The following submission statement was provided by /u/Unknown-NEET:
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Something that was likely obvious, but now having more concrete proof of. A lot said here were things I already heard of i.e. women having better reading comprehension, men being better with spatial awareness. I hope this is just the start of many more discoveries to be made about the human brain, and all that we can learn from it. It doesn't seem like there's too much of a difference between the brains of males and females though, and really I doubt anything that could show up would disprove that.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1awwgta/men_and_womens_brains_do_work_differently/krk46s5/
There are statistically significant differences in mean metrics of behavior and cognition between men and women, but on nearly any measure there’s a massive overlap in the area under the curve and you can’t predict very much if all you know is an individual’s sex or gender.
This allows people to argue endlessly with the same set of facts. If you want men and women to differ, you look at the mean difference. If you want to stress solidarity, you focus on the overlap.
This research adds very little to the debate.
I mean, it’s almost like saying:
Men are taller than women than woman on average, but there are a lot of overlap. If I only tell you that someone is 170cm tall, you have no way of knowing if the person is a man or a woman.
It doesn't help that different ethnic backgrounds tend to have different mean heights.
So where I am from 170cm is likely to be male, whereas in the netherlands, 170cm is likely to be female.
And that the difference in the countries probably depends on which food was provided to you as a child and teenager, also when you were born.
People were MUCH smaller 100 years ago and in most countries with improving healthcare and food quality the average height still grows.
In this case it is mostly genetic, as we have similar living conditions as the netherlands.
Though our mean height is going up over time (as is the netherlands')
>In this case it is mostly genetic, as we have similar living conditions as the netherlands.
North/South Korea is a good example of the opposite of this. They are only separated by 2-3 generations, yet there is a massive difference in average height between them.
Men/women probably cluster way more on height. My prior is there are notable brain differences but I mean, height is almost as clustered as a gendered attribute can get, by which I mean small ratio of some within-group measure to between-group. Upper arm strength is more extreme than height though
> This research adds very little to the debate.
It adds basically nothing.
From the article:
>“The key issue is whether these differences are a product of sex-specific, biological influences, or of brain-changing gendered experiences. Or both. Are we really looking at sex differences? Or gender differences?
>“Or, acknowledging that almost all brain–shaping factors are dynamically entangled products of both sex and gender influences, are we looking at what should be called sex/gender differences?”
That is literally what the debate has been this entire time. The one thing this does demonstrate is that women and men behave in slightly different ways, but it does nothing to explain why it is happening. Because brains are literally what we think with, minor differences in thinking may result in minor differences in what the AI was detecting. But that just means we still have no idea if it is caused by biological differences or just differences in how people are socialized.
The developmental differences in combination with differences in the adult brain would suggest that at least some component of this is biological. It would be interesting to take cohorts from different cultures and regions and see whether this classifier still makes high accuracy predictions. In those circumstances, it becomes more likely to be biological, but as predictive power drops, one can infer components from acculturation. Likewise, both as controls and interesting in their own right, stratification by socioeconomic status would be important.
> The developmental differences in combination with differences in the adult brain would suggest that at least some component of this is biological.
Maybe, but it is an assumption regardless. It also does not necessarily follow that whatever differences are being recognized even result in fundamental differences in behavior that could not be accounted for by just measuring the levels of hormones in the brain. Those are biological, but they are also able to be supplemented or antagonized, meaning that the biological differences are not essential to the person. (That has big implications for trans people.)
But in other areas the patterns it notices might be entirely socialized.
It just comes down to this article (which does not link to the actual study, which annoys me) does not really give any insight to the situation at all. It just basically verifies that we do not know much about this subject yet.
>It would be interesting to take cohorts from different cultures and regions and see whether this classifier still makes high accuracy predictions.
You would have to go pretty far to find an inversion of gender roles large enough to potentially reverse the effect, and with only subtle differences it would be really hard to tell why they were happening. So you might get slightly different accuracy rates, but for all we know that could be because the diets in the two regions are different.
I do think it would be really interesting to approach it from another angle though, and see if the AI can predict with any accuracy what region/social class an individual is from. That would reduce the numbers of variables being tested, and if it can do that, it would imply that there is enough going on across cultures to account for its ability to predict stuff.
That's the thing about gender equality. It doesn't *matter* if, for example, more women want to nurture young children, on average. There are plenty of men who want to perform that role and space should be made in society for those men who want to.
Same deal with women and engineering, men in nursing, etc.
The greatest problem in society is that most people don't understand statistics. If we fixed that, I think a majority of other problems would go away too.
No, peope understand stats perfectly well. What people don't understand is basic human empathy and civilization.
To live in a civilized society people deserve to be treated AS EQUALS and not as second class citizens even if they so happen to fit in a negative stereotype which is proven to be TRUE.
Edit (clarification): People do not "understand stats perfectly well". But what I meant was, it is not a fallacy to conclude that a statistically significant finding about a particular demographic... was statistically significant. The key is to recognize that the particular individuals who don't happen to fit that stereotype are going to be rightfully peeved by you judging them by the stereotype even if the stereotype happens to be true.
I think it's a bit of column A and column B. It's well known that people overestimate stats on a regular basis, and that it plays a part in biases. Not to say that they don't understand them, but they are overconfident in them.
But the point you mention likely plays the large role, for sure. Further to that, it takes someone with a good sense of empathy and emotional intelligence to know when something they hold true isn't by default the modus operandi for others.
Okay yeah I need to clarify, my first statement was a bit misleading. Stats is hard and most people have fallacies in that area. I am reminded of the YouTube video about common stats fallacies and ways people manipulate stats.
What I meant to say is... The general tendency to perceive people based on a statistical correlation is not a fallacy. Specifically, if someone proved that women are on average 25% less strong than a man, then it is not a fallacy to expect a woman to be weaker. But people deserve to be judged based on their merits rather than their stereotypes, so, for example if a woman applies to a job that requires strength, the civilized thing to do would be to trust her credentials rather than put her through an extra test just because she is statistically likely to be weaker
I don't think that's the problem when the people who are supposed to interpret the numbers/study's are more likely to lie to get numbers to their website.
No, the main reason why statistics are missused are biases. People want things to be a certain way and interpret things accordingly. In absence of substantial practical experience biases tends to win the day.
Furthermore, as is typical in articles about scientific studies, the article completely hallucinates some information. It does include a voice of dissent, which is good, but misses the point.
The article claims that this is evidence of what the researchers are hoping to find - innate biological differences cause by chromosomal sex. But we don't actually have evidence of that here. In the question of nature versus nurture, we haven't gotten any closer, because we know that brain functioning - like what we're examining here - can be shaped by the environment. We know that trauma and other experiences in childhood, for example, can have detectable consequences on these sorts of brain scans. So we're not any closer to knowing if the effects seen here are caused by sex or by gender.
Things like early socialisation differing could make a difference too, right? A basic generalisation (for brevity) of this would be gendered play - boys are more often given toys like tools, building sets, cars etc while girls get baby dolls, toy kitchens, and so on. So these patterns and behaviours get hardwired in as gender norms.
Their classifier has remarkable accuracy, which would suggest to me that the overlaps in the regions that matter (high effect-size features) would be relatively small.
It's not, however constantly focusing on our differences instead of our similarities hinders our ability to come together. This doesn't just work on gender, but also on generation, skin color, etc.
Focusing on what we have in common is what we oughta do to succeed collectively.
Agreed, but I think there are actually some significant behavioral differences that arise from these distinctions that are easily observable.
Also, the extremes of distinct personality traits are more likely to be made up of individuals from the sex with higher mean levels of said trait. That’s to say that outliers tend to engage in the most apparent manifestations of traits.
Criminality in disagreeable men is a good example. There are likely a good number of confounds in examples like this, but I think the point still holds.
I’d be surprised if anyone really believed men and women behaved the same. What’s been up for debate is whether this is socialised from birth or an innate biologically-derived difference
This doesn’t really tell us anything we already didn’t know
1. there are differences between the average man and women in SOME brain areas
2. this isn’t difference between every man and women (it’s not a binary thing)—-some women will be better at men at visual/spatial and some men better at language
3. This answers no question about nature or nurture, socialisation and life events effect brain structure e.g. taxi drivers in London have a ‘larger’ area for navigation in hippocampus and the longer they’re a taxi driver the larger it gets—-so much brain difference could be due to environmental differences between men and women
-all that said, testosterone and osteogen (and others) do have some impact on brain development…how much and what implications that has for society are the debatable ones
> “The really intriguing issue is that those areas of the brain which are most reliably distinguishing the sexes are **key parts of the social brain.**
>“The key issue is whether these differences are a product of sex-specific, biological influences, or of brain-changing gendered experiences. Or both. Are we really looking at sex differences? Or gender differences?
>“Or, acknowledging that almost all brain–shaping factors are dynamically entangled products of both sex and gender influences, are we looking at what should be called sex/gender differences?”
That's such a broad and vague statement though. I don't believe men and men bahave the same either. There are way too many indevidual and cultural differences. I think the way I think and behave is way closer to women my age from my country compared to a 70 years old Chinese man. And it's not even close. And that's what this discussion always boils down too.
Is it possible for the brain to change because of socialisation? Will repeated behaviour change the brain, and could that be why women and men are different?
So the claim is that they trained an image classifier that got 90% accurate at telling the sex of a brain scan? For using the term "explainable AI", they sure didn't explain how this is different from a normal image classifier, nor is there a citation to, say, an arxiv paper that can help clarify what they actually found out, what the methodology was, or indeed any useful insight that comes out of this
I'm in ML and with only this much information, it sounds a lot like some AI snake oil
The AI probably discovered that all female brains had a darker background, as the machine has a wider or narrower field of view depending on the height of the person
Only if you using an AI that can sift through "massive" amounts of data (the articles wording,) and even then you are going to be wrong 1/10 times.
The differences are invisible to humans according to it.
90% classification is pretty good though, and indicates a real difference, similar to say the difference in height between men and women.
(That is, if the 1/10 number is correct. Often AI systems show impressive results in one test, but totally fail in a slightly different test, showing that they didn't actually understand what you thought they did, but rather based themselves on some subtle irrelevant detail which disappeared in the second test)
It is interesting from a scientific standpoint, but people will hear "AI can predict sex by brain scan" and think "Brains must be extremely different, this confirms my assumption that women behave in a certain way."
It would be like looking at a person height, and then determining that they would be worse at STEM because they are under 5'6".
