using “entirely different” brain regions. Some even claim that there is a “male brain” and a “female brain”.

These ideas often have their roots in scientific research, but much of it is based on early experiments in our brains which were either found later to be insignificant, or their results were misinterpreted or misreported.

Scientists are suckers for wanting to tell a story that will be the talk of the town – and the media are willing accomplices. Less headline-grabbing experiments that show little or no difference can get stuffed in the drawer, never to see the light of day.

So, what does the science really say? From the eighth week in the womb, little boys’ and girls’ brains do start to develop slightly differently. Throughout our lives, the sex hormones testosterone, oestrogen, and progesterone mould our individual physical and emotional development. Hormone level differences tweak the dial on characteristics such as aggression, pain threshold, stress response, and parent-child bonding, but each person is so unique that there is often more variation within each sex than there is between them.

Male and female brains don’t differ significantly in size, either. Men’s brains are slightly larger as a consequence of their larger bodies, and thanks to detailed scanning we know that some brain parts differ in proportion between the sexes, but the differences are too small to claim that there is such a thing as a “male brain” or a “female brain”.

Most areas of mental functioning, behaviour and personality are the same in both sexes. What differences there are, such as in aggression levels, are usually driven by the differences in sex hormones such as testosterone after puberty.

Nature or nurture?

Recent research points to the historic sex divide actually being down to society, not science. When the magnifying glass of science reveals the workings of the brain, the accepted male and female stereotypes mostly vanish.

Some scientists now think that what differences there are between male and female brains – such as, say, in map reading – are the result not of biology, but of thousands of years of brain-training. The good news, however, is the brain is brilliant at learning new things – you can adapt and learn many new skills within a lifetime.

So it is logical that, if given the opportunity, men and women can learn skills stereotypical of the other sex very easily. For example, children who are given Lego to play with are likely to mature and have brains which have larger spatial cortexes, regardless of whether they are male or female.

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Arts, Psychology, Research, Science

Memory and the functioning of our minds

HUMAN MEMORY

EVERYDAY functioning of our minds or how we make sense of the world is central to Psychology. Memory research, an area that has been explored since 1885, started when Hermann Ebbinghaus published Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology. His was a lab-based approach where he set out to study our ability to memorise pure information, screening out the kinds of facts that people might already know would influence the experimental outcome. He designed trigrams, made-up syllables built from three letters – a consonant, a vowel, and a consonant – that had no meaning but looked like words. Ebbinghaus and an assistant carried out these experiments on themselves, learning the trigrams from flashcards, and varying the experiments to see what factors affected their capacity to remember.

This could be called a purely cognitive approach to memory – examining the way information is processed, memorised, and recalled. The work of George A. Miller forms part of this tradition, looking at how much random information we can remember in the short term, and how we can boost our ability to remember. The problem with this kind of approach is that in real life, as we all know, we don’t deal with meaningless information and there is a difference in what we remember when reading a book, tying our shoelaces, or recognising someone we know across the street.

Frederic Bartlett, another pioneer of research into memory, took a markedly different approach. Working in the 1930s, he became interested in how we organise our memories to fit in with things that we already know. Bartlett discovered that we adjust the material we hear so that it makes sense, deciding what to leave in and what to omit. His approach was more about how memory is adjusted in the light of human experience. There are parallels with this approach which can be seen in Freud’s theories about repression and the unconscious, and also in the research carried out by Elizabeth Loftus on eyewitness testimony.

Stubborn beliefs

Perception and cognition relate to what we take in from the world around us and what we make of it. While memory can seem a surprisingly slippery concept, so are the beliefs we hold – or think we hold. Faced with beliefs that clash – known as “cognitive dissonance” – we can end up unconsciously tweaking our beliefs, as if to restore order. There is a stubborn aspect to our belief systems, too. The concept of “confirmation bias” looks at how resistant we can be to information that conflicts with our most firmly held beliefs, and how this is even more marked when we are part of a like-minded group. And while we may claim to try to understand other people’s points of view, our default position, as Lee Ross’s “Fundamental Attribution Error” demonstrates, appears to be that we do no such thing. For example, look at some of the entrenched, anachronistic and insulting views held by some Protestant groups. Or certain factions that exist on social media.

The power of emotion

Understanding emotion, too, is also important: in particular, where it comes from. A century ago, the belief was that physiological changes in the body (like a surge in adrenaline) triggered our emotions. Now it is seen as being about how we interpret the situation in front of us, which is in part to do with the society to which we belong. This begs the question of whether emotions, and how we express them, are universal, or specific to certain cultures. Such questions recur throughout psychology.  

Over many decades of the last century, much of psychology was developed at Western universities, with experiments largely carried out on Western students, leading many to ask if this is a broad enough sample from which to develop universal truths about humankind.

