[HN Gopher] New Research Finds Differences Between Male and Fema...
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New Research Finds Differences Between Male and Female Brains
Author : janandonly
Score : 28 points
Date : 2024-07-08 17:21 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.psychologytoday.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.psychologytoday.com)
| mouse_ wrote:
| Interesting. Would also like to see a similar study conducted
| among non-binary and gender nonconforming people.
| Javalicious wrote:
| Looks like they _might_ have been in the study set, but weren't
| separated out and focused on? At any rate, the author is hoping
| for the same:
|
| "In the first edition of my book Why Gender Matters, published
| by Doubleday in 2005, I devoted a chapter to kids who are
| psychologically "gender-atypical." I suggested that these kids
| are somewhere in between male and female. But the Stanford
| study provides little support for that claim. I am hopeful that
| the researchers will do follow-up studies specifically looking
| at individuals who are gender-nonconforming, gender-atypical,
| and who have gender dysphoria, to see whether and how those
| characteristics influence these findings."
| liveoneggs wrote:
| the sample was "roughly 1,500 young adults 20 to 35 years of
| age" so, in today's environment, I don't think it's possible
| that there were not at least a few who self-identify as non-
| binary and nonconforming.
| riskable wrote:
| Transgender folks are represent about half a percent of any
| given population. So if the study had 1500 participants that
| would mean ~7 were transgender.
|
| If you look at the graphs from the study those people could
| be the outliers but no matter what, it's not really enough
| people to glean anything useful.
| empthought wrote:
| > Transgender folks are represent about half a percent of
| any given population
|
| This is not accurate for the cohort under study. 5% of
| people under age 30 identify as transgender or nonbinary. I
| would personally be unsurprised if well over 100
| individuals in the study identified that way.
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/short-
| reads/2022/06/07/about-5-o...
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| You have to be a little bit careful with those kinds of
| numbers. Once you get down to a few %, actual signal
| starts to be swamped by troll answers, misclicks, and
| other sources of error. You'll basically never see a
| number below a few percent in any poll with a decent
| sample size.
|
| (As an aside, this is one of the things that makes the
| data on the effectiveness of transition care more
| remarkable than it even looks. Given the very high
| probability that a random person is cisgender, even
| moderate false-positive rates would swamp true-positives.
| The fact that they don't suggests false-positives are
| very rare indeed.)
| empthought wrote:
| This is a Pew Research study...
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| What's your point? Looking at their methodology [1], it's
| pretty clear those sources of error would still be an
| issue here:
|
| > The American Trends Panel (ATP), created by Pew
| Research Center, is a nationally representative panel of
| randomly selected U.S. adults. Panelists participate via
| self-administered web surveys.
|
| [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2022/06/trans...
| empthought wrote:
| 0.5% (as the original poster opined) is not within the
| 95% confidence interval of the survey. Anywhere as low as
| 3.2% or as high as 7.8% is within the confidence
| interval. I am not sure why you would knee-jerk dismiss
| this.
|
| My point is that it is reasonable to expect between 3%
| and 8% of the MRI study participants to have been trans.
| It is not reasonable to think that 0.5% or less would
| have been trans.
| astromaniak wrote:
| The difference has two components: genetic, personal. Genetic
| does not depend on self identification. Personal is very
| similar these days. Same families, same schools.
|
| As for trans. Humans, unlike most animals, cannot even have sex
| without being taught. The reason is humans for many
| generations, million years probably, lived in groups and
| learned how to do it. Those who didn't have genetically
| hardcoded knowledge how to make kids by the time they grew up
| they knew it any way. It wasn't necessary and with the time it
| was almost lost. The same with gender identification.
| Everywhere boys and girls where brought up differently. So, we
| lost hadcoded self identification. Today human kids may grow up
| thinking they are dogs, or wolfs, or sheep. If they happened to
| grow up with animals.
|
| Conclusion is it's parents responsibility to give kids the
| right identity. Failure to do it, some brainwashed wokes don't
| do it intentionally, results in miss self-identification. Add
| to that 'doctors' multi-billon industry preying on them and
| some schools playing along to keep parents uninformed. There
| was a couple of months back interesting article about navy seal
| who had mental problems. He was brainwashed into believing he
| was a woman, and needs treatment and surgeries, payed by
| government. Later he realized he was just used to make money,
| and became a man again. The same happens to kids en mass.
