(NAME-MCE) Pink Brain, Blue Brain

[Bill Howe]

 This is the link to the Newsweek article.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/214834 Pink Brain, Blue Brain

Claims of sex differences fall apart.

By *Sharon Begley <http://www.newsweek.com/id/183003>* | NEWSWEEK

Published Sep 3, 2009

>From the magazine issue dated Sep 14, 2009

Among certain parents, it is an article of faith not only that they should
treat their sons and daughters alike, but also that they do. If Jack gets
Lincoln Logs and Tetris, and joins the soccer team and the math club, so
does Jill. Lise Eliot, a neuroscientist at Rosalind Franklin University of
Medicine and Science, doesn't think these parents are lying, exactly. But
she would like to bring some studies to their attention.

In one, scientists dressed newborns in gender-neutral clothes and misled
adults about their sex. The adults described the "boys" (actually girls) as
angry or distressed more often than did adults who thought they were
observing girls, and described the "girls" (actually boys) as happy and
socially engaged more than adults who knew the babies were boys. Dozens of
such disguised-gender experiments have shown that adults perceive baby boys
and girls differently, seeing identical behavior through a gender-tinted
lens. In another study, mothers estimated how steep a slope their
11-month-olds could crawl down. Moms of boys got it right to within one
degree; moms of girls underestimated what their daughters could do by nine
degrees, even though there are no differences in the motor skills of infant
boys and girls. But that prejudice may cause parents to unconsciously limit
their daughter's physical activity. How we perceive children—sociable or
remote, physically bold or reticent—shapes how we treat them and therefore
what experiences we give them. Since life leaves footprints on the very
structure and function of the brain, these various experiences produce sex
differences in adult behavior and brains—the result not of innate and inborn
nature but of nurture.

For her new book, *Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into
Troublesome Gaps—And What We Can Do About It,* Eliot immersed herself in
hundreds of scientific papers (her bibliography runs 46 pages). Marching
through the claims like Sherman through Georgia, she explains that
assertions of innate sex differences in the brain are either "blatantly
false," "cherry-picked from single studies," or "extrapolated from rodent
research" without being confirmed in people. For instance, the idea that the
band of fibers connecting the right and left brain is larger in women,
supposedly supporting their more "holistic" thinking, is based on a single
1982 study of only 14 brains. Fifty other studies, taken together, found no
such sex difference—not in adults, not in newborns. Other baseless claims:
that women are hard-wired to read faces and tone of voice, to defuse
conflict, and to form deep friendships; and that "girls' brains are wired
for communication and boys' for aggression." Eliot's inescapable conclusion:
there is "little solid evidence of sex differences in children's brains."

Yet there are differences in adults' brains, and here Eliot is at her most
original and persuasive: explaining how they arise from tiny sex differences
in infancy. For instance, baby boys are more irritable than girls. That
makes parents likely to interact less with their "nonsocial" sons, which
could cause the sexes' developmental pathways to diverge. By 4 months of
age, boys and girls differ in how much eye contact they make, and
differences in sociability, emotional expressivity, and verbal ability—all
of which depend on interactions with parents—grow throughout childhood. The
message that sons are wired to be nonverbal and emotionally distant thus
becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The sexes "start out a little bit
different" in fussiness, says Eliot, and parents "react differently to
them," producing the differences seen in adults.

Those differences also arise from gender conformity. You often see the claim
that toy preferences—trucks or dolls—appear so early, they must be innate.
But as Eliot points out, 6- and 12-month-olds of both sexes prefer dolls to
trucks, according to a host of studies. Children settle into sex-based play
preferences only around age 1, which is when they grasp which sex they are,
identify strongly with it, and conform to how they see other, usually older,
boys or girls behaving. "Preschoolers are already aware of what's acceptable
to their peers and what's not," writes Eliot. Those play preferences then
snowball, producing brains with different talents.

The belief in blue brains and pink brains has real-world consequences, which
is why Eliot goes after them with such vigor (and rigor). It encourages
parents to treat children in ways that make the claims come true, denying
boys and girls their full potential. "Kids rise or fall according to what we
believe about them," she notes. And the belief fuels the drive for
single-sex schools, which is based in part on the false claim that boy
brains and girl brains process sensory information and think differently.
Again, Eliot takes no prisoners in eviscerating this "patently absurd"
claim. Read her masterful book and you'll never view the sex-differences
debate the same way again.

*Begley is NEWSWEEK's science editor.*

Find this article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/214834




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