Stuff You Should Know - Do men and women have different brains?

Episode Date: April 12, 2013

It's a pretty touchy subject because of the possible implications - if you find differences between the brains of men and women, does that mean there are differences in their intellect? Surprisingly, though there are demonstrable differences between male and female brains, they use them differently to achieve the same ends equally well. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles Chuck Bryant, and this is Stuff You Should Know. Brains. Women's brains. Men's brains. That different? Yes.

Yes, Chuck. Zombie Chuck. No, that was, uh, what was it, Tonto Frankenstein and the SNL- Yeah, yeah. I know we've talked about this before. I can never remember. Tonto Frankenstein. Oh, man.

Why are you doing this to us? There's somebody screaming at their iPhone right now. All right. Tonto Frankenstein. Yeah, well, let's just get on with it. I'll remember as soon as I look it up. Tarzan. Tarzan.

Yeah. Boom. That's it. I don't have anything. Yeah. For this episode. I just gave it my all. Your little man's brain with all the gray matter.

Yeah. Just farted out on us. This is a very, God, this is going to be touchy navigating this one. I don't think so. Well, the implications are really huge, you know, especially not necessarily the scientific implications, but the potential policy implications of misguided people who don't understand what they're hearing. Yeah.

But I say this as our general, this is what I gather from this whole thing is it sounds like men and women's brains are different and who cares? Men might be better at some things than women. Women might be better at some things than men. Women might process this faster. Men might process this faster. Who cares? That's why we're all here together to put these brains together to lead us forward into

the future. Very nicely done. Like don't get all worked up about it. Women are, seems to be better at some things and men seem to be better at like big whoop. Well, and some of them supposedly are like very cliched. Sure. Like men supposedly are better at orienting objects in space in their mind. And that means you can read a map better supposedly.

Women are generally better at language tests, which probably means that they may be better at communicating things. Okay. So I really, really feel though we should caveat this with, this is a look at the state of a pretty nascent field still, comparing the brains of men and women. Like it was only in the 90s that a Dr. Sandra Whittleson started comparing more than a hundred normal men's and women's brains and actually accidentally stumbled upon the fact that they are different in their organization, the makeup.

And since then it's been such a touchy subject that there's still a lot of the field who won't say anything more than, that may be true, but there's really no difference or whatever. And there's people that are starting to get louder and louder and they're saying, no, there are differences. It's not necessarily an intelligence. It's not necessarily incognitive ability. I will even go one better and say, I'm not even willing to say that women are better

at, don't read maps as well as men, but there are structural and compositional differences between men's and women's brains. It's been proven. And what are the implications of that? Yeah. And I say, yes, study this because there are so many benefits you can garner from learning more specifically about everything. So do it.

Exactly. So that's kind of where we're at right now. We're just reporting on the state of this nascent field. And in a lot of it's not been proven, but one thing that has been shown, and I really feel like we should kick it off with this, if you look at longitudinal studies, huge studies that have been done over the decades, and you compare cognitive abilities, intelligence between boys and girls, the differences are almost negligible overall. Yeah.

IQ scores, stuff like that. It's all about the same. Right. And there's differences, say, between math skills and between boys and girls. And those, we don't even know whether those are culturally bound or what, but we'll get to that. Yeah. Let's talk about how the brain is different because, like we said, that has been proven.

Men's brains and women's brains do differ in some ways. Yeah. And like you said, this is new. For a while, they've known that they're different, but they used to think it was sort of just in the hypothalamus where sex drive and food intake are controlled, and that seems like such a kind of a cop-out. Like, yeah, their brains are different because men like to eat more and have sex more. Well, I mean, this is not true.