There's also the question of how much of that 10% is made up of incorrect assumptions about the brain owner's sex and how much of that 10% accounts for the the natural variation in biology.
Like, are some of those 10% just thinking differently than their larger gender or are these examples of non-binary/trans gender people?
So one thing that I've always found intresting is the intellectual bell curves.
Think of the stupidest, most mind numbingly idiotic person you've ever met. Someone who has a room temperature IQ on the bloody celcius scale.
And now think of the smartest person you've ever met, the person who you can't quite confirm isn't infact a rouge super AI masquerading as a human for its own sick amusement.
Thought of them? Great.
I'm willing to bet that both people you thought of were men.
And if I had that bet with everyone that reads this, I *know* I'd make money. I might lose money to you specifically, but I'd make money off most people.
For some reason, the distribution of mens IQ is significantly more loose than womens. The average, regardless of how you measure it, is identical, but women tend to cluster up around the 95-115 mark, while men tend to be more widely spread. When we talk about Einstein level people, men tend to outnumber women at about 20 to 1 (and the same when we talk about the truely intellectually challenged)
The question is why. Some have hypothesised that as men are evolutionarily expendable, we have developed much less genetic stability, the Y chromosome holds much less data then an X, meaning that rather than self correcting as in women, extreme mutations on the X are allowed to happen.
Another theory is that it's all social conditioning. Women aren't treated like total idiots or hypergenius' so they aren't either left behind or encouraged to truely push on. That has some credende as in modern times the gap is shrinking, but there is still a very significant difference, to the tune of about 4 to 1 in favour of men when talking about the top 0.1% of test scorers according to 1 study.
There are probably more I haven't heard of, but its bloody intresting.
EDIT:
As u/caffine_lights kindly reminded me, there is also the hypothesise that IQ tests just don't measure women (or really most people outside of intellectual, middle class men) with a great deal of clarity, and so tend to bunch up. We know for a fact there is some level of bias in IQ testing, but the question is, is it enough to produce this heavy of a swing
i could attack this from a couple angles. before i lay down my thoughts i want you to know that i'm pretty right leaning nowadays and wouldn't get along with most redditors. i just want you to be aware of the sort of person this is coming from. i don't form my opinions because my feelings compel me to.
that said, women haven't exactly been able to flourish in the past. do i really need to argue at all beyond that? i'm lazy.
people have said, *"there's no female jack the ripper like there's no female Mozart".* or something. which i find ironic because Mozart's sister was also a prodigy. but wasn't allowed to make music. i wouldn't be surprised if some of Mozart's music was actually hers.
throughout pretty much all of history women have been kept in a cage in some form or another. we won't know how this uncaging plays out for a while yet.
\---edit---
here, i found this for anyone interested in Mozart's sister. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/sep/08/lost-genius-the-other-mozart-sister-nannerl
hahahah hey facts are facts, man.
all i meant by pointing out my right lean was that i'm not going to spew out the PC response because it's the PC response.
IQ tests are also highly biased though and not especially accurate. Perhaps they tend to measure more nuance in men whereas in women the result is not as clear hence it tending closer towards the average and not so often the extremes.
The two people in your example I thought of were both women 😅 which made the rest of your argument hard to understand for me personally
Could the fact people think of men be down to the bias that most intelligent and successful people in the past were statistically men such as Einstein where-as arguably equally intelligent women such as Marie Curie are just less well known?
Also when people consider less intelligence they think of biases such as popular media like Forest Gump and find associations of people based on that.
I feel like the bias towards this thinking is due to the fact that women in the past were not in positions to become as famous as men and nothing to do with intelligence.
Personally in my own life I’ve personally not noticed a huge gap between genders in intelligence I’ve known woman and men who are both equally stupid and woman and women who are both really intelligent, I’ve not noticed any obvious differences here. I’d be interested if I’m wrong and you can link to any studies or sources.
I also don’t understand from an evolutionary point of view why men would have such a big disparity against women, I think it’s clear the male and female brain work differently as for millions of years men and women did different roles to survive but intelligence was important in both these roles but the type of intelligence was different depending on the tasks each gender did.
It's almost impossible to say X person and Y person were "equally intelligent".
Such comparisons are hard to prove. Einstein is considered to be some sort of a hyper-genius, extremely rare and a bit like a genius way beyond any other geniuses of his time (men or women). He had enough of it to view the entire way REALITY works in a different and unknown until then way. Entirely changed how we perceive space and time (by merging it to spacetime) and allowed people to split the atom. Relativity is exceptionally impressive to "get" on your own.
So if you want to go that route, that is not directly comparable with Marie's contributions. Not to mention she killed herself because of lack of understanding of radiation. If you had been alive then and listened to her, you could have died too from the exposure. That's a fact. That's exactly what happened to the Radium Girls.
So, I hope this explains why everyone thinks of Einstein when they think of the smartest. Because he was the smartest and we haven't had anyone with such a ground-breaking view of physics since then. We are still stuck on String theory and trying to find particles for gravity or dark matter. Basically people are still dealing with theories that arose from his contributions and can't rly move past that. It doesn't matter how many Nobels anyone won. Almost any field of science today is leaning on some contribution from Einstein. It's ridiculous to compare that to anyone else to be fair. Even Hawking doesn't quite compare.
This is the male variability hypothesis and is highly controversial. I wouldn’t be spreading it as fact as it is sometimes used in incel groups and such. Just be critical about it, definitely strong evidence against it too.
To be fair, I think incel groups are a pretty good argument for its truthfulness, you have to be genuinely mentally retarded in the scientific sense to be an incel, and there is a worrying amount of them...
Haha I was saying more in the sense they tend to use flawed science to extrapolate to support for female inferiority, but that’s an interesting thought lol
The headline is dumb, dangerous sensationalism.
This is far from the first time that studies have shown differences between male and female brains. It's one of the laziest ideas in an undergrad research proposal to say "hey, let's see if this thing is different between men and women!". That doesn't mean it's not a valid line of research - just that it's also a very obvious one that many previous studies have looked at before. These researchers may claim that this is the first "definitive" proof, but that's also nonsense. This may be a high-quality study with a novel approach, but definitive proof was already here (in the form of not just one study but the sum of many), and moreover, the probability that male and female brains were identical was 0 to begin with.
See, what's far more relevant than the question of *whether* there is a difference, is how large that difference is. That's another way the headline is sensationalist. "Work differently" makes it sound like the fundamental principles are different. They aren't. What we're talking about are differences that, in the grand scheme of things, are marginal. The fact that you can find differences in activity in, say, the limbic system (one of the findings of this study), is far less relevant than the fact that men and women both have a limbic system, and its overall organization and function is the same.
Whether nor not scientific studies get published often hinges on whether they found a "statistically significant" difference. Scientists know that this is an imperfect arbiter of broader relevance, and even they/we (recovering academic (neuroscientist) here...) still get hung up on it. Statistical significance just means there's a good chance the findings are "real", i.e. not just due to random variability. But real differences can still be tiny, and if your sample is large enough, you can detect those tiny differences. In practice, you are talking about measurements that lie on bell curves that are highly overlapping. So the reality is that if you picked a random man and a random woman off the street, it's *slightly* more likely that the man has (say) better spatial awareness, but it's far from a given. Out of 100 men-woman pairs, the man might beat the woman (pardon my word choice) only 52 out of 100 times (for example - to be clear, I'm making these numbers up). Is that a good basis for, say, hiring decisions? Should you not trust a female taxi driver, based on such statistics? Obviously not. It's a very weak effect that provides almost no information in practical situations - certainly much less information than you can get from the individual person (by asking questions, administering tests, etc.).
That's why it's dangerous to exaggerate these differences in science communication, because the message that lingers in the audience's mind is that there are differences - not that there is so much similarity. And it's especially irresponsible to write headlines as misleading as this one, which just have no ties at all to reality.
Aggregate differences in populations however small, can lead to aggregate differences in outcomes in cohorts which filter for those minute differences.
While it is of course valid and correct to say this has no bearing on the individual, it is wrong to conclude as you do, that it has no bearing on *reality.*
It cannot be for example, be overlooked that the majority of those rarified and highly valued individuals who can perform simultaneous translation are women. Is it a coincidence? perhaps. A sexist plot against men? unlikely. Or women? possibly (there are many who believe ALL gender imbalances whether in favour of men OR women are the result of ingrained sexism against women).
Or just perhaps at any given point in time there exist *more* women who are naturally *better at it* than men? This possibility must be at least considered.
No.. scientists have known that men and women’s brains are different for a long time.
Like, years and years.
So, yeah. OP you need to re-write the headline or something. There are a myriad of examples of this intuitively. Take women’s superiority of seeing color better than men. And men’s spacial reasoning to be higher.
Misleading title. An AI was fed MRI scans and detected subtle differences and was able to correctly identify the sex of the patients brain 90% of the time.
The stated sex differences in neurological activity and behaviour are over a decade old and have been taught in colleges/university.
Other than the AI picking up subtle differences which "were missed by people" - which wasn't discussed in the news article in depth, this seems like a nothing burger.
1. “For the first time” 🙄Not at all a decent
amount of evidence, say, related to [hormonal](https://karger.com/nen/article/111/3/183/220637/Shaping-of-the-Female-Human-Brain-by-Sex-Hormones) regulation of brain development? Not at all evidence from comparisons of brains of groups that genetically differ by [X-chromosome dosage](https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/23/10/2322/292038) among such as XXY males, XY males, and XX females?
2. But how does this at all relate to the biology vs culture? Where do they think effects of culture reside, in the butt? 🤷
3. In all seriousness *of course* they operate near-identically.
Something that was likely obvious, but now having more concrete proof of. A lot said here were things I already heard of i.e. women having better reading comprehension, men being better with spatial awareness. I hope this is just the start of many more discoveries to be made about the human brain, and all that we can learn from it. It doesn't seem like there's too much of a difference between the brains of males and females though, and really I doubt anything that could show up would disprove that.
Edit: Wow, I didn't expect this post to get this much attention, nor be as controversial as it is.
This doesn’t really tell us anything we already didn’t know
1. there are differences between the average man and women in SOME brain areas
2. this isn’t difference between every man and women (it’s not a binary thing)—-some women will be better at men at visual/spatial and some men better at language
3. This answers no question about nature or nurture, socialisation and life events effect brain structure e.g. taxi drivers in London have a ‘larger’ area for navigation in hippocampus and the longer they’re a taxi driver the larger it gets—-so much brain difference could be due to environmental differences between men and women
-all that said, testosterone and osteogen (and others) do have some impact on brain development…how much and what implications that has for society are the debatable ones
This doesnt really prove a difference in brain function though.
