Neuroscientists are ignoring the differences between males and females | Hacker News Reader

Neuroscientists are ignoring the differences between males and females

newscientist.com

47 pointscolinprince25 comments

Quite a catch-22.

Try to find differences, you get accused of sexism and the study gets cancelled.

Or study only men, you get accused of sexism, but at least you get some results out of it.

Why not study exclusively male and exclusively female and let the meta analysis happen from a less politically charged climate do a meta analysis.

Some people do get very upset if you suggest male and female brains even have differences...

It's because the evidence has been sharply contended for centuries, with an immense amount of outright false information and unreplicatable information being published in the 20th century, Fausto-Sterling's book Sexing the Body goes over this in a lot of detail and I would absolutely recommend it if you want to go further.

It digs into how we even section up and divide and measure brains in the first place -- this is suspect on many levels, for example, she cites that one paper that was huge in the 1980s uses 1800s openly-racist phrenology-based diagrams to section up the different areas of the brain. None of this is taking into account neuronal density, or any other such metrics.

Hell, there's outright a feedback loop where (for an example of one such feedback loop) what hormones your body is producing/you are taking, has huge impacts on how the brain functions and signals at a fundamental level -- changing hormones physically alters the brain, and there is some evidence in the literature that trans people (for example) have the physical characteristics of the 'opposite sex's' brain. Fausto-Sterling cites rat behavioural cases from the 90s where a single application of testosterone changed the rat's behaviour enough that the testosterone levels went up permanently, because the behaviour caused the rat's body to start doing that.

None of this is as easy or as clear cut as any article on the subject can describe, or even many graduate student books) describes and it is blisteringly difficult, and that isn't even taking into account the meta-science at work here where it is impossible to figure out nature versus nurture, and how much our own society changes our behaviour and changes our brains.

Related information is, there's a good twitter thread I replicated on imgur, that goes over in-depth about how the female/male scale does not accurately describe modern bio and neurochemistry (i.e. it has to be split up into many, many more discrete categories, more like a bimodal distribution) and actually is wildly inappropriate for certain drug interactions as it can cause incorrect predictions: https://imgur.com/a/qmIiULb

> openly-racist phrenology-based diagrams to section up the different areas of the brain.

What was racist? Was the picture inside some black face caricature? If so, was the actual scientific part inside the racist drawing accurate?

The actual scientific diagrams were made with the purpose of 'demonstrating that bipoc are inferior'. It was outright phrenology, done in the 1800s, and has literally no basis in modern science!

Crazy. Do you know where to find the diagrams?

Well cited in the book I referenced (It's amusing to me how many people attempted to call me out on 'psuedoscience' and how I'm at -1 on the original post, despite the book I cited being a well-known, well-respected, and blisteringly well-cited authoritative work that covers both biochemistry and neuroscience. The dogma here and lack of scientific knowledge is incredible).

Pages 199 - 136 covers it and the root problem of "how do you divide up the brain in the first place, in an accurate and meaningful way" which turns out to not be as easy as it sounds (obviously) and is certainly not as easy as neuroscientists apparently treat it. You can find the original papers from the 1800s and 1980s in the bibilography.

I see that you are upset, but try not to spread pseudoscience

It's scientific fact, all rigorously cited in the literature, but thank you for your concern.

Not in any substantial numbers, though someone gets upset about anything. Lots of people get upset when you assume without any evidence beyond the existence of different social outcomes that brain differences between sexes must be the explanation.

Ironic isn't it? Try to pretend that everybody is exactly equal to get woke points and the people you're trying to pander to end up being the ones who suffer.

The issue of recording and analysing women's responses to disease and medicine has been around for centuries - women have been aware of this for a long time, and it's finally starting to come to light. Historically, it's been easier to assume women are just smaller-sized men. One reason being that hormones have an enormous impact on the body and this was probably not understood properly until relatively recently, so progress has been slow.

Most likely these studies are not being woke - they are just not putting in the time and effort (and therefore expense) required to discover these distinctions.

Given the current state of society as it pertains to relationships between the sexes and how frequently that permeates through the sciences in a negative sense, it's generally my assumption that something like this is influenced by it

You can’t research something if no one will fund it, and no one dares fund anything that might show neurological disorders in women.

Really, because someone's doing a lot of studies for something no one will fund...

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2021&q=gender+neur...

I think you're probably right but on your link there I see a review article (from the US) criticizing the lack of diversity in studies. It is followed by papers from countries like Uzbekistan, Iran, Iraq, Mexico, Austria, Korea. A few from Italy. The US certainly seems under-represented.

Do you have a source for this claim? There are plenty of mental health disorders (in the DSM-V) that are tied to one gender or another. Whether these are grounded in some physiological basis or serve to re-affirm social expectations is a whole other story.

I'm curious if you are speaking from research experience in this line or work.

It doesn't need to be from the research experience. Research is not a straight line from A to B. One has to form wrong hypotheses, discard them completely, improve upon them, etc. Some paths are from A are MORALLY forbidden from pursuing.

Misread as "MORALLY forbidden from pruning", which ... still works, I guess?

This article only focuses on the human subjects. But that's not all of neuroscience.

There are different reasons to prefer one gender over the other in experiments with animals. For example, female rodents are easier to handle and less aggressive so they are preferred in behaviour studies but they are also hormonally more complex than male rodents which can interact with biological signals that you are measuring. Furthermore, some studies are done over both genders so that their final results can be reported to be true independent of gender. So it really depends on what one is trying to study and to what level gender can or can not affect that study.

It’s amazing how scared everyone has become of social media mobs. We are regressing.

I don't know the answer to this question, so asking, are more 'willing subjects' for these kinds of things, men? Or do equal numbers of sexes show up for qualification as study targets and only men are selected?

I've actually been hit by this recently looking at a study of hormonal response to nuero stimulation where the study was ONLY done on men. I thought...what kind of study is only done on men? Particularly when the response was found to be an increase in prolactin levels?

Now we have to try and do the study on women.

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