A Neuroscience Lesson for Charlotte Allen [Updated]
If you’re just cruising in due to the Charlotte Allen flap and don’t know who I am, let me introduce myself:
I am a graduate student in cognitive psychology. My concentrations are neuroscience and education research. My dissertation research is on spatial skills and math achievement. In other words, when Allen starts spewing nonsense about brains and math, she is making a mess on my academic home turf.
And her understanding of the science is so wrong, it makes my head hurt. I care not that she thinks women are only suited for staying at home and counting their shoes. As I said before, I wish she would do exactly that, and leave the scientific commentary to those who are qualified to do it.
Commenter Adam Klasfeld of Stinky Journalism challenged that I didn’t go far enough in my refutation of her science, and sent me to this piece about the folly of the brain-size/intelligence argument. He’s right, and the piece is well worth reading.
I found the additional commentary at the bottom of the article particularly interesting, including this choice tidbit from Allen herself:
It’s incontrovertible that men’s brains are relatively larger than women even when the measurements are adjusted for body size. One leading such study is Jill Goldstein’s “Normal Sexual Dimorphism of the Adult Human Brain Assessed by In Vivo Magnetic Resonance Imaging,” published in the journal Cerebral Cortex in 2001. There, Goldstein and her research team found that men have proportionately larger parietal lobes, which are associated with the mental manipulation of objects and relation of numbers to each other.
Should I assume she’s just being tongue-in-cheek here, too?
Anyways, I took this as a personal challenge, so I downloaded the Goldstein study (it appears to be free) and read it.
There are many, many problems with her interpretation of the study, but I’m going to highlight the three biggest.
The First Problem
As Adam points out, there were no differences between the men and women in this study in terms of IQ, verbal skill, education, or any other cognitive/social factor the researchers looked at. In other words, you cannot and should not use this study to argue that sexual dimorphism in the brain produces cognitive differences.
It’s not even a study about cognition. It’s an exploratory study of hormone receptors in the brain and whether or not they’re predictive of sexual dimorphism.
The Second Problem
The researchers did not find that men have “proportionately larger parietal lobes,” as Allen claims. The parietal lobe is a big place. The researchers looked at six different subregions of the parietal lobe. One (angular gyrus) was marginally proportionally larger in men, and one (posterior supramarginal gyrus) was marginally proportionally larger in women. The remaining regions were a total wash.
Ironically, the only cortical regions that showed truly statistically significant effects were all proportionally larger in women.
More ironically, the list of non-significant trends shows that women tend towards larger hippocampi (spatial learning and memory) while men tend towards larger amygdalae (emotion, especially fear).
The Third Problem
Yes, the parietal lobe is associated with spatial awareness and mental calculations. But the parietal lobe is not a “math region.” Math is a task that requires both spatial and verbal skills (math is, after all, a language with its own particular syntax and surely everyone here has solved a story problem or two), and as such it is performed by a large brain network that includes both spatial and verbal regions. It’s generally true that men have a small but consistent advantage in spatial skills while women have a small but consistent advantage in verbal skills, but you can’t conclude that there’s an overall advantage for math in either case, because math requires both sets of skills.
I’ll save the detailed analysis of sex differences in math achievement for another post, but suffice it to say that Charlotte Allen has no idea what she’s talking about. The only question that remains is whether she’s being willfully ignorant or intellectually dishonest.
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Addendum:
Adam has linked my blog from the aforementioned piece. Thanks, Adam!
And Charlotte Allen is continuing to demonstrate her complete lack of knowledge of neuroscience. The latest:
I think the idea is that the extra male brain size goes to parts of the brain [sic] good for visual-spatial skills.
Let’s look at that data, shall we?
The Goldstein paper reports that proportionally, men have larger cerebrums, more white matter, and larger ventricles while women have proportionally more area devoted to cortex.
For the non-neuroanatomically-inclined, I will explain this using our favorite analogy from intro neuropsych.
You have a watermelon. This is your cerebrum. The rind of the watermelon is the cortex. Underneath the cortex is white matter (though in our watermelon analogy it’s red). Inside your brain (but not the watermelon analogy), you also have four spaces. These are your ventricles.
So according to the Goldstein study, men have proportionally larger watermelons, but that extra size is on the inside. Women have proportionally more rind.
In studies of higher-order cognition (like math), we study the rind, because that’s where the cell bodies of the neurons live. The rind is where the neuronal computation that we call “thinking” happens. The stuff in the interior is important too, but Allen’s statement is pretty silly in the face of the actual science.
And thus far I haven’t even mentioned the biggest folly of this crude brain-based determinism: experience changes the structure of your brain. You pump more iron, you grow bigger biceps, right? Well, if you have a job in which you do a lot of spatial learning and memory, like being a London taxi driver, you grow more hippocampus.
So even if we had definitive evidence that adult males have larger “math regions” of the brain, whatever they are, and even if we could draw a direct link from brain size, whatever that means, to math achievement, the driving mechanism behind the math achievement gap could still be nurture and not nature.
Charlotte: FAIL. SO MUCH FAIL.
What makes me really irate about this sort of thing is that it directly makes my life harder. See, part of my job is to teach good science to undergrads. Every so often, I get one who has bought her kind of pseudo-scientific garbage hook, line, and sinker, and then I have to unwrap his or her brain from around the figurative telephone pole.
Chipanglish
CogKnition
Gustatory Circuit
This woman is so far gone…
You are wasting your breath.
Despite the title, Allen is not the intended audience for this piece. She claims she’s too dumb to do much more than add 2 and 2…I believe her.
In case you’ve yet to read it, the fantastic Katha Pollitt slices and dices the drivel of She Who Must Not Be Named, and takes the Post’s editors to task, too.
Hi you phd student of cognitive psychology,
I have read the comments about Charlotte Allen’s article by chance. I am phd student myself and I am just writing this to take the chance to get in contact to the one who wrote the article “A neuroscience lesson for Charlotte Allen”. The reason is that my dissertation project is on the same topic (spatial and mathematic skills). Maybe you can give me a hint where I can find you (which university?). I am at lmu munich.
please answer to start a communication! thanx