Structurally, they are different. They are different. The super-chiasmatic nucleus is different, and that helps regulate reproductive cycles, circadian rhythm. Sure. There's different patterns of androgen receptors, which are responsible for sexual preferences. Yeah. There's two times more like neurons and cells in certain areas in the hypothalamus of a

man than a woman. So they are different, but that's what they thought for a long time like that was the only difference in the brain. Yeah, and they've also found out that taking into consideration weight differences and height differences, men's brains are probably a little bigger, but that doesn't equate to intelligent or cognitive abilities, it's just one of those things. No, remember the myths of the brain episode we did? We were saying like humans don't have the biggest brain, a whale does, but it's all

about ratio of body size. Well, we missed something. It's about the ratio of neurons to body size, more than brain size. Yeah, I think someone pointed out, who was it? It was some animal that kind of disproved. Yeah. It was just the size. I don't remember what the animal was.

Yeah, I can't either. People wrote in with that, so okay. So this actually kind of raises a very troubling question I did at first. Well, wait a minute. If a man's brain is bigger than a woman's, and even if you take into account like weight and height and all that stuff, it's still larger, then does that mean that men are smarter than women or should be? No.

No. Why? Well, because in 2001, they found that certain parts of men's brains might be larger or smaller, certain parts of women's brains are larger or smaller, and that could balance out the overall difference in the end. That's why you're not going to see any differences on intelligence levels and stuff like that. So parts of the frontal lobe, which is decision-making, problem-solving, and the limbic cortex, which is for regulating emotions, are larger in women.

Whereas in men, the parietal cortex, which is space perception and the amygdala, which impacts sexual behavior and social behavior, were larger. So certain parts of ours are bigger, certain parts of the ladies are bigger. Okay. There's another big difference that they found. Men have about six and a half times more gray matter, which is neurons than women do. But women have about 10 times more white matter, which is the connections between those neurons than men do.

That's right. And it seems that men actually think with the gray matter, and women think with the white matter, and so taking a step back from the outset, it looks like women's brains might be more complicated in how it's set up and how they think, but they may be faster than men. Right. They would work more efficiently. Yeah.

So in this sense, if you're looking at this gray matter, that's where the neurons, the thinking cells are, but there's less communication among them in men. Makes sense. Whereas women may have, depending on the part of the brain, fewer neurons, but a more efficient communication system, which is weird, because then that would mean that you could make the case that they would roughly arrive at the same conclusion at about the same time, even though there were these two completely different structures. Yeah, but they also point out that some women might have more neurons, as much as 12% more

neurons. It depends. And I was surprised that that sentence was written like that. It depends on the region of the brain, that the, I think she's a biologist, physiologist, Sandra Whittleson of McMaster in Ontario. Psychologist. Psychologist. Yeah.

She's the brain lady. I found that there are parts of the cortex in women, pretty much across the board, where you're going to find about 12% more neurons packed in there. So in this region, they may have less gray matter overall, but their neurons are more densely packed. But what she found that was interesting was that these areas where they have more neurons were associated with signals coming into and out of the brain, which means that women would be more efficient at combining information rather than internal calculation.

Yeah. That makes sense to me too. When I hear all these things out loud and think about my marriage, I think, yeah, like Emily's like way faster at processing things in a conversation than I am. And like, I don't know, it all kind of makes sense to me. See, I feel like that that is, that this is the reason why a lot of people are so, whoa, whoa, whoa. Because we're at this point where like just in the 90s, Whittleson discovered 12% more

neurons in this one thing. We know so little about the brain as it stands, let alone the differences between men and women that it's like, I feel like we need to amass all of the info we can first and then start extrapolating. You know what I mean? Yeah. Well, because I, Emily's way better at reading maps than me and that goes counter to what usually what people might think, I have the worst sense of direction on the planet.

Like we call it the opposite thing. If I say, go right, it's left, right. And I'll even try and trick myself and say, I think it's right. And I'll say, go left and it's right. So it's, I'm a wonder of nature. Really? And how bad my sense of direction is. I didn't know that.

Dude, I've been on road trips and gotten off the highway to get gas and gotten back on and gone right back the way I came from. No way. For miles before I realized it. I feel like I know you a little more. Yeah. I'm really bad when it comes to that stuff. That means you got a lady brain.

And I do. And I have to hold the map. Like I have to orient the map to where like point it in the direction to make sense of it. So yeah. Me and my little tiny lady brain. I know. I know what you mean.

