By: Genevieve Fox | Meet the neuroscientist shattering the myth of the gendered brain | Neuroscience | The Guardian
Why asking whether your brain is male or female is the wrong question
You receive an invitation, emblazoned with a question: “A bouncing little ‘he’ or a pretty little ‘she’?” The question is your teaser for the “gender reveal party” to which you are being invited by an expectant mother who, at more than 20 weeks into her pregnancy, knows what you don’t: the sex of her child. After you arrive, explains cognitive neuroscientist Gina Rippon in her riveting new book, The Gendered Brain, the big reveal will be hidden within some novelty item, such as a white iced cake, and will be colour-coded. Cut the cake and you’ll see either blue or pink filling. If it is blue, it is a…
Yes, you’ve guessed it. Whatever its sex, this baby’s future is predetermined by the entrenched belief that males and females do all kinds of things differently, better or worse, because they have different brains.
Plasticity is now a scientific given – the brain is moulded from birth onwards until old age
The brain is a rule scavenger and it picks up its rules from the outside world