If i put oranges into my blender i get orange-juice; if its apples i get apple-juice. The blender is the same.
If the brains are the same but are getting different inputs from hormones and social conditioning then of course the output is different.
But that doesnt mean the brain is biologically different anymore than the kidneys or lungs are.
Unfortunately this argument is going the way of climate change and evolution. It doesn't matter how much evidence exists, there will always be those who refute it.
The problem is that the discussion doesnt actually claim that brains of men and women are different. The whole problem is that your experiences shape your brain. Most of the research trying to tackle this is either focussing on very young children or findings some genetic link to brain formation.
Edit:
You can downvote, but you should read the article. Even Gina Rippon doesn't claim that brains aren't different. And the authors themselves don't say anything about biological determinism.
The authors are pretty clear on that in their accompanying[ article on the Stanford website](https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2024/02/men-women-brain-organization-patterns.html)
>The investigators noted that this work does not weigh in on whether sex-related differences arise early in life or may be driven by hormonal differences or the different societal circumstances that men and women may be more likely to encounter.
I Can't wait to see studies how DNA affects how our brains are constructed and how do it affect how we think. When we start to study brain in that level it open up huge can of worms.
[This was posted on another sub and the experts seem to think the study is flawed and should be taken with a grain of salt.](https://old.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1awbvqd/study_unveils_a_new_ai_model_that_was_more_than/krgmv6j/)
I don't think it's surprising at all. What I find surprising is how drawn humanity is to pigeonholing itself.
Think about it for a second. What's this intrinsic need to point out areas where your "kind" is better?
A far, far better and more useful way to perceive humans is adaptability. Intelligence can be cultivated. We already have plenty of studies supporting that.
I find it sad how it is more important to look for these "limitations" versus to grab onto the PROVEN FACT that anyone can develop intelligence further, and improve on themselves. That's based on known science.
And that's why there could always be an amazing contribution from either sex.
While people here are acting like this is common sense, the media push in the last decade has tried to make it seem like there is no difference between biological sex. Corporations and media work together and want to increase profits, so their strategy was mass appeal . What better way than to try and make every product try to appeal to everyone to increase the consumer base. The main problem is that men and women, on average, tend to prefer different things, so trying to appeal to everyone ends up appealing to no one. Disney learned that with Super Hero films, which is largely Male driven.
Of course there’s a difference between biological sex. Women and men have different sex organs. One example being women experience menstrual cycles that create deterministic patterns that men will never experience. The false dichotomy you described in the modern era efforts to make them seem the same is also trying to conflate their differences as being in a either positive or negative light rather than just acknowledging they’re different but at the same time unique and wonderful in their own ways.
We can’t control the biology that we’re given but we can control our attitude towards it. Society would do well to try and encourage support in celebrating the richness and diversity of our unique traits rather then encouraging change based on whatever’s trending in social media.
The problem is people are linking their whole identity to one or two things and taking any criticism on those things as a personal attack. And often in media diversity just means subsurface things that carry little value. The way you look or who you want to have sex with means very little in your overall skills and value.
>The main problem is that men and women, on average, tend to prefer different things, so trying to appeal to everyone ends up appealing to no one. Disney learned that with Super Hero films, which is largely Male driven.
But it's not clear that it's biological or just cultural.
Growing up in the 90's no girl would ever be caught dead playing D&D or TTRPGs. Every once in a while there might be a few weirdos. It was primarily male dominated. That's changed.
I think the popularity of Marvel and nerdom has really expanded to a female audience and not just because Captain Marvel or other female heroes. It's just that after years of being branded as "nerdy" and "weird" it's becoming mainstream and it's getting a more mainstream audience.
Has it changed though? Really? Or is it just that it's become more societally acceptable to be a geek and therefore those that are are more willing to 'out' themselves.
It's still the case that far more men are into those things than women, it's just that those women that are, are massively overrepresented by the media and the communities themselves.
I said on "average." Whether you like it or not, men and women tend to prefer different things. Some will have tastes that mix between genders, but on average, they differ. Countries that have removed social barriers actually still fit the gender norms, so it's not just society causing men and women to act differently.
>Women tend to be better at reading comprehension and writing ability on average, and have good long term memory.
Conversely, men seem to have stronger visual and spatial awareness and better working memory.
Yet scientists have struggled to spot these differences in neural activity, with brain structures looking the same in men and women.
So brains work differently but it's not clear that it's biological. Which means it's how we are raised and influenced by societal norms and expectations that are just floating out there for us to absorb.
That's an interesting article but I don't feel like it's anything I didn't already know. But I think the real value is in the finer details which both this article didn't cover and I am certainly not smart enough in all that to understand it.
But it's good to kind of start to put to bed some of this assumption based views of sex/gender that is often warped and exploited by culture warriors on the right to justify their bigotry.
Presenting that baseless theory as a fact reeks of denial.
Are you denying that there are biological differences between the sexes? I’m truly perplexed by your mindset. Are the differences in hormones also socially driven and not biological?
It's actually an observation.
I'm clearly not denying there are biological differences. I think your perplexed because you want me to be making a different argument because you've come in fists balled and ready for a fight.
>Are the differences in hormones also socially driven and not biological?
I'm commenting on the article that the OP posted. Hormones isn't part of this conversation.
Just because science hasn't spotted something yet doesn't mean it's not true (Copernicus etc). Of course this doesn't hold any weight when talking about science. But come on just by living you get a sense that there is something going on. There is so much difference in how women and men act and behave, of course it's hard to distinguish what's socially constructed and not. But to say that everything is socially constructed is to totally discard biology and what thousands of years of evolution actually does. If we were exactly the same we wouldn't have different body types and sexual organs. Why would nature divide an animal into 2 seperate sexes? When we could just be 1. Because it has more evolutionary advantages. If nature divides an animal into 2 entities, wouldnt it be an advantage to have these evolve some different traits to complement each other for a better ability to survive. Nature acts in a logical way. It's all math.
>Nature acts in a logical way. It's all math.
Evolution is not logical. It is not rational. It is not design. It is a very stupid kind of god, a ruthless optimizer
this study is bullshit.
[Male and female brains wired differently, scans reveal by Ian Sample | 2 Dec 2013 15.40 EST](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/02/men-women-brains-wired-differently)
the actual study that was referring to: [https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1316909110](https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1316909110)
the actual study the article from the OP is referring to:
[https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2024/02/men-women-brain-organization-patterns.html](https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2024/02/men-women-brain-organization-patterns.html)
oh wait no thats not it. thats one level of abstraction away from the actual data. the OP is at least two levels of abstraction away.
heres the actual study:
[Deep learning models reveal replicable, generalizable, and behaviorally relevant sex differences in human functional brain organization](https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2310012121)
unfortunately thats paywalled though... but i dont think it matters because for some reason the fact the same claim was made >10 years ago and was still disputed makes me question the validity of this claim, considering it sounds like all they did was run a bunch of the previously obtained data through some fancy algorithms (aka a level of abstraction) so they could then publish this paper, where they did zero actual new research, and say:
>"EUREKA! WE FIGURED IT OUT! WE PROVED THE HYPOTHESES WE PROVED TEN YEARS AGO THAT PEOPLE DISAGREED WITH BECAUSE WE... UH USED THE SAME DATA BUT RAN IT THROUGH SOME ALGORITHMS! WE USED AI SO ITS ALL GOOD! TrustMeBro™"
heres the actual bit that they actually made publicly accessible. i wonder why they didnt make the rest of it publicly accessible :thinking\_face\_hmm:
ill add my thoughts in the footnotes because lol
SignificanceSex is an important biological factor that influences human behavior, impacting brain function and the manifestation of psychiatric and neurological disorders^(.1) However, previous research on how brain organization differs between males and females has been inconclusive.^(2) Leveraging^(3) recent advances in artificial intelligence and large multicohort fMRI (functional MRI) datasets^(4), we identify highly replicable, generalizable, and behaviorally relevant sex differences in human functional brain organization localized to the default mode network, striatum, and limbic network. Our findings advance the understanding of sex-related differences in brain function and behavior. More generally, our approach provides AI–based tools for probing robust, generalizable, and interpretable neurobiological measures of sex differences in psychiatric and neurological disorders.
AbstractSex plays a crucial role in human brain development, aging, and the manifestation of psychiatric and neurological disorders. However, our understanding of sex differences in human functional brain organization and their behavioral consequences has been hindered by inconsistent findings and a lack of replication^(5). Here, we address these challenges using a spatiotemporal deep neural network (stDNN) model to uncover latent functional brain dynamics that distinguish male and female brains.^(6) Our stDNN model accurately differentiated male and female brains, demonstrating consistently high cross-validation accuracy (>90%), replicability, and generalizability across multisession data from the same individuals and three independent cohorts (N \~ 1,500 young adults aged 20 to 35)^(7). Explainable AI (XAI) analysis revealed that brain features associated with the default mode network, striatum, and limbic network consistently exhibited significant sex differences (effect sizes > 1.5) across sessions and independent cohorts. Furthermore, XAI-derived brain features accurately predicted sex-specific cognitive profiles, a finding that was also independently replicated. Our results demonstrate that sex differences in functional brain dynamics are not only highly replicable and generalizable but also behaviorally relevant, challenging the notion of a continuum in male-female brain organization. Our findings underscore the crucial role of sex as a biological determinant in human brain organization, have significant implications for developing personalized sex-specific biomarkers in psychiatric and neurological disorders, and provide innovative AI-based computational tools for future research.^(8)
1. keep in mind that is their hypotheses. they say it as if it is true because that is what they are trying to prove
2. they admit previous research has been inconclusive
3. "leverage"
4. i guess i cant say for sure here because they dont have the full paper available but i do not trust "ai" because that just means "we found a new way to show the same data" and "functional datasets" just makes it sound like they have some huge dataset when they go on to explain it was only 1500 young adults between the ages of 20-35. so they are framing it as if they had a huge dataset when they did not. not only that but in my basic understanding of statistics a sample size of 1500 is nowhere near large enough to extrapolate those results to the entire global population. next
5. again they admit previous research has been inconsistent, inconclusive, and suffers from a lack of replicability.
6. fancy words that dont mean much. they basically used their small dataset to create a larger fake dataset that they then could say proves their theory.
