A recurring issue for Psybertron – something that runs quite deep in all binary divisions, and taxonomic divisions ARE all binary many times over (#GoodFences) – is one very specific division, that between the sexes.
Differences are not dichotomous, total, forever, never the twain shall meet. Differences are simply significant distinctions we need to be able to make to even talk about them. In the sex / gender case we undoubtedly share 99.99% of our humanity and everything that goes with that including rights and freedoms of opportunity and the like (and share probably 99.90% with the animal world, and maybe 99.00% with living things generally). But differences that are nevertheless significant enough to care about and understand as properly as possible?
(And no this isn’t a post about the “LGBTQI+” trans-gender wars, those biological-sex and socio-cultural-gender distinctions.)
This is about two very important distinctions that get overlooked because it’s been easier to deny popular misconceptions – that are therefore equally easily mis-used – than it is harder to share understanding of nuanced but valuable truths.
Men / Males and Women / Females ARE different, and
Left-Brains and Right-Brains ARE different, therefore
Male-Brains/Minds and Female-Brains/Minds ARE different
and their distinctions / relationships ARE significant.
And I say valuable, because such differences are a source of requisite variety in both the meme-pool of ongoing human affairs and in the gene-pool of future human evolution.
A healthy mixture beats artificial uniformity any day.
Vive La Difference(s) because they are a Good Thing.
Anyway, the latest published research on brain & sex differences opens with a simple statement:
“Sex differences in human brain anatomy have been well‑documented, though remain significantly underexplored …”
People steer clear of considering real (and well-documented) facts out of a politically-correct (aka Woke in the 2020’s) fear of unintended misrepresentation and misunderstanding. This one is doubly problematic because BOTH left-right-brain differences AND sex-differences are involved and there’s a lot of popular mythical debunking flak to avoid in order to make any progress with either, let alone both.
Critical Debunking is so much easier than Progressive Creativity.
#Dysmemics #PartOfTheProblem
The significance in the latest paper, is that one of the significant sex differences highlighted is in the scale of the corpus-callosum white-matter permissively communicating between the brain halves. A very old finding reinforced by the latest research.
Hat tip to Kevin Mitchell for the latest link, a biologist specialising in evolutionary brain-mind-agency development. And Iain McGilchrist who having chosen one difficult left-right brain hill to die on (sacred naturalism), has nevertheless also correctly referenced the sex differences in this area, Dennett too.
(Previously on Psybertron? Search “Vive La Difference”)
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