When you are a woman, you should know that you can rarely fully understand people of the opposite sex, not because they do not want to, but perhaps because there are differences in their mental function. This very assumption has always troubled me. I have heard in the past theories about the differences between the sexes and where they are due. However, everything ended in sexist issues, so I was forced to give up, throwing any accusations of misunderstanding between people of different sexes on cultural issues, religions, customs and traditions, that is, anything related to external factors of personality formation.
That was until the ever-increasing events of female murder, rape and abuse began to concern both me and the public in our little country Greece. And from what we all knew about some isolated incidents of Papachronis-type criminals, we came up with stories of daily madness, crime due mainly to the multiplication of male aggression, possessiveness and a misunderstood masculinity. I could never imagine how an ordinary man would transform into a beast, by killing (verbally and/or physically) and raping a woman (usually these two are a suitable duo) with whom they either lived together or they were strangers to each other. At least with the data so far emerging daily, neither psychologists, nor sociologists, nor psychiatrists can give satisfactory answers. Only speculation has been made public, but the actual investigation is too far from the tele-windows.
The phenomenon could be attributed with excessive "translation ease" to the pandemic, the current living conditions, increased stress, or the isolation of today's man from society thanks to technology and a number of other causes, but without giving the coveted "proven " answer to the one million dollar question: why mostly women are victims of violence?
So I decided to research in depth - as much as possible - the scientific view that insists that the neurosciences can explain the differences in behavior and intellect between the sexes, hoping that I may approach even the hidden truth, as complex as it is. Although often, what is obvious seems very oversimplified and so we usually exclude it, both ordinary mortals and scientific minds.
The studies of Drs Nirao Shah and Diane Halpern
Dr. Nirao Shah is a professor of psychiatry, behavioral sciences and neurobiology at the famous Stanford University (MD, PhD) and is of course unknown to us. Note: in Greece it is customary to trust the breakfast teleshows to be informed about such specialized issues, but elsewhere, serious journalists prefer to invite mostly recognized scientists to speak out the truth.
For the history - and I return to the subject - in 1998, Shah decided to study gender differences using modern molecular analyzes and he was quite inspired by an earlier similar study by Diane Halpern, PhD, in 1991. Halpern, former president of the American Psychological Association conducted her first academic study on "Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities" and she based it on previous results of animal experiments, compiling heaps of reports on both neuroanatomical and behavioral differences related to sex. Until then, however, they remained dusty on some university library shelves. Of course, "social psychologists and sociologists have advocated the concept of fundamental cognitive differences between males and females," notes Halpern, now an honorary psychology professor at Claremont McKenna College. Halpern and other colleagues, after experiments on both animals and humans (especially infants aged 9-17 months) have repeatedly recorded, as she claims, many human behavioral differences.
Also according to the same studies, "Women excel in many tests of verbal ability. In fact, they surpass men in perceptual speed, in fact they are more capable in retrieving information from long-term memory ". That is true, the female sex is very talkative, with excellent perception and an elephant's memory. Men, again, according to Halpern, "can more easily extract images of objects through memory, have superior perceptual abilities in terms of where they are and are better at visualizing events; " they can easily distinguish angles in horizontal environments, monitor moving objects more easily and they are specialists in aiming with missiles ". True again! Rationalization, awareness of place and time, adaptation of the eye to a fixed or moving target, distinguishes men as mentally and perceptually different from us women.
In conclusion, men are superior in weapons, so it is now explained why Lysistrata wanted to end the wars when she was fighting men. Apart from the fact that women have won olympic championships in shooting, they do not seem to be font of wars. Besides, history indicates it that wars have been waged through the decisions of male leaders, at the same time that female leaderhips aim to worldwide peace.
Even in navigation, says professor Halpern, "experiments in both humans and rats show that females of both species tend to rely on milestones, while males usually rely on computational patterns, using the direction and distance traveled instead of landmarks ". Clear differences in perceptual ability are highlighted here, beyond any doubt.