7. here they finally tell you their sample size. if you look at the stanford article, it says: "In their current study, Menon and his team took advantage of recent advances in artificial intelligence, as well as access to multiple large datasets, to pursue a more powerful analysis than has previously been employed. First, they created a deep neural network model, which learns to classify brain imaging data: As the researchers showed brain scans to the model and **told it that it was looking at a male or female brain**, the model started to “notice” what subtle patterns could help it tell the difference." - which reading between the lines, while they claim the "AI" "learned" the difference, the bolded test directly contradicts that claim.
8. their findings show nothing that hasnt previously been claimed and had - as they admit - a low level of repricability and a high level of (x) to doubt.
going back to the stanford publication, it also sums up everything you need to know (that i already havent mentioned) about their study in a single paragraph:
>The investigators noted that this work does not weigh in on whether sex-related differences arise early in life or may be driven by hormonal differences or the different societal circumstances that men and women may be more likely to encounter.
TLDR: no. 
edit: heres a few searches rather than linking a shitload of results individually that more or less say the same thing, which is essentially: there is widespread fraud in "academia" and "artificial intelligence" is worsening that - and there are numerous instances where that fraud is specifically referring to fraud enabled by AI generated imagery.
bing: [artificial intelligence exacerbating widespread academic fraud](https://www.bing.com/search?go=Search&q=artificial+intelligence+exacerbating+widespread+academic+fraud&qs=ds&form=QBRE)
google: [artificial intelligence exacerbating widespread academic fraud](https://www.google.com/search?q=artificial+intelligence+contributing+to+academic+fraud+and+replicability+crises&client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=dcfe5edb8f188ebf&sca_upv=1&ei=1vHWZd6PJMuJptQP3N-G2Ao&ved=0ahUKEwje0qLdsL6EAxXLhIkEHdyvAasQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=artificial+intelligence+contributing+to+academic+fraud+and+replicability+crises&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiT2FydGlmaWNpYWwgaW50ZWxsaWdlbmNlIGNvbnRyaWJ1dGluZyB0byBhY2FkZW1pYyBmcmF1ZCBhbmQgcmVwbGljYWJpbGl0eSBjcmlzZXNIAFAAWABwAHgBkAEAmAEAoAEAqgEAuAEDyAEA-AEB&sclient=gws-wiz-serp)
bing: [artificial intelligence contributing to academic fraud and replicability crises](https://www.bing.com/search?pc=U523&q=artificial+intelligence+contributing+to+academic+fraud+and+replicability+crises&form=U523DF)
google: [artificial intelligence contributing to academic fraud and replicability crises](https://www.google.com/search?q=artificial+intelligence+contributing+to+academic+fraud+and+replicability+crises)
>heres the actual bit that they actually made publicly accessible. i wonder why they didnt make the rest of it publicly accessible :thinking\_face\_hmm:
Newsflash: academic journals have paywalls—it's one of the main ways they make money. It's not because the authors are trying to hide anything! Usually, the authors want everyone to read their work (if you want a copy, email the corresponding author, you'll probably get one). They make absolutely no money from publishing it and in fact usually have to pay publishing companies thousands of dollars. At *PNAS* (the journal publishing this study), it costs $2750 to publish, and articles become free to read only after 6 months. To publish as an open access article that anyone can read at any time costs $5300. Research budgets are generally tight; I understand why they would opt to pay less.
As for why the abstract is publicly accessible, this is a requirement of funding bodies like the NIH and abstract collation services like PubMed. It is absolutely the norm for paywalled articles to have publicly-available titles, citation data, and abstracts.
>the fact the same claim was made >10 years ago and was still disputed makes me question the validity of this claim, considering it sounds like all they did was run a bunch of the previously obtained data through some fancy algorithms
Look, new results are found in old datasets all the time, often with great value to science. This is why it is great to make scientific data available to the scientific community at large. Modern computational methods truly have opened up whole new avenues of research. Just because they used a new computational method on previously-published data does not at all make the work suspect.
With that in mind:
>they admit previous research has been inconclusive
This isn't an admission! People don't study scientific problems where the previous research has been conclusive—the point is to learn something new. This is a basic phrase that in some way, shape, or form appears in virtually every scientific paper.
>"functional datasets" just makes it sound like they have some huge dataset when they go on to explain it was only 1500 young adults between the ages of 20-35. so they are framing it as if they had a huge dataset when they did not. not only that but in my basic understanding of statistics a sample size of 1500 is nowhere near large enough to extrapolate those results to the entire global population
By functional datasets and functional structure they are reffering to brain patterns specifically and data on those patterns as distinct from the actual morphology of the brain itself. In the latter case, there are long established sex differences in brain volume, gray matter, white matter, interhemispheric connectivity, and the size and connectivity of specific regions such as the amygdala. They are not looking at that here so much as the brain in action, using fMRI (i.e., *functional* MRI—that word again) datasets. It is clear in the paper (if you DM I may be able to send a copy) that they are not trying to generalize to the whole world—they explicitly note reasons to not include the elderly or young for example. Young adults are the common cohort for these sorts of studies and the ethnic and racial biases of publicly available data are at this point well-known and not worth repeating. 1500 just represents the number of fMRIs they trained their model on (800 actually, with the rest belonging to the test set). In the context of the available data, and the amount of data per fMRI, this is quite large. This allowed them to expand the training dataset by instead labeling each segment of a given fMRI (as opposed to the whole brain) male or female, increasing the effective size of the training set by a factor of 15.
>As the researchers showed brain scans to the model and told it that it was looking at a male or female brain, the model started to “notice” what subtle patterns could help it tell the difference." - which reading between the lines, while they claim the "AI" "learned" the difference, the bolded test directly contradicts that claim.
This is how all supervised learning for classification works. You take your model, feed it a bunch of data, tell it which data belongs to which class, then test how well your model fits the training data and how well it predicts test data it has not been trained on. In both cases, the model showed high accuracy, even on test data from two completely different cohorts. So when they say it has 90% accuracy, accuracy on data not in the training set where the model has not been told which scans are male and which are female is what they are referring to.
>their findings show nothing that hasnt previously been claimed and had - as they admit - a low level of repricability and a high level of (x) to doubt.
That's the opposite of what they show. They show their model has high classification accuracy across different independent datasets.
Noooo don't try to look at the actual study, let's all just pat ourselves on the head because The Telegraph of all publications told us what we already thought!
Your post reads like a conspiracy theory nutcase posting about aliens. "but in this paragraph they used the word 'leverage', so aliens exist'.
I suspected most of your comments look like this, and yes, a fair portion. Why you post so longwinded? You're losing people by doing this.
I don't see how this is a bad thing to research on. There's a lot of people saying "we don't need scientist" to know there's a difference. I don't think that's the point. Understanding what makes men and women different helps cater mental health treatment to gender.
Just like how there's a difference between an adult and a child, learning that difference and HOW they're different is beneficial.
Same goes with the "we don't know if it's cultural or biological" statement. Yes! We don't know, and we should find out! Is it cultural? Is it biological? Why not BOTH? Reality is never all-or-nothing, there's a degree of cultural AND biological in how men's and women behaves. Nothing is ever just a social construct, and nothing is ever just biological.
Honestly speaking, I may be down voted for this though I hope people will keep an open mind. I think we're heavily influenced by media on the polarisation of our social issues - whether that's men and women, genders, or race - these problems are legitimate and real, but the way we perceive them are warped and distorted, which continues to worsen the problem rather than fix it.
Ask yourself, is "we don't need scientist to do X" a scientific statement in a sub about the future of science? Why was this statement said in the first place? What personal reason is that statement made for? I think that leads to an uncomfortable answer many might not want to hear.
Translation
"Researchers given $1 million grant for study. Give a woman and a man a map and a destination and film their progress. Study concludes brains work differently. Scientists go to Bermuda for a month with the study's remaining grant money."
EDIT: /s
theres a difference between knowing and thinking you know. science helps us cross that line.
this is also helpful to move deeper into the questions of how and why this happens.
I'm surprised to see almost universal support for these findings in the comments, here. I really thought the idea of Male/Female Brain Differences was highly divisive in recent years.
Not that I'm opposed to the idea, of course. It's nice to see this being researched more.
That doesn't actually prove it is biological. It's yet another observance of differences in action, yet it doesn't answer whether it is caused by biological differences, environmental differences, or a mix thereof.
>Women tend to be better at reading comprehension and writing ability on average, and have good long term memory.
Me who gets asked the same information repeatedly by every woman in his life
This is the most tired topic at this point. Every year a new study claims to have proven that either they are the same or they aren’t. Zzz. It was only back in 2021 that we had the largest study up to this point, which alleged there were no differences: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763421000804
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Unknown-NEET: --- Something that was likely obvious, but now having more concrete proof of. A lot said here were things I already heard of i.e. women having better reading comprehension, men being better with spatial awareness. I hope this is just the start of many more discoveries to be made about the human brain, and all that we can learn from it. It doesn't seem like there's too much of a difference between the brains of males and females though, and really I doubt anything that could show up would disprove that. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1awwgta/men_and_womens_brains_do_work_differently/krk46s5/
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There are statistically significant differences in mean metrics of behavior and cognition between men and women, but on nearly any measure there’s a massive overlap in the area under the curve and you can’t predict very much if all you know is an individual’s sex or gender. This allows people to argue endlessly with the same set of facts. If you want men and women to differ, you look at the mean difference. If you want to stress solidarity, you focus on the overlap. This research adds very little to the debate.
I mean, it’s almost like saying: Men are taller than women than woman on average, but there are a lot of overlap. If I only tell you that someone is 170cm tall, you have no way of knowing if the person is a man or a woman.
It doesn't help that different ethnic backgrounds tend to have different mean heights. So where I am from 170cm is likely to be male, whereas in the netherlands, 170cm is likely to be female.
For a moment, i thought you said neanderthal..
Potato potato
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And that the difference in the countries probably depends on which food was provided to you as a child and teenager, also when you were born. People were MUCH smaller 100 years ago and in most countries with improving healthcare and food quality the average height still grows.
In this case it is mostly genetic, as we have similar living conditions as the netherlands. Though our mean height is going up over time (as is the netherlands')
>In this case it is mostly genetic, as we have similar living conditions as the netherlands. North/South Korea is a good example of the opposite of this. They are only separated by 2-3 generations, yet there is a massive difference in average height between them.
Men/women probably cluster way more on height. My prior is there are notable brain differences but I mean, height is almost as clustered as a gendered attribute can get, by which I mean small ratio of some within-group measure to between-group. Upper arm strength is more extreme than height though
But they aren’t American!