I know you mean about the having to orient the map in that direction. Yeah. Yeah. But wow, I had no idea. Oh yeah. I'm awful. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. Because public enemy number one is drug abuse.

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David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

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blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so, oh, here's another one. This one, this is the most amazing difference to me between a man's brain and a woman's brain.

Back in, I think, the 90s, like 94, 95, right around the turn of that year, some Yale researchers gave a test, I guess, a language-skilled test of some sort, where basically they said, here, say Germany without the muh. It was like a test of removing phonemes. Girmani.

Girani. Girani. Girani. Oh yeah. I'll just be in stupid. I was having trouble with it just now. Oh, really? They did this, though, at the time,

brand spanking new Wonder Machine. Oh yeah, it was new at the time. Yeah, and the weird thing that they found was that women and men had the same ability. They did just as good a job in removing phonemes from words, but they used different parts of their brain, whereas men used just one small region of one of the hemispheres, I'm not sure which one.

The left. Women used regions in both the left and the right. Yeah. To do the exact same thing. Yeah. And the researchers pointed this out. They're like, okay, we would get this if what we were testing was something really ancient,

like something that had to do with reproduction or acquiring food or defense or fear, something like that. Something really old. But reading is a skill that humans have acquired, probably, dude, within the last few thousand years. It's brand new. And men and women have evolved in just that recent time to use their brains differently to do the same thing.

Why? That makes no sense whatsoever. What it suggests is that men and women have different brains. Exactly. It's remarkable. You know, you would think they kind of worked in the same way, but they really don't.

Yeah, you know. That's staggering to me. It is. Because we're human beings. We're the same species. We can mate and produce new versions of our species, you know? Yeah.

Like the fact that we have different brains just because of the differing sexes, that's just mind-boggling to me. I had no idea. Just because of differing sexes or there's the old nature versus nurture argument. Okay. So who wrote this?

Was it Conger? Molly Edmonds. Molly Edmonds, formerly of Stuff Mom Never Told You. Right. She points out that even if you're super, super open-minded and I really wanna just raise my child, not as your boys, you have to play with trucks or you're a girl, you have to play with dolls,

there's still probably gonna be some of that that the child absorbs. Even among the most gender-neutral parents among us. You rarely pick up a little girl by her left ankle and dangle her upside down. Right, exactly. But no matter how hard you try, society is gonna impact and shape a child like that

in some way. But so that, you know, maybe that plays a part in it. Okay, so okay, all right. I'll shoot a hole right into that. That doesn't account for the brain changing, being different in structure or does it? Well, Sandra Whittleston studied Einstein's brain. We've done a podcast on Einstein's brain.

Yeah, that's a good one. And the fact that it's had in a garage for a number of years. Like 70. In a jar. But she actually got a piece of it like other people have to study it. Her argument is, no, our brains are structured at birth. Cause look at Einstein's brain.

It was actually structurally different. And it had nothing to do with nature at all. I'm sorry, nurture at all. It was just shaped differently in some ways. And that's, you know, maybe why he was so smart. And maybe that's why there aren't Einstein's all over the place. And so this is something that we get from birth.

And it doesn't matter how you're raised. It's gonna be different. But see, the jury's still out on that one. Whittleston, that's her belief. There's also another camp that says, well, no, because there's such a thing as brain plasticity. And you have neural connections that are, remember the person with just one hemisphere,

but binocular vision, your brain goes through the process of pruning. So it gets rid of neural connections. And if everybody's telling a little girl that she's not good at math, cause she's a girl, her brain may very ruthlessly cut out a lot of those connections. And she may, through this brain's version

of a self-fulfilling prophecy, be the last good at math. Well, yeah, well, that's where- And the brain structure would still look the same. Exactly. That's where nurture comes back in. Like you said, if little girls are taught, they don't wanna do math. Maybe there are more boys in class.

And then that perpetuates it further to where they did one study where they found that female students who were math and science and engineering majors did not wanna sign up for these summer conferences in math and science because they were shown videos where it was a bunch of horny little nerdy boys. Right, I was wondering, did they like that?

