Gender Differences

 

The San Francisco Chronicle recently reviewed Louann Brizendine’s book “The Female Brain“.  Gender differences?  Try:

• - Thoughts about sex enter women’s brains once every couple of days; for men, thoughts about sex occur every minute.
• - Women use 20,000 words per day; men use 7,000 per day.
• - Women excel at knowing what people are feeling; men have difficulty spotting an emotion unless someone cries or threatens bodily harm.
• - Women remember fights that a man insists never happened.
• - Women over 50 are more likely to initiate divorce.

Citations?  Unfortunately the SFC does not list any.  At any rate, I got curious and searched Pubmed for fMRI papers on gender differences.  A total of 468 studies popped up, including this little ditty.  From the abstract:

BACKGROUND: The brain plays a crucial role in the decision to eat, integrating multiple hormonal and neural signals. A key factor controlling food intake is selective satiety, ie, the phenomenon that the motivation to eat more of a food decreases more than does the motivation to eat foods not eaten. OBJECTIVE: We investigated the effect of satiation with chocolate on the brain activation associated with chocolate taste in men and women. DESIGN: Twelve men and 12 women participated. Subjects fasted overnight and were scanned by use of functional magnetic resonance imaging while tasting chocolate milk, before and after eating chocolate until they were satiated. RESULTS: In men, chocolate satiation was associated with increased taste activation in the ventral striatum, insula, and orbitofrontal and medial orbitofrontal cortex and with decreased taste activation in somatosensory areas. Women showed increased taste activation in the precentral gyrus, superior temporal gyrus, and putamen and decreased taste activation in the hypothalamus and amygdala. Sex differences in the effect of chocolate satiation were found in the hypothalamus, ventral striatum, and medial prefrontal cortex. CONCLUSIONS: Our results indicate that men and women differ in their response to satiation and suggest that the regulation of food intake by the brain may vary between the sexes. Therefore, sex differences are a covariate of interest in studies of the brain’s responses to food.

Interesting.  However, I am usually opposed to the average, at least when it makes quite broad claims about behaviour, and as Jake Young points out in his most excellent blog Pure Pedantry, individual differences may be larger than group differences.  No doubt.  I’d like it if they had chucked a few Belgians or Germans in the scanner.  Both men and women.

Edge, via Pure Pedantry, gives you a debate

Of Hamlet and Brains

I was reading a paper on A meta-algorithm for brain extraction in MRI and wondered what other studies used the Dice coefficient as a metric. Interestingly enough I came across a program called WordHoard from Northwestern University.

// The WordHoard project is named after an Old English phrase for the verbal treasure ‘unlocked’ by a wise speaker. It applies to highly canonical literary texts the insights and techniques of corpus linguistics, that is to say, the empirical and computer-assisted study of large bodies of written texts or transcribed speech. In the WordHoard environment, such texts are annotated or tagged by morphological, lexical, prosodic, and narratological criteria. They are mediated through a ‘digital page’ or user interface that lets scholarly but non-technical users explore the greatly increased query potential of textual data kept in such a form.

Look out, John Grisham.

I’m still debating on what kind of similarity metric I will be using, although this blurb on comparing texts has been the most helpful I’ve read up to now.

Hot Live Brains

The longer I stay up, the more weird and interesting things I find. Like this: OR Live, a website devoted to live webcasts of surgical procedures. Seeing as it’s been a long day at work, I’ve decided to crack open a beer and watch someone’s Chiari malformations be whisked away by a neurosurgeon. But don’t just take my word for it, take a peek at the host of neurosurgery videos available on their website.

Also, although I’m unsure if this is a hoax, “clunedesign” claims to have produced some water ripples related to a visual agnosia case for the theatrical production of Oliver Sack’s “The man who mistook his wife for a hat”.