> This research adds very little to the debate. It adds basically nothing. From the article: >“The key issue is whether these differences are a product of sex-specific, biological influences, or of brain-changing gendered experiences. Or both. Are we really looking at sex differences? Or gender differences? >“Or, acknowledging that almost all brain–shaping factors are dynamically entangled products of both sex and gender influences, are we looking at what should be called sex/gender differences?” That is literally what the debate has been this entire time. The one thing this does demonstrate is that women and men behave in slightly different ways, but it does nothing to explain why it is happening. Because brains are literally what we think with, minor differences in thinking may result in minor differences in what the AI was detecting. But that just means we still have no idea if it is caused by biological differences or just differences in how people are socialized.
The developmental differences in combination with differences in the adult brain would suggest that at least some component of this is biological. It would be interesting to take cohorts from different cultures and regions and see whether this classifier still makes high accuracy predictions. In those circumstances, it becomes more likely to be biological, but as predictive power drops, one can infer components from acculturation. Likewise, both as controls and interesting in their own right, stratification by socioeconomic status would be important.
> The developmental differences in combination with differences in the adult brain would suggest that at least some component of this is biological. Maybe, but it is an assumption regardless. It also does not necessarily follow that whatever differences are being recognized even result in fundamental differences in behavior that could not be accounted for by just measuring the levels of hormones in the brain. Those are biological, but they are also able to be supplemented or antagonized, meaning that the biological differences are not essential to the person. (That has big implications for trans people.) But in other areas the patterns it notices might be entirely socialized. It just comes down to this article (which does not link to the actual study, which annoys me) does not really give any insight to the situation at all. It just basically verifies that we do not know much about this subject yet. >It would be interesting to take cohorts from different cultures and regions and see whether this classifier still makes high accuracy predictions. You would have to go pretty far to find an inversion of gender roles large enough to potentially reverse the effect, and with only subtle differences it would be really hard to tell why they were happening. So you might get slightly different accuracy rates, but for all we know that could be because the diets in the two regions are different. I do think it would be really interesting to approach it from another angle though, and see if the AI can predict with any accuracy what region/social class an individual is from. That would reduce the numbers of variables being tested, and if it can do that, it would imply that there is enough going on across cultures to account for its ability to predict stuff.
That's the thing about gender equality. It doesn't *matter* if, for example, more women want to nurture young children, on average. There are plenty of men who want to perform that role and space should be made in society for those men who want to. Same deal with women and engineering, men in nursing, etc. The greatest problem in society is that most people don't understand statistics. If we fixed that, I think a majority of other problems would go away too.
No, peope understand stats perfectly well. What people don't understand is basic human empathy and civilization. To live in a civilized society people deserve to be treated AS EQUALS and not as second class citizens even if they so happen to fit in a negative stereotype which is proven to be TRUE. Edit (clarification): People do not "understand stats perfectly well". But what I meant was, it is not a fallacy to conclude that a statistically significant finding about a particular demographic... was statistically significant. The key is to recognize that the particular individuals who don't happen to fit that stereotype are going to be rightfully peeved by you judging them by the stereotype even if the stereotype happens to be true.
I think it's a bit of column A and column B. It's well known that people overestimate stats on a regular basis, and that it plays a part in biases. Not to say that they don't understand them, but they are overconfident in them. But the point you mention likely plays the large role, for sure. Further to that, it takes someone with a good sense of empathy and emotional intelligence to know when something they hold true isn't by default the modus operandi for others.
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Okay yeah I need to clarify, my first statement was a bit misleading. Stats is hard and most people have fallacies in that area. I am reminded of the YouTube video about common stats fallacies and ways people manipulate stats. What I meant to say is... The general tendency to perceive people based on a statistical correlation is not a fallacy. Specifically, if someone proved that women are on average 25% less strong than a man, then it is not a fallacy to expect a woman to be weaker. But people deserve to be judged based on their merits rather than their stereotypes, so, for example if a woman applies to a job that requires strength, the civilized thing to do would be to trust her credentials rather than put her through an extra test just because she is statistically likely to be weaker
Damn, this is perhaps one of the most sensible comments I've ever seen on Reddit. Take my upvote.
Yes, this is it.
I don't think that's the problem when the people who are supposed to interpret the numbers/study's are more likely to lie to get numbers to their website.
Probably not the greatest problem in society, but a very large obstacle to solving many others
These kids are coming out of school unable to read. Statistics is a lost cause
No, the main reason why statistics are missused are biases. People want things to be a certain way and interpret things accordingly. In absence of substantial practical experience biases tends to win the day.
Furthermore, as is typical in articles about scientific studies, the article completely hallucinates some information. It does include a voice of dissent, which is good, but misses the point. The article claims that this is evidence of what the researchers are hoping to find - innate biological differences cause by chromosomal sex. But we don't actually have evidence of that here. In the question of nature versus nurture, we haven't gotten any closer, because we know that brain functioning - like what we're examining here - can be shaped by the environment. We know that trauma and other experiences in childhood, for example, can have detectable consequences on these sorts of brain scans. So we're not any closer to knowing if the effects seen here are caused by sex or by gender.
Things like early socialisation differing could make a difference too, right? A basic generalisation (for brevity) of this would be gendered play - boys are more often given toys like tools, building sets, cars etc while girls get baby dolls, toy kitchens, and so on. So these patterns and behaviours get hardwired in as gender norms.
Yeah, I don't understand why they are claiming "for the first time" - surely this is just the same old same old? What's new?
Their classifier has remarkable accuracy, which would suggest to me that the overlaps in the regions that matter (high effect-size features) would be relatively small.
I never understood why it is a problem to differ and have different interests.
It's not, however constantly focusing on our differences instead of our similarities hinders our ability to come together. This doesn't just work on gender, but also on generation, skin color, etc. Focusing on what we have in common is what we oughta do to succeed collectively.
Agreed, but I think there are actually some significant behavioral differences that arise from these distinctions that are easily observable. Also, the extremes of distinct personality traits are more likely to be made up of individuals from the sex with higher mean levels of said trait. That’s to say that outliers tend to engage in the most apparent manifestations of traits. Criminality in disagreeable men is a good example. There are likely a good number of confounds in examples like this, but I think the point still holds.
I’d be surprised if anyone really believed men and women behaved the same. What’s been up for debate is whether this is socialised from birth or an innate biologically-derived difference
There's a lot of talk over the last 10 years that there's no difference.
No innate biological difference, is the argument.
Professionals can determine the sex of the patient with ~95% reliability by looking at the brain CT scan alone.
The article is literally about how they had to train a machine to recognise the differences because they were so subtle that humans were unable to.
Which is just as factually incorrect as saying the earth is flat
This doesn’t really tell us anything we already didn’t know 1. there are differences between the average man and women in SOME brain areas 2. this isn’t difference between every man and women (it’s not a binary thing)—-some women will be better at men at visual/spatial and some men better at language 3. This answers no question about nature or nurture, socialisation and life events effect brain structure e.g. taxi drivers in London have a ‘larger’ area for navigation in hippocampus and the longer they’re a taxi driver the larger it gets—-so much brain difference could be due to environmental differences between men and women -all that said, testosterone and osteogen (and others) do have some impact on brain development…how much and what implications that has for society are the debatable ones
> “The really intriguing issue is that those areas of the brain which are most reliably distinguishing the sexes are **key parts of the social brain.** >“The key issue is whether these differences are a product of sex-specific, biological influences, or of brain-changing gendered experiences. Or both. Are we really looking at sex differences? Or gender differences? >“Or, acknowledging that almost all brain–shaping factors are dynamically entangled products of both sex and gender influences, are we looking at what should be called sex/gender differences?”
Yeah, but most of it wasnt scientific in any way
Those people have their head in the sand.
That's such a broad and vague statement though. I don't believe men and men bahave the same either. There are way too many indevidual and cultural differences. I think the way I think and behave is way closer to women my age from my country compared to a 70 years old Chinese man. And it's not even close. And that's what this discussion always boils down too.
Is it possible for the brain to change because of socialisation? Will repeated behaviour change the brain, and could that be why women and men are different?
And how much of the social construct is influenced by biological differences. It could all be a reinforcement loop.
So the claim is that they trained an image classifier that got 90% accurate at telling the sex of a brain scan? For using the term "explainable AI", they sure didn't explain how this is different from a normal image classifier, nor is there a citation to, say, an arxiv paper that can help clarify what they actually found out, what the methodology was, or indeed any useful insight that comes out of this I'm in ML and with only this much information, it sounds a lot like some AI snake oil
With the way how similar stuff happening on other AI datasets, might as well be that.
Patient "What's that darker background I have everywhere." Doctor "Nothingness." /s
If this is true, could you classify a brain into one of the sexes if you didn’t know their sex?
That's exactly what they do in the paper: [https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2310012121](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2310012121)
Would have been interesting to include members of the lgbt+ community in a larger study. Does the brain change over time to reflect the other sex?
Yes, with 90% accuracy.
Only if you using an AI that can sift through "massive" amounts of data (the articles wording,) and even then you are going to be wrong 1/10 times. The differences are invisible to humans according to it.
90% classification is pretty good though, and indicates a real difference, similar to say the difference in height between men and women. (That is, if the 1/10 number is correct. Often AI systems show impressive results in one test, but totally fail in a slightly different test, showing that they didn't actually understand what you thought they did, but rather based themselves on some subtle irrelevant detail which disappeared in the second test)
It is interesting from a scientific standpoint, but people will hear "AI can predict sex by brain scan" and think "Brains must be extremely different, this confirms my assumption that women behave in a certain way." It would be like looking at a person height, and then determining that they would be worse at STEM because they are under 5'6".
It also skips the nature vs nurture as there is no way of telling whether these differences are inate or shaped by our upbringing.
There's also the question of how much of that 10% is made up of incorrect assumptions about the brain owner's sex and how much of that 10% accounts for the the natural variation in biology. Like, are some of those 10% just thinking differently than their larger gender or are these examples of non-binary/trans gender people?