They were like, I wanna go to that. Exactly. They could wanna be surrounded by those goons. Right. So these are math and science and engineering majors and they didn't wanna do that because, again, if they're just fed that line that, no, it's just all boys and boys are interested

in this kind of thing. And there were, there's been other studies, too, that found like girls who are told that a math test generally does show gender differences. Yeah. Score more poorly than ones who weren't told that. Yeah, or if they were told it's gender neutral, they improve.

Right. And boys are not immune to this kind of thing, too. Apparently they did a study where they told white males taking a math test that their scores were gonna be compared to Asian males. And they did much more poorly than people like males who weren't told that. Right, so again, it's that self-fulfilling prophecy

that we can, I guess, make happen. So the path that we're going down right now when we're saying, well, no, it's just nurture, it's just society, it's just, there's a danger to it. It's not necessarily wrong. Right. But there's a danger of following it too far along to where you ignore the fact that there are,

for whatever reason, real differences but in the male brain and the female brain. Yeah. And is here where some people, there's a guy named Cahill. I can't remember his first name, but he's at UC Irvine. He's one of the louder people to shout like, no, we need to be paying attention to these differences

to understand how to say better treat males and females suffering from the same thing. Yeah, like drugs, for instance, I didn't know this. Apparently most of the studies they do on drugs are done on males and male animals because they don't want a skewed result during the menstrual cycle. And so these drugs, like they need to study

both the female brain and the male brain because they could potentially tailor a drug toward a female brain to act better and be received better than they would for just the standard male brain. And conversely too, like if you take a, like schizophrenia. Yeah. That's different for men, it's different for women. The onset's usually earlier for men.

Men usually have worse symptoms. Women usually fare better with schizophrenia and they think that it's because women respond better to the drugs prescribed to treat schizophrenia than men. That would be because of the differences in the brain. And if we understand the male brain versus the female brain, we could better tailor schizophrenia men to treat men better and have better outcomes.

Yeah, physical therapy is another good example in the article. They found that our brains actually work differently like when we do simple things like reaching for an object, a woman's brain tackles that differently than a men's just in the same way that I guess we do when we're reading gurumini, gurumini. Journey.

Yeah, it is journey. So, don't stop believing. So, if physically me reaching for this phone is different than when Jerry comes over and reaches for this phone, then if we had, we're both punched in the brain, we might need different physical therapy techniques. Well, you said it punched in the brain too. Women, especially in frontal lobe injuries,

have, are devastated by those way more than men. They think because there's more neural activity packed into the frontal lobe of women, and that's where they do a lot more of their thinking than men do. And that's evidenced by people who suffer the exact same kind of brain injury, but a woman will just be zonked into a man,

will be like, oh, that kind of hurt, but I'm gonna get back to walking, you know? Yeah, so, I mean, I'll go back to the beginning. I stand by it. I say, everyone needs to just settle down and start studying this stuff because it could provide huge medical benefits and physical therapy benefits and things like that

if we just accepted the fact that, yeah, our brains are a little different, and that's just the deal, you know? Yeah, our brains are different, but they're also trainable, true. Like, if a girl was told that she was bad at math and she decided that she wanted to take a lot of math classes,

I guarantee she would excel at math. Yeah, and I could probably train my brain to be more spatially oriented as far as maps and direction goes. Do it. I just, I don't care, because now I have GPS and Emily. You're right, nice.

You tell me I'm dumb. Let's see, you got anything else? I don't. Embrace differences, people, that's what I say. That's very nice. Gary Snicker, she's behind that. If you wanna learn more about embracing differences, specifically with the male and female brain,

you can type that into the search bar at yourhousethuffworks.com and it will bring up this article. The War on Drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is gonna show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy

to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs, of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm a prime example of that. The War on Drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty, exactly.

And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. Cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid for it. Be sure to listen to the War on Drugs

on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use HeyDude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there

when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil answer for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everybody, I'm Tyler Florence. I'm Wells Adams. We're the hosts of the new podcast, Two Dudes in the Kitchen.

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