According to dr Halpern, cognitive differences were also found even in 2 and 3 month old infants. Girls are more focused on the image of familiar faces (mom and dad) and react faster by talking, at the same time that boys react earlier to visual changes in the environment (remember the mobiles that were spinning over the baby's crib and you will understand), than they are focused in faces, as is the case with girls. Of course, there are objections to the infinitesimal differences between boys and girls in terms of the total number of infants observed.
Later in adulthood, women continue to insist on faces and men on things. This alone is a revolutionary idea, although the differences are minimal and one could ignore them. But as research progresses to cognitive and neuropsychiatric disorders, then these minimal differences increase exponentially. Somehow, always after research, the following was found:
Women are twice as likely as men to experience clinical depression (and postpartum depression is included here) in their lifetime, as well as post - traumatic stress.
Men are twice as likely to become alcoholics or drug addicts and 40 percent more likely to develop schizophrenia.
Boys have maybe 10 times more dyslexia problems than girls and are four or five times more likely to be diagnosed with autism.
And here, of course, the next big question arises: how much can biological differences and the others mentioned above -no matter how small - help explain potentially emerging mental disorders but also the cognitive and behavioral differences observed between men and women?
Neuroscience and brain functions
Neuroscience has a lot to offer in research and according to his professor of neurobiology and behavior UC-Irvine, Larry Cahill, PhD "Brain imaging studies show that the differences between the sexes extend far beyond the strictly reproductive field."
For example, the brain of men is larger than that of women, while the hippocampus, an organ that is part of the brain structure, a "piece" of the parietal system which participates in the transfer of information from short-term to long-term memory and space navigation, is larger in women and works differently. In contrast, a man's amygdala, which is associated with experiencing emotions and remembering such experiences, is larger than that of a woman and according to Cahill, works differently too.
Thanks to an experiment in 2000, Cahill scanned the brains of men and women who watched either extremely unpleasant or emotionally neutral films. Normally, nasty movies, especially horror movies, were expected to affect both sexes and be imprinted on both tonsils of the brain to be recalled by both men and women. But in women, this connection was observed only in the left amygdala. In men, again, it was only on the right amygdala!
Dr. Cahill and others have found out that these results have been extremely subversive, as women retain stronger, more vivid memories of emotional events than men, making it easier to recall emotional memories. If we can not see if indeed both the right and the left amygdala have similar effects in both sexes, how in the world, says Cahill, will we be able to see who is causing what and to whom? As if that was not enough, studies have shown that the two hemispheres of a woman's brain "communicate" with each other more than a man. In a 2014 study, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania imaged the brains of 428 men and 521 young women and found that women's brains were consistently more strongly coordinated between hemispheres, while men's brains were more restricted to the local areas of the brain.
Studies have also shown that the "wire" of white matter that crosses and connects the hemispheres is larger in women than in men and that the female brain tends to be more bilaterally symmetrical than that of men. As a parenthesis, I cite here my experience flipping through a book of criminology that sought to approach the profiles of criminals, where I noticed that the brain scan they submitted and which they quoted in the book, clearly showed the sharp inhomogeneity between the two cerebral hemispheres and some other discontinuities. I do not think it was a coincidence that in a normal human being such serious inequalities do not exist.
"To some degree," dr Cahill notes, "these brain differences must translate into behavioral differences." Many studies show that this is true and is even associated with medically significant effects. Indeed, white matter has been proven to be associated with learning as well as degenerative diseases.
The fact is that in a 2017 study at JAMA Psychiatry the brains of 98 people aged 8 to 22 years with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and 98 controls (normal without autism) were imaged. Both groups contained approximately equal numbers of men and women. The study confirmed a previous research showing that the pattern of variation in the thickness of the cerebral cortex differed between men and women. As studies show that more boys than girls have this profile, we are forced to conclude that the four to five times higher prevalence of the disease among boys compared to girls, is due to the assumption of different cortical thickness between the two genders brains.
But how one could explain the difference in brain structure between men and women?