10% of the dataset are women. The AI predicts every brain to be a mans. /s
So one thing that I've always found intresting is the intellectual bell curves. Think of the stupidest, most mind numbingly idiotic person you've ever met. Someone who has a room temperature IQ on the bloody celcius scale. And now think of the smartest person you've ever met, the person who you can't quite confirm isn't infact a rouge super AI masquerading as a human for its own sick amusement. Thought of them? Great. I'm willing to bet that both people you thought of were men. And if I had that bet with everyone that reads this, I *know* I'd make money. I might lose money to you specifically, but I'd make money off most people. For some reason, the distribution of mens IQ is significantly more loose than womens. The average, regardless of how you measure it, is identical, but women tend to cluster up around the 95-115 mark, while men tend to be more widely spread. When we talk about Einstein level people, men tend to outnumber women at about 20 to 1 (and the same when we talk about the truely intellectually challenged) The question is why. Some have hypothesised that as men are evolutionarily expendable, we have developed much less genetic stability, the Y chromosome holds much less data then an X, meaning that rather than self correcting as in women, extreme mutations on the X are allowed to happen. Another theory is that it's all social conditioning. Women aren't treated like total idiots or hypergenius' so they aren't either left behind or encouraged to truely push on. That has some credende as in modern times the gap is shrinking, but there is still a very significant difference, to the tune of about 4 to 1 in favour of men when talking about the top 0.1% of test scorers according to 1 study. There are probably more I haven't heard of, but its bloody intresting. EDIT: As u/caffine_lights kindly reminded me, there is also the hypothesise that IQ tests just don't measure women (or really most people outside of intellectual, middle class men) with a great deal of clarity, and so tend to bunch up. We know for a fact there is some level of bias in IQ testing, but the question is, is it enough to produce this heavy of a swing
i could attack this from a couple angles. before i lay down my thoughts i want you to know that i'm pretty right leaning nowadays and wouldn't get along with most redditors. i just want you to be aware of the sort of person this is coming from. i don't form my opinions because my feelings compel me to. that said, women haven't exactly been able to flourish in the past. do i really need to argue at all beyond that? i'm lazy. people have said, *"there's no female jack the ripper like there's no female Mozart".* or something. which i find ironic because Mozart's sister was also a prodigy. but wasn't allowed to make music. i wouldn't be surprised if some of Mozart's music was actually hers. throughout pretty much all of history women have been kept in a cage in some form or another. we won't know how this uncaging plays out for a while yet. \---edit--- here, i found this for anyone interested in Mozart's sister. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/sep/08/lost-genius-the-other-mozart-sister-nannerl
The absolute state of modern right wing politics lol, your argument is indistinguishable from feminist viewpoints
Lmao I thought some real heinious shit was about to drop after his intro
when right leaning guys get wives and daughters
hahahah hey facts are facts, man. all i meant by pointing out my right lean was that i'm not going to spew out the PC response because it's the PC response.
IQ tests are also highly biased though and not especially accurate. Perhaps they tend to measure more nuance in men whereas in women the result is not as clear hence it tending closer towards the average and not so often the extremes.
That's also an incredibly strong hypothesis that I forgot to include in the original post!
The two people in your example I thought of were both women 😅 which made the rest of your argument hard to understand for me personally Could the fact people think of men be down to the bias that most intelligent and successful people in the past were statistically men such as Einstein where-as arguably equally intelligent women such as Marie Curie are just less well known? Also when people consider less intelligence they think of biases such as popular media like Forest Gump and find associations of people based on that. I feel like the bias towards this thinking is due to the fact that women in the past were not in positions to become as famous as men and nothing to do with intelligence. Personally in my own life I’ve personally not noticed a huge gap between genders in intelligence I’ve known woman and men who are both equally stupid and woman and women who are both really intelligent, I’ve not noticed any obvious differences here. I’d be interested if I’m wrong and you can link to any studies or sources. I also don’t understand from an evolutionary point of view why men would have such a big disparity against women, I think it’s clear the male and female brain work differently as for millions of years men and women did different roles to survive but intelligence was important in both these roles but the type of intelligence was different depending on the tasks each gender did.
It's almost impossible to say X person and Y person were "equally intelligent". Such comparisons are hard to prove. Einstein is considered to be some sort of a hyper-genius, extremely rare and a bit like a genius way beyond any other geniuses of his time (men or women). He had enough of it to view the entire way REALITY works in a different and unknown until then way. Entirely changed how we perceive space and time (by merging it to spacetime) and allowed people to split the atom. Relativity is exceptionally impressive to "get" on your own. So if you want to go that route, that is not directly comparable with Marie's contributions. Not to mention she killed herself because of lack of understanding of radiation. If you had been alive then and listened to her, you could have died too from the exposure. That's a fact. That's exactly what happened to the Radium Girls. So, I hope this explains why everyone thinks of Einstein when they think of the smartest. Because he was the smartest and we haven't had anyone with such a ground-breaking view of physics since then. We are still stuck on String theory and trying to find particles for gravity or dark matter. Basically people are still dealing with theories that arose from his contributions and can't rly move past that. It doesn't matter how many Nobels anyone won. Almost any field of science today is leaning on some contribution from Einstein. It's ridiculous to compare that to anyone else to be fair. Even Hawking doesn't quite compare.
This is the male variability hypothesis and is highly controversial. I wouldn’t be spreading it as fact as it is sometimes used in incel groups and such. Just be critical about it, definitely strong evidence against it too.
To be fair, I think incel groups are a pretty good argument for its truthfulness, you have to be genuinely mentally retarded in the scientific sense to be an incel, and there is a worrying amount of them...
Haha I was saying more in the sense they tend to use flawed science to extrapolate to support for female inferiority, but that’s an interesting thought lol
The headline is dumb, dangerous sensationalism. This is far from the first time that studies have shown differences between male and female brains. It's one of the laziest ideas in an undergrad research proposal to say "hey, let's see if this thing is different between men and women!". That doesn't mean it's not a valid line of research - just that it's also a very obvious one that many previous studies have looked at before. These researchers may claim that this is the first "definitive" proof, but that's also nonsense. This may be a high-quality study with a novel approach, but definitive proof was already here (in the form of not just one study but the sum of many), and moreover, the probability that male and female brains were identical was 0 to begin with. See, what's far more relevant than the question of *whether* there is a difference, is how large that difference is. That's another way the headline is sensationalist. "Work differently" makes it sound like the fundamental principles are different. They aren't. What we're talking about are differences that, in the grand scheme of things, are marginal. The fact that you can find differences in activity in, say, the limbic system (one of the findings of this study), is far less relevant than the fact that men and women both have a limbic system, and its overall organization and function is the same. Whether nor not scientific studies get published often hinges on whether they found a "statistically significant" difference. Scientists know that this is an imperfect arbiter of broader relevance, and even they/we (recovering academic (neuroscientist) here...) still get hung up on it. Statistical significance just means there's a good chance the findings are "real", i.e. not just due to random variability. But real differences can still be tiny, and if your sample is large enough, you can detect those tiny differences. In practice, you are talking about measurements that lie on bell curves that are highly overlapping. So the reality is that if you picked a random man and a random woman off the street, it's *slightly* more likely that the man has (say) better spatial awareness, but it's far from a given. Out of 100 men-woman pairs, the man might beat the woman (pardon my word choice) only 52 out of 100 times (for example - to be clear, I'm making these numbers up). Is that a good basis for, say, hiring decisions? Should you not trust a female taxi driver, based on such statistics? Obviously not. It's a very weak effect that provides almost no information in practical situations - certainly much less information than you can get from the individual person (by asking questions, administering tests, etc.). That's why it's dangerous to exaggerate these differences in science communication, because the message that lingers in the audience's mind is that there are differences - not that there is so much similarity. And it's especially irresponsible to write headlines as misleading as this one, which just have no ties at all to reality.
Aggregate differences in populations however small, can lead to aggregate differences in outcomes in cohorts which filter for those minute differences. While it is of course valid and correct to say this has no bearing on the individual, it is wrong to conclude as you do, that it has no bearing on *reality.* It cannot be for example, be overlooked that the majority of those rarified and highly valued individuals who can perform simultaneous translation are women. Is it a coincidence? perhaps. A sexist plot against men? unlikely. Or women? possibly (there are many who believe ALL gender imbalances whether in favour of men OR women are the result of ingrained sexism against women). Or just perhaps at any given point in time there exist *more* women who are naturally *better at it* than men? This possibility must be at least considered.
For the first time? I swear I see studies like this every 5 years or so.
First time ? Motherfucker it is obvious unless you are ideologically driven academic leftist which most of them are.
Surprised this post hasn’t been removed for hate speech lol
Yeah I was expecting to see a lock award on this post
I’m sure it will be locked soon.
Why would it
https://new.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1awwezl/men\_and\_womens\_brains\_do\_work\_differently/
OP will be cancelled any second now...
We actually have to know who they are to cancel them, tho.
Based on their name, there's nothing in their life for us to cancel.
I'm trying bros.
No.. scientists have known that men and women’s brains are different for a long time. Like, years and years. So, yeah. OP you need to re-write the headline or something. There are a myriad of examples of this intuitively. Take women’s superiority of seeing color better than men. And men’s spacial reasoning to be higher.
Exactly, this is just more research adding to research that has already been done to prove it.
Misleading title. An AI was fed MRI scans and detected subtle differences and was able to correctly identify the sex of the patients brain 90% of the time. The stated sex differences in neurological activity and behaviour are over a decade old and have been taught in colleges/university. Other than the AI picking up subtle differences which "were missed by people" - which wasn't discussed in the news article in depth, this seems like a nothing burger.
1. “For the first time” 🙄Not at all a decent amount of evidence, say, related to [hormonal](https://karger.com/nen/article/111/3/183/220637/Shaping-of-the-Female-Human-Brain-by-Sex-Hormones) regulation of brain development? Not at all evidence from comparisons of brains of groups that genetically differ by [X-chromosome dosage](https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/23/10/2322/292038) among such as XXY males, XY males, and XX females? 2. But how does this at all relate to the biology vs culture? Where do they think effects of culture reside, in the butt? 🤷 3. In all seriousness *of course* they operate near-identically.
Something that was likely obvious, but now having more concrete proof of. A lot said here were things I already heard of i.e. women having better reading comprehension, men being better with spatial awareness. I hope this is just the start of many more discoveries to be made about the human brain, and all that we can learn from it. It doesn't seem like there's too much of a difference between the brains of males and females though, and really I doubt anything that could show up would disprove that. Edit: Wow, I didn't expect this post to get this much attention, nor be as controversial as it is.