| Because they are easy targets.
| Flemiklo wrote:
| That's a lot of weird nonsense.
|
| We do not know what influences the way brains choose some
| kind of identity.
|
| And obviously we as a society created this stark contrast
| between male and female. Look at animal kingdom
| trealira wrote:
| > And obviously we as a society created this stark contrast
| between male and female. Look at animal kingdom
|
| How so? Many species of animals show sexual dimorphism.
| logicprog wrote:
| So a [gigantic meta analysis](https://www.sciencedirect.com/scien
| ce/article/pii/S014976342...) of thirty years of studies on sexed
| structural and functional differences in human brains found zero
| evidence of any differences, a completely overlapping
| distribution, but as soon as "big data AI" is used suddenly not
| only are there differences, there's _literally zero overlap_?
| Count me suspicious. I think I 'm going to trust the meta-
| analysis of 30 years worth of wide-ranging scientific study over
| the brand new study that's just throwing whatever fad is
| currently in the vogue at the problem to see what happens.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Sounds like a case of "Old measuring instrument cannot tell two
| things apart. New more precise instrument can tell them apart"
| logicprog wrote:
| They're using the same measuring instruments, though. They're
| just feeding them through AI. Maybe, though. Let's see if it
| replicates.
| courseofaction wrote:
| Without making any claims about gender or non-binary people
| (not my wheelhouse, I simply don't know), there's ample
| evidence to suggest statistically significant population-level
| differences between males and females on a many cognitive
| measures.
|
| I don't see how it's surprising that an new generation of
| signal-detection tool finds population-level differences in the
| brains that produce these cognitions.
| derbOac wrote:
| I think the linked news article is a little misleading,
| although I share your skepticism. I'd like to see these results
| replicated rigorously on still new sets of data by independent
| researchers; I wouldn't be surprised either way, if the results
| did or did not replicate.
|
| However, the news article seems to spin this as "male and
| female brains are totally different entities that bear no
| relationship with one another." Although I haven't reread it
| carefully, it seems like the article is saying something more
| like "you can identify gender-specific patterns, and those
| gender-specific components relate to things like cognitive
| ability gender-specifically". It's not that you can't find
| overlap -- that that wasn't the focus of the study -- it's that
| if you go looking for differences, you can find them.
| RoyalHenOil wrote:
| It seems to me that in order for male and female brains to be
| functionally the same, they would need to be physically
| different to account for the extreme hormonal differences.
|
| When you give a man a female dose of hormones or a woman a
| male dose of hormones, it has a very big effect on their
| mood, behavior, and mental wellbeing. This change is much,
| much bigger than the average diffences we see between men and
| women. For example, an average man with an average woman's
| level of testosterone will experience a MUCH higher level
| depression, listlessness, and sexual disinterest than the
| average woman experiences.
|
| This strongly implies that human brains must correct for
| these huge hormonal differences. Basically, in order for male
| and female behavior to be similar, their brains must differ.
| If their brains are the same, then hormones will have a much,
| much bigger influence on male and female behavior than what
| we actually see in reality.
|
| Hormone-correcting brain differences would also imply that
| it's possible for people to be born with some type of
| intersex brain condition, and that these individuals would
| benefit greatly from receiving hormone therapy to bring their
| hormone levels in line with their brains. And this, indeed,
| seems to be something we see fairly often.
| cmcaleer wrote:
| I have to assume you haven't bothered reading this, because
| section 2.3 points out flaws in the methodology of the studies
| looked at which the methodology in this study kind of tries to
| address (whether or not it's a good job of it is left for
| everyone else to figure out). You shouldn't dismiss a result
| out of hand because it doesn't fit preconceived notions, but
| it's absolutely a reason to try to dig in to the methodology of
| the new study and make sure it's not flawed.
|
| That said, this meta-analysis is also filled with some crazy
| statements. It seems to imply sexual dimorphism is only really
| visible in repro organs but women necessarily need to have
| wider hips to facilitate child birth among other differences.
|
| This obvious point should have also been noted when comparing
| differences in organ mass, since mothers of babies with larger
| heads are more likely to die so this is selected against. Not
| an issue with lungs, heart etc., hence larger % differences in
| sexes there.
|
| These aren't egregious omissions in and of themselves, but it's
| certainly useful context I'd like to have were I not familiar
| with sexual dimorphism.
