In-class Study Group Weekly Report 2 20221007

☺In-class Study Group Weekly Report

🚩Title studied: 
 Has anyone found a gendered brain yet?

🚩Main idea : 

What is the difference in different genders?

🚩Summary :

There's one thing that almost all neuroscientists agree on and that is that the male brain is on average larger than the female brain. Scientists say this is because male bodies are on average larger than female bodies. 

But that isn't always been considered in studies that look into the differences between male and female brains.

🚩Content :

Studies:

Age complicates analysis of brains and the way they function:

So lots of differences went away when scientists took the relative size of brains into account. But still, they said there was a difference about 15% between male and female brains.  

Gina Rippon says that could be due to age. Rippon is a neurobiologist from Aston University in the UK who has focused much of her career on fighting what she calls "neurosexism" — gender bias in neurological studies.  

Testing for the gendered brain in babies:

In order to attempt to reconcile the problem of age and cultural conditioning, some scientists have tried to conduct comparative research on babies and apes — babies, because they haven't yet grown up in a gendered world, and apes, because they are neurologically similar to humans, but are not raised in the same sociocultural world as them. 

The words we learned from this article:

• prefrontal cortex 前額葉皮質
• pituitary gland 腦下垂體
• amygdala 杏仁核
• hippocampus 海馬迴
• hypothalamus 下視丘