According to experts, the biggest perpetrators of diversity are sex steroid hormones. In female mammals, it is estrogen and progesterone, while in males, testosterone and some similar molecules that look collective are androgens. Testosterone, in the middle of pregnancy, shapes the physique and the brain of men, while its possible reduction due to genetic defects, causes a design shift towards the female physique (eg large pelvis). In general, areas of the brain such as the amygdala and the hippocampus tend to contain particularly high concentrations of receptors for sex hormones of the brain. With the help of Shah's experiments on mice, genes that show completely different functions in the brain of male versus female mice were indeed identified. His research team experimented with inactivating an important gene that was more active in females and directly related to their sexual behavior, making females appear reluctant to mate, while corresponding gene inactivation in males played no role. Apparently progesterone was probably affected in female mice, while testosterone in males was not. In conclusion, genetic variants appear to interact resulting in different genes responding differently to estrogens than to androgens.
"We believe that gender-related behavior is a synthesis of all these units, which, cumulatively, give the overall degree of masculinity and femininity," says Shah.
"Almost all of these genes have human analogs," he said. "We still do not fully understand their function in human social behavior." "But when we looked at the databases available to the public to find out what we know about them, we found an astonishing number of people linked to autism, alcoholism and other ailments."
Can we isolate biology from social anthropology and culture by drawing safe conclusions?
No, this is not happening, at least with the current data that seem to provoke reactions among research scientists, which to me seems a very healthy phenomenon, if we wish to develop views through fruitful dialogue and objections that lay on a scientific basis.
Diane Halpern says aptly: "The role of culture is not zero." "The role of biology is not zero."
Note: All of the above written, belongs to this excellent article by Bruce Goldman, a scholarly author in the Office of Communications, which has given me the courage and inspiration to "immerse myself" in completely unknown scientific fields and engage in truly labyrinthine topics.
Theory of Mind (ToM) - A Revolutionary tool for detecting the mind?
It is certainly not a well-known theory, but it sums up the miracles of research, when it admits that while man has landed on the moon, he still does not know - except a little - what exactly is going on inside his head.
The Theory Of Mind (ToM) " is the social cognitive ability to explain and predict other people's actions based on underlying mental states, such as beliefs, intentions or emotions." The theory seeks to explain human actions and behaviors beyond the mechanistic perception.
Gender differences in social cognitive processes are an issue that has been discussed for a long time, especially those related to ToM. The main theoretical framework in this regard is the empathy / systematization theory of psychological differences between the sexes proposed by Baron-Cohen, according to which women are, on average, more aware of empathy, ie the tendency to recognizing the mental states of others in order to predict their behavior and respond with the appropriate emotion.
Males, on the other hand, are, on average, more inclined to a systematic style. Behavioral studies show that women, compared to their male counterparts, score higher on tests related to the emotional dimension of social cognition, such as emotion recognition, social sensitivity, empathy, and emotional intelligence.
Scientists dare to link these differences with the ancestors of today's women who since the time of the cavemen were excellent in tracing and adapting to different primitive social conditions, but above all in the protection of their newborns, which continued into growing up. Similarly, neuroimaging studies found differences between women and men in tasks that included evaluating emotional scenes, empathizing interactions with other people, humor, social reputation, pain perception, and social evaluations.
Brain stimulation techniques have confirmed that ToM could be considered extremely useful for exploring different areas of the brain and how they relate to cognitive and emotional functions. It seems that ToM will become valuable, not only for finding and explaining the differences in brain functions between the sexes, but also for the possible contribution of these experimental findings to the development of effective non-invasive brain stimulation therapies in patients with different neuropsychiatric disorders.
Instead of an epilogue
Concluding here and having been overwhelmed by multidimensional information, the technical terms of which I personally cannot "translate", so I have quoted them here as they are, I conclude that we are facing important discoveries and these, perhaps - may be our "lens" in the dark tunnel of brain activities and the effects they have on our daily lives and our physical and mental health. The differences between the sexes undoubtedly exist genetically as well, but the conception of a universal idea of dealing with any disorders that can cause in humans, whether female or male, can be overcome with prevention but also with future treatments, which as it seems , will be discovered soon. We, as social beings, however, who are influenced by our biology, can shorten the distances and coordinate with the opposite sex, for a common path leading towards a healthier model of human being, who will practise more empathy and greater social sensitivity, that is, more contact with his fellow human, whether he is a man or a woman.
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