Emotions also drives how we make decisions. Pure rationality would get us nowhere, because in every aspect of our lives we could find ourselves processing an infinite amount of information, but sadly lacking the processing speed of a computer. We need an emotional element to help us to rule out a whole bunch of options – helping us to make decisions based on gut feeling so as to be able to get on with our lives. And all this decision making can take a mental and emotional toll on our resources. As Roy Baumeister’s experiments appeared to show, it is possible simply to run out of the capacity to decide.

(Podcast ends)

A Short Biography of George A. Miller (1920–2012)

MILLER studied at Alabama, and gained his Ph.D. at Harvard. He began his research there in the 1940s, looking at speech production and perception, and his Language and Communication (1951) helped to establish the new science of psycholinguistics.

Building on existing mathematical theories of communication, he published a paper on short-term memory capacity, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.” It captured the public imagination and even encouraged lively debates on the optimal length of telephone numbers.

He continued to work on the psychology of speech, testing some of Noam Chomsky’s theories, and in 1960 founded (with Jerome Bruner) the Harvard Centre for Cognitive Studies. He is regarded (with Chomsky and Bruner) as one of the founding fathers of cognitive psychology, the study of thought processes – a dramatic departure from behavioural psychology, which stated that since mental processes were not observable, they were not suitable for scientific study.

After a period at New York’s Rockfeller University, working on language acquisition, Miller moved to Princeton where he helped establish both the Princeton Cognitive Science Laboratory and WordNet, a word database that has applications in present-day search engines and artificial intelligence (AI).

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Books, Health, Medical, Research, Science

Book Review: A Silent Fire

THE FLAMES WITHIN

Intro: A fascinating primer explores the crucial role of inflammation in our bodies and how it can go awry. What you need to know about inflammation in the body

INFLAMMATION is a crucial tool of the body’s immune system. As the first line of defence against injury or invaders, it traps bacteria and viruses, heals wounds and signals to other cells for help. It results in symptoms such as pain and swelling. Once a threat is remedied, inflammation, along with its ensuing discomfort, disappears – or at least it should.

In her debut book A Silent Fire: The story of inflammation, diet and disease, gastroenterologist Shilpa Ravella explains how inflammatory responses can turn against us. Crucially, she shows how chronic inflammation plays a role in many common conditions such as heart disease and cancer, and why Western diets are at least partially to blame.

This primer sees Ravella start with some fascinating history, travelling all the way back to the 1st century, when Aulus Cornelius Celsus first described four of the five main signs of inflammation: pain, heat, redness and swelling. The fifth, a loss of function, was identified in the mid-1800s.

Ravella spends a lot of time examining the work of Victorian scientists, such as Élie Metchnikoff, who won a Nobel Prize in 1908 for discovering immune cells called phagocytes that engulf pathogens and particles. Eventually, she moves on to modern-day researchers like Charles Serhan, who helped identify molecules known as resolvins that turn off inflammation.

This lays a proper foundation for the book’s second section, which connects these discoveries to inflammation’s possible role in disease. Low levels of inflammation have been found in people with conditions such as cancer. While inflammation is a normal response to injury and disease, persistent inflammation is now being viewed as a potential cause of illness.

Ravella further speculates that inflammation can contribute to conditions like depression and Alzheimer’s disease, though as a responsible medical professional, she provides important caveats and stresses the need for more research.

The most damning evidence links inflammation to autoimmune conditions – which occur when the body damages its own cells – such as rheumatoid arthritis. Characterised by long-lasting, low levels of inflammation, these conditions increase susceptibility to other problems like bone loss, heart disease and kidney disease.

The book wraps up by detailing how factors like diet and exercise can contribute to inflammation as well as help dampen it. For many, this won’t be new, but what may be illuminating is Ravella’s explanation of lifestyle significance.

For instance, she devotes a whole chapter to the gut microbiome, describing how processed foods and animal products, like red meat and dairy, disrupt microbial composition, setting off a chain of events that leads to increased inflammation. She then explains why fruits, vegetables and whole grains can help undo these effects.

A Silent Fire is no quick read: it is packed with information, combining medical history, innovative research and first-hand clinical experiences. At times, it feels over-ambitious, as Ravella crams in as much as possible rather than clearly connecting the various topics. It can also be difficult to keep track of all the different microbes, scientists and immune cells involved, especially if you lack a scientific or medical background.

But Ravella’s writing style keeps even the most dense page engaging. She breathes life into biological function, at one point describing types of white blood cells as “sophisticated warriors” that “voraciously gobble up” particles. Ultimately, the book is perfect for those looking to delve deeper into the history and intricate workings of immunology, diet and disease.

– A Silent Fire is published by Bodley Head

– Rheumatoid arthritis, as shown in this X-ray, is a chronic inflammatory condition
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