|
| The dismissiveness of a 1.6 fold increase in SDN size of human
| males compared to human women is bad. That's enormous! Not
| something I would prepend with "only" and repeatedly call
| "small", even when not comparing the differences between M/F
| humans and M/F rodents.
|
| Bizarre that none of the authors objected to this phrasing,
| because it's poisoned reading the rest of this paper for me.
| How am I meant to trust the authors' opinion of what a "small"
| difference is?
|
| Some of the points are a bit more compelling, like in section
| 5.1 where they point out that a difference attributed to M/F
| was replicated in much smaller size by concentrating on volume
| instead, or in 5.2 where they point out a few papers that
| missed crucial nuance.
|
| But overall after reading a few thousand words of this, the
| nicest thing I can say about it is that I agree that it is
| indeed gigantic.
| logicprog wrote:
| Update: had a friend with access send me a PDF of the study and
| looked through it. It seems that the big breakthrough is only
| half AI -- the other half being looking directly at time series
| of fMRIs instead of static images with features in them
| manually selected for relevance, because how the various
| circuits in the brain operate and circulate over time is
| important information. Also they got this to replicate well
| with the same people at different times, and also generalize to
| two other cohorts, consistently, and also used XAI to check
| what the AI was keying off, to make sure it wasn't going off
| something nonsensical, and directly used _those_ features with
| success as well. It seems like an extremely carefully
| controlled and designed study tbh.
| aappleby wrote:
| "Male and female brains are so similar that it takes a dedicated
| AI to distinguish between the two."
| hpen wrote:
| Turns out AI is good at separating noisy signals
| dopylitty wrote:
| The article seems to conflate sex and gender while the study is
| paywalled so I can't tell how they defined male and female. The
| study does seem specific to sex and doesn't mention gender at all
| in the abstract.
|
| Without those definitions it's basically saying "things we
| grouped a certain way ended up grouped that way" which isn't
| really a useful result.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Really, I understand the human rights aspect of calling people
| whatever they feel they are and I am all for it. I think we
| should call people by their pronouns and whatever. Sex is one
| thing and gender is another.
|
| But definitely, pretending that innate differences between
| sexes are influenced by the social construct of gender is going
| to far into a rabbit hole.
|
| Let's just accept that we can still have medical research based
| on sex, and understand that it doesn't invalidade the idea of
| gender. It is just a different matter.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| That's making a pretty big assumption that external factors
| are non-causal in the expression of genes that impact gender
|
| We know for a absolute fact that genetic expression is
| environmentally impacted - To the extent that even eukaryotic
| organisms can change sex based on environmental factors
|
| So it's not implausible that environmental factors actually
| do affect human genetic expression of characteristics that we
| typically consider gendered
| elzbardico wrote:
| I am not assuming this, but the point is that it is
| perfectly valid to keep doing studies on the fundamental
| and pretty well-understood phenomenon of birth-sex and
| whether it is a significant causal factor on the biology of
| homo sapiens.
|
| It is a simple variable, we can start from it and then try
| to see whether gender self-identity has any effect.
|
| We can be pretty sure of the sex-at-birth of any human
| being given some simple tests. It is a simple variable that
| we can trust have been correctly recorded the vast majority
| of time. Gender identity? not so simple.
|
| And given a correct understanding of the differences, if
| any, between sex-at-birth individuals, we will have a good
| framework from which we can investigate if those
| differences follow gender identity, and if so, what is
| their causal relationship with gender, etc. etc. etc...
|
| What I am questioning, is that if every time a scientist do
| a sex-at-birth based study we question implicitly if they
| are not being bigots, we will end up censoring scientific
| inquiry for no good reason at all. (yeah, I do believe that
| not all scientific inquiry is allowable, for example, I
| oppose research on chemical and biological weapons)
| zgjead wrote:
| Gender identity is a fairly recent cultural invention
| too, it just started out as a euphemism for the desire to
| be the opposite sex, or, more commonly, some stereotyped
| idea of the opposite sex.
|
| In a culture without such polarized ideals of how males
| and females should behave and present themselves, the
| concept probably wouldn't exist at all.
| Flemiklo wrote:
| I would assume that the hormonal effect on a brain is a lot
| more relevant when looking for brain forms than like social
| constructs.
|
| We are not able to tell if someone is a logical person or a
| cool dude or whatever just by looking at it.
|
| And apparently hormones don't make a brain look different
| either
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