1147 This is your brain on a political hot button

The May issue of Scientific American has an article on the brain differences between men and women, “His Brain, Her Brain.”

Before getting into differences, the male author makes the obligatory, law-suit protecting statement that . . . “no one has uncovered any evidence that anatomical disparities might render women incapable of achieving academic distinction in math, physics or engineering.” (That’s sort of a straw woman, because I don’t remember Summers saying women were incapable of achieving academic distinction, only that they were different in achievement, and it’s the Summers flap the author probably is referring to.)

Then he goes on to list all the research on brain differences, the hypothalamus, cognition and behavior, including memory, emotion, vision, hearing, the processing of faces and the brain's response to stress hormones, the size of cortex and amygdala, the orbitofrontal-to-amygdala ratio, differences in utero, and differences in behavior in the nursery on day one. And he also provides a lot of animal studies of differences in male and female brains.

I’m a little surprised people are allowed grants to study the differences in men and women’s brains. I hope he hasn’t ruined his career. This puts feminist hard-liners in a tough spot. If they continue to insist there is no difference, they deprive women of important research on how medications affect the brains of men and women differently and thus condemn women to treatments that work for men but not for women and vice versa.