Reddit Reddit reviews Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps- and What We Can Do About It

We found 6 Reddit comments about Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps- and What We Can Do About It. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps- and What We Can Do About It
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6 Reddit comments about Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps- and What We Can Do About It:

u/DevonianAge · 7 pointsr/Feminism

Maybe it's a bit below your level as a neuroscience student, but I thought the recent book Pink Brain Blue Brain did a good job on sex differences. Basically, the author's premise is that neurological sex differences are very small (but measurable) initially, but then differentiation occurs during early childhood development, mostly as a result of social reinforcement/ influence. And that of course, due to the nature of brain development (neuroplasticity), those differences eventually become hardwired, eventually resultling in larger measurable differences in older children and adults.

In the process she revisits a lot of the literature on innate sex differences. For much of it, she calls either the data or the methodology into question, and her conclusion is that the differences are generally smaller than is often claimed (or at least that the data is not very conclusive). She also has harsh words for many self-help psychology/sex difference popularizers (like Robert Bly or Louann Brizendine), who she claims accepted the inconclusive science and ran with it.

That book is not exactly about gender in the Judith Butler sense-- she's more concerned with differences in cognition that impact parenting/ academic issues (like social/communication skills, spatial reasoning, etc). Still, I found it to be very provacative and interesting, and if nothing else it's a reminder that the popularized notions of scientific discoveries don't always align very well with the data.

Edit: damned autocorrect

u/Fauzlin · 4 pointsr/women

I wonder if this study, once published, will be yet another "boys are this way always" and "girls are this way always" book or if it will actually examine the social constructs that lead to that divide-- things such as expectation, conditioning, archaic gender roles, etc.

We definitely don't need more of the former floating around out there. It's great to know things as they are, but it's better to look at the actual "why"s that make them that way.

A great example of the latter would be Pink Brain, Blue Brain. We need more books like that around.

u/p3on · 2 pointsr/MensRights

would you mind linking to that criticism? this was the only formal criticism i could find and it isn't related to the book discussed. if you're referring to this amazon review, you used some pretty misleading framing for your statements ("she refers to disproved or non-duplicated studies")

also as far as the feminist confirmation bias angle, this is such a general criticism that i can't even address it. can you refer to any individual studies that shouldn't be taken seriously because they're done by people with "radical ideas" re: feminism? and shouldn't you be able to find flaws in their methodology rather than dismissing them outright for their conclusions? that entire paragraph seems entirely pulled out of your ass to be honest

lise eliot doesn't identify herself as any kind of feminist, she is a neuroscience ph.d and associate professor and approaches her books' topics from that perspective. of course accusations of "radical ideas" probably wouldn't be thrown around if she were a man

u/JulianMorrison · 2 pointsr/TwoXChromosomes

This type of biological essentialism has been fashionable for awhile, although the evidence for it is actually very weak. See the book Pink Brain, Blue Brain for the opposite case: science supports the fact that human infants instinctively seek and copy the cultural form of their gender, and that their brains gain differences they didn't start with, basically by practicing some skills and neglecting others. (Social construction via nurture via nature - how's that for a unification.) So if you want boys to be good in school and girls to be able to assert themselves, you had better see they gain practise in what they're bad at. This school is doing exactly the wrong thing.

u/fetishiste · 2 pointsr/AskWomen

We've been trying to tell men that for a really really long time :P

You may enjoy this book.