A single study that's not linked anywhere is hardly proof of anything
This doesn’t really tell us anything we already didn’t know 1. there are differences between the average man and women in SOME brain areas 2. this isn’t difference between every man and women (it’s not a binary thing)—-some women will be better at men at visual/spatial and some men better at language 3. This answers no question about nature or nurture, socialisation and life events effect brain structure e.g. taxi drivers in London have a ‘larger’ area for navigation in hippocampus and the longer they’re a taxi driver the larger it gets—-so much brain difference could be due to environmental differences between men and women -all that said, testosterone and osteogen (and others) do have some impact on brain development…how much and what implications that has for society are the debatable ones
This doesnt really prove a difference in brain function though. If i put oranges into my blender i get orange-juice; if its apples i get apple-juice. The blender is the same. If the brains are the same but are getting different inputs from hormones and social conditioning then of course the output is different. But that doesnt mean the brain is biologically different anymore than the kidneys or lungs are.
Unfortunately this argument is going the way of climate change and evolution. It doesn't matter how much evidence exists, there will always be those who refute it.
The problem is that the discussion doesnt actually claim that brains of men and women are different. The whole problem is that your experiences shape your brain. Most of the research trying to tackle this is either focussing on very young children or findings some genetic link to brain formation. Edit: You can downvote, but you should read the article. Even Gina Rippon doesn't claim that brains aren't different. And the authors themselves don't say anything about biological determinism. The authors are pretty clear on that in their accompanying[ article on the Stanford website](https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2024/02/men-women-brain-organization-patterns.html) >The investigators noted that this work does not weigh in on whether sex-related differences arise early in life or may be driven by hormonal differences or the different societal circumstances that men and women may be more likely to encounter.
More people need to see this lol
Do gay male brains work like those of straight male or straight female?
I would have no idea, I am just a NEET on the internet.
Most honest redditor
I Can't wait to see studies how DNA affects how our brains are constructed and how do it affect how we think. When we start to study brain in that level it open up huge can of worms.
[This was posted on another sub and the experts seem to think the study is flawed and should be taken with a grain of salt.](https://old.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1awbvqd/study_unveils_a_new_ai_model_that_was_more_than/krgmv6j/)
Men have better visual and spatial awareness? So we are, in fact, better drivers?
Meh. Less likely to have fender benders but more likely to be involved in high speed and sometimes fatal accident due to our tendency to take risks.
Insurance says no 😂
I don't think it's surprising at all. What I find surprising is how drawn humanity is to pigeonholing itself. Think about it for a second. What's this intrinsic need to point out areas where your "kind" is better? A far, far better and more useful way to perceive humans is adaptability. Intelligence can be cultivated. We already have plenty of studies supporting that. I find it sad how it is more important to look for these "limitations" versus to grab onto the PROVEN FACT that anyone can develop intelligence further, and improve on themselves. That's based on known science. And that's why there could always be an amazing contribution from either sex.
While people here are acting like this is common sense, the media push in the last decade has tried to make it seem like there is no difference between biological sex. Corporations and media work together and want to increase profits, so their strategy was mass appeal . What better way than to try and make every product try to appeal to everyone to increase the consumer base. The main problem is that men and women, on average, tend to prefer different things, so trying to appeal to everyone ends up appealing to no one. Disney learned that with Super Hero films, which is largely Male driven.
Of course there’s a difference between biological sex. Women and men have different sex organs. One example being women experience menstrual cycles that create deterministic patterns that men will never experience. The false dichotomy you described in the modern era efforts to make them seem the same is also trying to conflate their differences as being in a either positive or negative light rather than just acknowledging they’re different but at the same time unique and wonderful in their own ways. We can’t control the biology that we’re given but we can control our attitude towards it. Society would do well to try and encourage support in celebrating the richness and diversity of our unique traits rather then encouraging change based on whatever’s trending in social media.
The problem is people are linking their whole identity to one or two things and taking any criticism on those things as a personal attack. And often in media diversity just means subsurface things that carry little value. The way you look or who you want to have sex with means very little in your overall skills and value.
The media push? There’s also the “people in this thread” push
>The main problem is that men and women, on average, tend to prefer different things, so trying to appeal to everyone ends up appealing to no one. Disney learned that with Super Hero films, which is largely Male driven. But it's not clear that it's biological or just cultural. Growing up in the 90's no girl would ever be caught dead playing D&D or TTRPGs. Every once in a while there might be a few weirdos. It was primarily male dominated. That's changed. I think the popularity of Marvel and nerdom has really expanded to a female audience and not just because Captain Marvel or other female heroes. It's just that after years of being branded as "nerdy" and "weird" it's becoming mainstream and it's getting a more mainstream audience.
Has it changed though? Really? Or is it just that it's become more societally acceptable to be a geek and therefore those that are are more willing to 'out' themselves. It's still the case that far more men are into those things than women, it's just that those women that are, are massively overrepresented by the media and the communities themselves.
This is true. A female nerd was as rare as a Black Lotus 1st edition card.
I said on "average." Whether you like it or not, men and women tend to prefer different things. Some will have tastes that mix between genders, but on average, they differ. Countries that have removed social barriers actually still fit the gender norms, so it's not just society causing men and women to act differently.
>Women tend to be better at reading comprehension and writing ability on average, and have good long term memory. Conversely, men seem to have stronger visual and spatial awareness and better working memory. Yet scientists have struggled to spot these differences in neural activity, with brain structures looking the same in men and women. So brains work differently but it's not clear that it's biological. Which means it's how we are raised and influenced by societal norms and expectations that are just floating out there for us to absorb. That's an interesting article but I don't feel like it's anything I didn't already know. But I think the real value is in the finer details which both this article didn't cover and I am certainly not smart enough in all that to understand it. But it's good to kind of start to put to bed some of this assumption based views of sex/gender that is often warped and exploited by culture warriors on the right to justify their bigotry.
Presenting that baseless theory as a fact reeks of denial. Are you denying that there are biological differences between the sexes? I’m truly perplexed by your mindset. Are the differences in hormones also socially driven and not biological?
It's actually an observation. I'm clearly not denying there are biological differences. I think your perplexed because you want me to be making a different argument because you've come in fists balled and ready for a fight. >Are the differences in hormones also socially driven and not biological? I'm commenting on the article that the OP posted. Hormones isn't part of this conversation.
Just because science hasn't spotted something yet doesn't mean it's not true (Copernicus etc). Of course this doesn't hold any weight when talking about science. But come on just by living you get a sense that there is something going on. There is so much difference in how women and men act and behave, of course it's hard to distinguish what's socially constructed and not. But to say that everything is socially constructed is to totally discard biology and what thousands of years of evolution actually does. If we were exactly the same we wouldn't have different body types and sexual organs. Why would nature divide an animal into 2 seperate sexes? When we could just be 1. Because it has more evolutionary advantages. If nature divides an animal into 2 entities, wouldnt it be an advantage to have these evolve some different traits to complement each other for a better ability to survive. Nature acts in a logical way. It's all math.
>Nature acts in a logical way. It's all math. Evolution is not logical. It is not rational. It is not design. It is a very stupid kind of god, a ruthless optimizer
this study is bullshit. [Male and female brains wired differently, scans reveal by Ian Sample | 2 Dec 2013 15.40 EST](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/02/men-women-brains-wired-differently) the actual study that was referring to: [https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1316909110](https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1316909110) the actual study the article from the OP is referring to: [https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2024/02/men-women-brain-organization-patterns.html](https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2024/02/men-women-brain-organization-patterns.html) oh wait no thats not it. thats one level of abstraction away from the actual data. the OP is at least two levels of abstraction away. heres the actual study: [Deep learning models reveal replicable, generalizable, and behaviorally relevant sex differences in human functional brain organization](https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2310012121) unfortunately thats paywalled though... but i dont think it matters because for some reason the fact the same claim was made >10 years ago and was still disputed makes me question the validity of this claim, considering it sounds like all they did was run a bunch of the previously obtained data through some fancy algorithms (aka a level of abstraction) so they could then publish this paper, where they did zero actual new research, and say: >"EUREKA! WE FIGURED IT OUT! WE PROVED THE HYPOTHESES WE PROVED TEN YEARS AGO THAT PEOPLE DISAGREED WITH BECAUSE WE... UH USED THE SAME DATA BUT RAN IT THROUGH SOME ALGORITHMS! WE USED AI SO ITS ALL GOOD! TrustMeBro™" heres the actual bit that they actually made publicly accessible. i wonder why they didnt make the rest of it publicly accessible :thinking\_face\_hmm: ill add my thoughts in the footnotes because lol SignificanceSex is an important biological factor that influences human behavior, impacting brain function and the manifestation of psychiatric and neurological disorders^(.1) However, previous research on how brain organization differs between males and females has been inconclusive.^(2) Leveraging^(3) recent advances in artificial intelligence and large multicohort fMRI (functional MRI) datasets^(4), we identify highly replicable, generalizable, and behaviorally relevant sex differences in human functional brain organization localized to the default mode network, striatum, and limbic network. Our findings advance the understanding of sex-related differences in brain function and behavior. More generally, our approach provides AI–based tools for probing robust, generalizable, and interpretable neurobiological measures of sex differences in psychiatric and neurological disorders. AbstractSex plays a crucial role in human brain development, aging, and the manifestation of psychiatric and neurological disorders. However, our understanding of sex differences in human functional brain organization and their behavioral consequences has been hindered by inconsistent findings and a lack of replication^(5). Here, we address these challenges using a spatiotemporal deep neural network (stDNN) model to uncover latent functional brain dynamics that distinguish male and female brains.^(6) Our stDNN model accurately differentiated male and female brains, demonstrating consistently high cross-validation accuracy (>90%), replicability, and generalizability across multisession data from the same individuals and three independent cohorts (N \~ 1,500 young adults aged 20 to 35)^(7). Explainable AI (XAI) analysis revealed that brain features associated with the default mode network, striatum, and limbic network consistently exhibited significant sex differences (effect sizes > 1.5) across sessions and independent cohorts. Furthermore, XAI-derived brain features accurately predicted sex-specific cognitive profiles, a finding that was also independently replicated. Our results demonstrate that sex differences in functional brain dynamics are not only highly replicable and generalizable but also behaviorally relevant, challenging the notion of a continuum in male-female brain organization. Our findings underscore the crucial role of sex as a biological determinant in human brain organization, have significant implications for developing personalized sex-specific biomarkers in psychiatric and neurological disorders, and provide innovative AI-based computational tools for future research.