The female brain

[The Misfit]

I've completely missed this book, which came out a few months ago. This is from the NY Times, a Q&A with the author of what apparently is a controversial study. It intrigues me enough that I'll read the book. Thought, given the frequent question of wimmin around here, some others may find it interesting ...

 

Q: As a professor of neuropsychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, you’ve drawn some strange conclusions about “The Female Brain,” to borrow the title of your debut book, which argues that a woman’s brain structure explains a good deal of her behavior, including a penchant for gossiping and talking on the phone.

 

A: (Dr. Louann Brizendine, author of "The Female Brain") The hormone of intimacy is oxytocin, and when women talk to each other, they get a rush of it. For teen girls especially, when they’re talking about who’s hooking up with whom, who’s not talking to whom, who you like and don’t like — that’s bedrock, that excites the girl’s brain.

 

Q: You make it sound as if female friendship and affection is just a search for oxytocin.

 

A: Sixth-grade teachers will tell you that girls get up and go to the bathroom together; girls say they have to go at the same time. They need to go off and intimately exchange the important currency of their day, which increases their oxytocin and dopamine levels.

 

Q: Your book cites a study claiming that women use about 20,000 words a day, while men use about 7,000.

 

A: The real phraseology of that should have been that a woman has many more communication events a day — gestures, words, raising of your eyebrows.

 

Q: Are you concerned that you are rehabilitating outdated gender stereotypes that portray women as chatterboxes ruled by female hormones?

 

A: A stereotype always has an aspect of truth to it, or it wouldn’t be a stereotype. I am talking about the biological basis behind behaviors that we all know about.

 

Q: Were there any research findings you were reluctant to include in your book because they could be used to bolster sexist thinking?

 

A: Any of this could be taken badly. I worried, for instance, that stuff about pregnancy and the mommy brain could be taken to mean that mothers shouldn’t go to work. The brain shrinks 8 percent during pregnancy and does not return to its former size until six months postpartum.

 

Q: How big is the average male brain?

 

A: It’s about the size of a cantaloupe. It’s 9 to 10 percent larger than the female brain.

 

Q: But the size of one’s brain is unrelated to one’s level of intelligence, right?

 

A: Yes. Remember, the female brain has more connections between the two hemispheres, and we have 11 percent more brain cells in the area of the brain called the planum temporale, which has to do with perceiving and processing language.

 

Q: If women have superior verbal skills, why have they been subservient to men in almost all societies?

 

A: Because of pregnancy. Before birth control, in the 1700s and 1800s, middle-class women were pregnant between 17 and 22 times in their lifetimes. All these eons upon eons, while Socrates and all these guys were sitting around thinking up solutions to problems, women were feeding hungry mouths and wiping smelly behinds.

 

Q: And yet all human brains begin as female. Or so you claim in your book.

 

A: All brains start out with female-type brain circuits until eight weeks of fetal life, when the tiny testicles start to pump out adult-male levels of testosterone that travel in the bloodstream up to the brain. You have to grow all of the basic sex-specific circuitry in the male brain before birth, because that’s when the entire road map is laid down.

[Azazello1313]

this just in....the earth is also spheroid.

[Kid Cid]

This is just one of those scientific studies that verifies a fact we already know.

[polksalet]

this just in....the earth is also spheroid.

 

 

Wow, I thought it was an ellipsoid

Edited December 11, 2006 by polksalet

[Azazello1313]

Wow, I thought it was an ellipsoid

 

 

well i wouldn't want to argue with one of the brightest young minds in the world of geodesy , but here's a good site for ya...

 

In reality, the overall shape of the Earth is more like a spheroid than a true sphere. A spheroid (Figure 2) is a spherelike object where only two of the three radii are of equal length (the third radii can be either longer or shorter than the other two). In reality, the Earth is slightly flattened at the poles, so if you orient a spheroid so that the two equally long radii run through the plane of the equator and the third axis runs through the poles, and shrink the polar axis by about 20 kilometers relative to the other two axes, you get a pretty good idea of the overall shape of the Earth. Over the last 170 years or so, many scientists have developed a number of spheroids that have been widely used in mapmaking.

 

 

Figure 2. A spheroid. Note how the axis through the poles is of different length than the other two axes.

 

One note: "Spheroid" is actually not the correct mathematical term for the shapes we've been discussing. Technically, they should be called ellipsoids of revolution. However, the term "spheroid" has become well established in geodesy, and we'll use this term throughout the remainder of this presentation. Just don't get confused if a mathematician tells you that your spheroids are really ellipsoids of revolution!

 

Spheroids are very popular models of the overall shape of the Earth. However, they are not the only game in town: ellipsoids are another possible model. As you have probably already guessed, an ellipsoid is a spherelike object where all three axes are of differing length (Figure 3). However, ellipsoids don't do an appreciably better job of representing the overall shape of the Earth than do spheroids, and the mathematics involved in using ellipsoids is considerably more difficult than the math involved in using spheroids. Thus, ellipsoids are rarely used in modern geodesy.

[polksalet]

To make matters even more complicated, some geodetic scientists use the terms spheroid and ellipsoid interchangeably. While this is not technically correct, it isn't as much of a problem as you might expect, because true ellipsoids are rarely used. However, it is a potentially confusing and sloppy habit, so we suggest you strive to be accurate, and call a spheroid a spheroid, and an ellipsoid an ellipsoid.

[Azazello1313]

To make matters even more complicated, some geodetic scientists use the terms spheroid and ellipsoid interchangeably. While this is not technically correct, it isn't as much of a problem as you might expect, because true ellipsoids are rarely used. However, it is a potentially confusing and sloppy habit, so we suggest you strive to be accurate, and call a spheroid a spheroid, and an ellipsoid an ellipsoid.

 

 

so technically your egg-shaped head is an ellipsoid, correct?

[polksalet]

Indeed, and I strive to be accurate.

[AtomicCEO]

Women ain't nothing but bitshes and hos.

[Squeegiebo]

[TimC]

The SO made a mean Smithfield ham sammich on Sunday.