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New Research Finds Differences Between Male and Female Brains

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Re: New Research Finds Differences Between Male and Female Brains

#2
> The researchers found no overlap between male and female

That's kind of a bold claim...

EDIT: Interesting that I'm getting massively modded down by people who have clearly not even read the article. There's a bunch of graphs that show "no overlap" without any explanation of what they are actually even showing on the graphs. And then they make claims like "found no overlap between male and female" when what they actually means is "in some poorly specified tests, where they don't actually tell you what they were doing and how they determined this, they found data that was different between male and female". It also seems like the author of the article isn't grounded in statistics or he'd be calling it "no correlation" not "no overlap".

But sure, just carry on down-voting me if you can't be bothered to actually read the article.

Re: New Research Finds Differences Between Male and Female Brains

#3
I don't know how legit the source is, but if this is to be believed then it's a pretty interesting finding. It seems likely to spark off some pretty big social conversations and a lot more research into this particular area

I don't have time to dig deeper at the moment but I'm very curious about this topic

Re: New Research Finds Differences Between Male and Female Brains

#5
post #2

> The researchers found no overlap between male and female That's kind of a bold claim... EDIT: Interesting that I'm getting massively modded down by people who have clearly not even read the article. There's a bunch of graphs that show "no overlap" without any explanation of what they are actually even showing on the graphs. And then they make claims like "found no overlap between male and female" when what they act…

Reading through the article - the source data is 1,500 people. Not insignificant, but reading between the lines at some the criticism outlined - it may be the case that those 1,500 people were chosen selectively in a way that could bias the conclusions (maybe unintentionally).

I would love to get data on where my brain is at! I myself have no gender (like how some people just don't have a religion). I have a sex, and an orientation... just no gender.

But yeah, more data is needed to take this study seriously (reproducibility for one).

Re: New Research Finds Differences Between Male and Female Brains

#6
This is a great example of the type of question-begging and junk science "deep learning models" enable. The methodology is to take time series MRI of hundreds of regions of the brain and, labeling each data point as "male" or "female", train a model to differentiate between the two, then pick out the most determinative bits. The issue, of course, is that you are searching for what you want to find. With so much data, of course there is going to be some feature that has maximal differentiating power, so it's totally unsurprising to see a result showing maximal differentiation, since that was what the model was being trained for.

However, nothing in this points towards any intelligent conclusion… the highest differentiating region is called "R DLPFC, Subdivision A9l", with "R DLPFC, Subdivision A9/46d" coming close behind. No doubt though this will be passed around as evidence that gender disparities in professional fields and economic outcomes are biologically determined.

Re: New Research Finds Differences Between Male and Female Brains

#7
No overlap is rather surprising, though as others have mentioned the article doesn't do a good job explaining what is actually being measured here.

The idea that the male and female brains are identical has always seemed to be more grounded in political expediency rather than in reality. While there are always outliers (which is why the purported no overlap seems odd), when you actually interact with people in the real world it doesn't take long to identify behaviors and ways of thinking that are more common with either men or women.

I suppose the root of a lot of the trouble here is that some people just suck and have to make everything a competition. If men and women are different, then one must be better than the other, right? Surely we couldn't just accept and come to understand our differences and therefore work better together.

Re: New Research Finds Differences Between Male and Female Brains

#8
post #4

A fascinating article but I'm not entirely clear on what is being measured. What are tSNE 1 and 2?

Dimension 1 and dimension 2. They reduced a multidimensional vector output to 2 dimensions to make it visualizable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-distributed_stochastic_neigh...

IMO this study feels like it's saying "facial recognition AI model outputs vectors where female and male faces cluster closer to each other than not". Which to a typical human is stupid obvious.

The author is spinning up drama to get more engagement in his article IMO.

Re: New Research Finds Differences Between Male and Female Brains

#10
post #8
post #4

A fascinating article but I'm not entirely clear on what is being measured. What are tSNE 1 and 2?

Dimension 1 and dimension 2. They reduced a multidimensional vector output to 2 dimensions to make it visualizable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-distributed_stochastic_neigh... IMO this study feels like it's saying "facial recognition AI model outputs vectors where female and male faces cluster closer to each other than not". Which to a typical human is stupid obvious. The author is spinning up drama to get more e…

It might not say much about how male and female brains are different, but just being able to measure whether a brain has male or female brain activity could be a powerful health tool. For example, what if we could use this to determine ahead of time who will respond positively to gender-affirming care and who will respond negatively? It could save lives.
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