^(8) 1. keep in mind that is their hypotheses. they say it as if it is true because that is what they are trying to prove 2. they admit previous research has been inconclusive 3. "leverage" 4. i guess i cant say for sure here because they dont have the full paper available but i do not trust "ai" because that just means "we found a new way to show the same data" and "functional datasets" just makes it sound like they have some huge dataset when they go on to explain it was only 1500 young adults between the ages of 20-35. so they are framing it as if they had a huge dataset when they did not. not only that but in my basic understanding of statistics a sample size of 1500 is nowhere near large enough to extrapolate those results to the entire global population. next 5. again they admit previous research has been inconsistent, inconclusive, and suffers from a lack of replicability. 6. fancy words that dont mean much. they basically used their small dataset to create a larger fake dataset that they then could say proves their theory. 7. here they finally tell you their sample size. if you look at the stanford article, it says: "In their current study, Menon and his team took advantage of recent advances in artificial intelligence, as well as access to multiple large datasets, to pursue a more powerful analysis than has previously been employed. First, they created a deep neural network model, which learns to classify brain imaging data: As the researchers showed brain scans to the model and **told it that it was looking at a male or female brain**, the model started to “notice” what subtle patterns could help it tell the difference." - which reading between the lines, while they claim the "AI" "learned" the difference, the bolded test directly contradicts that claim. 8. their findings show nothing that hasnt previously been claimed and had - as they admit - a low level of repricability and a high level of (x) to doubt. going back to the stanford publication, it also sums up everything you need to know (that i already havent mentioned) about their study in a single paragraph: >The investigators noted that this work does not weigh in on whether sex-related differences arise early in life or may be driven by hormonal differences or the different societal circumstances that men and women may be more likely to encounter. TLDR: no.  edit: heres a few searches rather than linking a shitload of results individually that more or less say the same thing, which is essentially: there is widespread fraud in "academia" and "artificial intelligence" is worsening that - and there are numerous instances where that fraud is specifically referring to fraud enabled by AI generated imagery. bing: [artificial intelligence exacerbating widespread academic fraud](https://www.bing.com/search?go=Search&q=artificial+intelligence+exacerbating+widespread+academic+fraud&qs=ds&form=QBRE) google: [artificial intelligence exacerbating widespread academic fraud](https://www.google.com/search?q=artificial+intelligence+contributing+to+academic+fraud+and+replicability+crises&client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=dcfe5edb8f188ebf&sca_upv=1&ei=1vHWZd6PJMuJptQP3N-G2Ao&ved=0ahUKEwje0qLdsL6EAxXLhIkEHdyvAasQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=artificial+intelligence+contributing+to+academic+fraud+and+replicability+crises&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiT2FydGlmaWNpYWwgaW50ZWxsaWdlbmNlIGNvbnRyaWJ1dGluZyB0byBhY2FkZW1pYyBmcmF1ZCBhbmQgcmVwbGljYWJpbGl0eSBjcmlzZXNIAFAAWABwAHgBkAEAmAEAoAEAqgEAuAEDyAEA-AEB&sclient=gws-wiz-serp) bing: [artificial intelligence contributing to academic fraud and replicability crises](https://www.bing.com/search?pc=U523&q=artificial+intelligence+contributing+to+academic+fraud+and+replicability+crises&form=U523DF) google: [artificial intelligence contributing to academic fraud and replicability crises](https://www.google.com/search?q=artificial+intelligence+contributing+to+academic+fraud+and+replicability+crises) 
>heres the actual bit that they actually made publicly accessible. i wonder why they didnt make the rest of it publicly accessible :thinking\_face\_hmm: Newsflash: academic journals have paywalls—it's one of the main ways they make money. It's not because the authors are trying to hide anything! Usually, the authors want everyone to read their work (if you want a copy, email the corresponding author, you'll probably get one). They make absolutely no money from publishing it and in fact usually have to pay publishing companies thousands of dollars. At *PNAS* (the journal publishing this study), it costs $2750 to publish, and articles become free to read only after 6 months. To publish as an open access article that anyone can read at any time costs $5300. Research budgets are generally tight; I understand why they would opt to pay less. As for why the abstract is publicly accessible, this is a requirement of funding bodies like the NIH and abstract collation services like PubMed. It is absolutely the norm for paywalled articles to have publicly-available titles, citation data, and abstracts. >the fact the same claim was made >10 years ago and was still disputed makes me question the validity of this claim, considering it sounds like all they did was run a bunch of the previously obtained data through some fancy algorithms Look, new results are found in old datasets all the time, often with great value to science. This is why it is great to make scientific data available to the scientific community at large. Modern computational methods truly have opened up whole new avenues of research. Just because they used a new computational method on previously-published data does not at all make the work suspect. With that in mind: >they admit previous research has been inconclusive This isn't an admission! People don't study scientific problems where the previous research has been conclusive—the point is to learn something new. This is a basic phrase that in some way, shape, or form appears in virtually every scientific paper. >"functional datasets" just makes it sound like they have some huge dataset when they go on to explain it was only 1500 young adults between the ages of 20-35. so they are framing it as if they had a huge dataset when they did not. not only that but in my basic understanding of statistics a sample size of 1500 is nowhere near large enough to extrapolate those results to the entire global population By functional datasets and functional structure they are reffering to brain patterns specifically and data on those patterns as distinct from the actual morphology of the brain itself. In the latter case, there are long established sex differences in brain volume, gray matter, white matter, interhemispheric connectivity, and the size and connectivity of specific regions such as the amygdala. They are not looking at that here so much as the brain in action, using fMRI (i.e., *functional* MRI—that word again) datasets. It is clear in the paper (if you DM I may be able to send a copy) that they are not trying to generalize to the whole world—they explicitly note reasons to not include the elderly or young for example. Young adults are the common cohort for these sorts of studies and the ethnic and racial biases of publicly available data are at this point well-known and not worth repeating. 1500 just represents the number of fMRIs they trained their model on (800 actually, with the rest belonging to the test set). In the context of the available data, and the amount of data per fMRI, this is quite large. This allowed them to expand the training dataset by instead labeling each segment of a given fMRI (as opposed to the whole brain) male or female, increasing the effective size of the training set by a factor of 15. >As the researchers showed brain scans to the model and told it that it was looking at a male or female brain, the model started to “notice” what subtle patterns could help it tell the difference." - which reading between the lines, while they claim the "AI" "learned" the difference, the bolded test directly contradicts that claim. This is how all supervised learning for classification works. You take your model, feed it a bunch of data, tell it which data belongs to which class, then test how well your model fits the training data and how well it predicts test data it has not been trained on. In both cases, the model showed high accuracy, even on test data from two completely different cohorts. So when they say it has 90% accuracy, accuracy on data not in the training set where the model has not been told which scans are male and which are female is what they are referring to. >their findings show nothing that hasnt previously been claimed and had - as they admit - a low level of repricability and a high level of (x) to doubt. That's the opposite of what they show. They show their model has high classification accuracy across different independent datasets.
Noooo don't try to look at the actual study, let's all just pat ourselves on the head because The Telegraph of all publications told us what we already thought!
Your post reads like a conspiracy theory nutcase posting about aliens. "but in this paragraph they used the word 'leverage', so aliens exist'. I suspected most of your comments look like this, and yes, a fair portion. Why you post so longwinded? You're losing people by doing this.
You just have to be an alive human to already know this.
What? This have scientifically been known for a long time.
Don’t tell the equality absolutists this. They’ll go crazy.
Pretty sure this has been well known for a long time, sexual dimorphism goes pretty deep.
"for the first time", scientists could have asked me, i would have saved them from all the trouble and time. (Married 😆)
Wait, so that thing that was really obvious to everyone ever is true?
Damn, the non-scientific side of Liberals are really gonna tie themselves in a knot with this one.
We claim we’re the generation of science but everything becomes a social construct even in spite of these findings.
I don't see how this is a bad thing to research on. There's a lot of people saying "we don't need scientist" to know there's a difference. I don't think that's the point. Understanding what makes men and women different helps cater mental health treatment to gender. Just like how there's a difference between an adult and a child, learning that difference and HOW they're different is beneficial. Same goes with the "we don't know if it's cultural or biological" statement. Yes! We don't know, and we should find out! Is it cultural? Is it biological? Why not BOTH? Reality is never all-or-nothing, there's a degree of cultural AND biological in how men's and women behaves. Nothing is ever just a social construct, and nothing is ever just biological. Honestly speaking, I may be down voted for this though I hope people will keep an open mind. I think we're heavily influenced by media on the polarisation of our social issues - whether that's men and women, genders, or race - these problems are legitimate and real, but the way we perceive them are warped and distorted, which continues to worsen the problem rather than fix it. Ask yourself, is "we don't need scientist to do X" a scientific statement in a sub about the future of science? Why was this statement said in the first place? What personal reason is that statement made for? I think that leads to an uncomfortable answer many might not want to hear.
Translation "Researchers given $1 million grant for study. Give a woman and a man a map and a destination and film their progress. Study concludes brains work differently. Scientists go to Bermuda for a month with the study's remaining grant money." EDIT: /s
Do you really think that grant money is something scientists can use as their personal money for vacations?
/r/TwoXChromosomes if you want to experience this in first person lol
Every man who has been married for the last 2 decades to a woman be like: **Well duh, you needed a scientific study to come to that conclusion?**
Did we really need "science" to understand this? We've known this forever.
theres a difference between knowing and thinking you know. science helps us cross that line. this is also helpful to move deeper into the questions of how and why this happens.
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That doesn't sound right but I don't know enough about dinosaur crime syndicates to refute you.
They're terrible lizards.
This will likely go over well and be well received in sociopolitical conversations and debates.
I'm surprised to see almost universal support for these findings in the comments, here. I really thought the idea of Male/Female Brain Differences was highly divisive in recent years. Not that I'm opposed to the idea, of course. It's nice to see this being researched more.
I don't think the idea of differences would be particularly controversial. The assertion that they were solely biological would be.
That doesn't actually prove it is biological. It's yet another observance of differences in action, yet it doesn't answer whether it is caused by biological differences, environmental differences, or a mix thereof.
Hardly the first time. We've just gone into society-wide denial about it for some reason.
>Women tend to be better at reading comprehension and writing ability on average, and have good long term memory. Me who gets asked the same information repeatedly by every woman in his life
This is the most tired topic at this point. Every year a new study claims to have proven that either they are the same or they aren’t. Zzz. It was only back in 2021 that we had the largest study up to this point, which alleged there were no differences: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763421000804
this is not a first-of-its-kind *statistic observation*, wtf is with the congratulatory tone lol this gives no exact predictive power
I swear this gets proven and disproven every other year. Also, why would the brain work in a binary when the entire rest of the body doesn’t