Transcription
What do we, what do you understand about the brain? Let's start with gender. The differences between men and women, which right away, if there, if there are, the blank slate is false.
Okay. So, [laughter] I hit you with a truck of stuff here. But what I can tell you is that I came into this whole conversation after having just done a medical PhD looking at the female brain in deep detail. So, the first inclination that I knew I was headed for trouble was when I did a radio interview that was recorded and was never aired because the person didn't like what I had to say about the differences between the male and the female brain, because there are objective differences between the male and the female brain. Not just in how they function, but also in some neuroanatomical perspective. So I'm going to just name a few of them so that we are speaking just neuroanatomy. Now, we are not speaking about the feeling of knowing. We're not speaking about trance. We're just speaking about neuroanatomy. We know that in the human brain, the left and the right hemisphere, there is something that connects them called the corpus callosum. This is a, a robust, um, network of neurons that connect these two sections of the brain.
And, just as a reminder, remind me of the, which will, the left and right, they're sort of general functions. Would you say left brain, right brain?
This is very, it's not the normal myth that that goes around. Um, but to, to make it really, really simple, um, if you have a look at, uh, Dr. Ian McGillchrist, he explains it beautifully. If we look at it from a huge, big helicopter view, we can say the, the right hemisphere is more interested in the big picture, and the left hemisphere is more interested in granular.
Okay. Grasping what can I get right now? The, the, the right, let's have a look at this in perspective. What does it mean in relation to other things? Now, the corpus callosum is more robust. It's a, it's a, it's a bigger section. There are more neuronal fibers, connections between the left and the right hemisphere in the female brain. This is why it's a lot easier for women to win arguments. Okay, let's just bring some human into this because they just jump between, um, the hemispheres much faster than the ma, male brain does.
We also know that in the female brain, the prefrontal cortex is a lot busier than in the male brain. And just to bring some humor into this again, although it's probably not really humorous, that's why they're more men in jail than women. Women are much more careful to say, "Hold on a second. Racing around at 2:00 a.m. in the morning in a car when I'm drunk. I don't think that's a good idea." Whereas the male brain will go, "Hey, that could be fun." Hopefully only before prefrontal cortex development. So that's another difference. So there's, there's increased lateralization in the male brain, which means the male brain is more busy in certain, in, in hemispheres separately from each other, versus in the female brain, prefrontal cortex very, very busy. There also things like the, the cingulate gyrus, and any woman that has had a child will know what the nesting feeling is. This is a couple of weeks, maybe a month before this child is go, is coming. The woman will go, "I need to get the room ready." And the husband will go, "What are you talking about? Still ages." "No, I need to get it ready now." So, the nesting influence in the cingulate gyrus is very much stronger in the female versus the male. It's also the part of the brain that allows women to pick up on visual impulses or, or visual perspectives of a face when it's preverbal.
Oh, so my, I mean, just personally, like I, I, you know, I'm, I'm very conscious of whether, of, of the question of knowing in this conversation. [laughter] But it sure feels like my wife is much more quick to get what ends up being a correct read on people than me.
Absolutely. Like she's got an, I, I call it intuition, but she just, she's got it. Like we'll, we'll come away from some interaction and I'll be like, "Oh, he was a nice guy." And she'll be like, "No, >> no, I don't trust that guy." And she may not be able to say exactly why, but she just gets a feeling. And now, this is where intuition is very spot-on. And why do women have to have this? Because we need to be able to pick up what a child needs before it has words. We need to be able to pick up on preverbal movements and facial, um, perspective. So, so that is a lot busier in the female brain.
Reading the baby.
Yes. "What is the baby's problem?" The husband will go, "I haven't got a clue." And the mother will go, "I think it's this. Let's try this." And so that part of the brain is a little bit more attuned to that. Now, I have to have a caveat here. The male and the female brain are more similar than different, but the differences are important and they are noticeable. Okay, so now let's just go back to this. That's also the part of the brain that's kind of like a relay station. So you've got a thought and another thought comes in to take that thought and out it goes. When a, a female brain is chronically stressed, rumination occurs, and that's the thought doesn't leave that little relay station. So women suffer more from rumination than men do because of that. And also because men seem to have more serotonin in the brain versus the female brain. So we respond differently to stress to the way the male brain responds.
Is this why, is this, does this point towards why, as I understand it, women just generally score higher on neuroticism in the Big Five, um, personality tests or have higher degrees of emotional instability?
Anxiety and depression are definitely higher among women than among men. And that's one of the reasons. But there are a couple of reasons for this. One of it is that in our society, we have created a lot more psychosocial stress for women. So women are juggling a whole lot more things than they used to, and that's one of the reasons. But [snorts] another one of the reasons are those magical things called hormones. They do impact the brain. They are not inert substances that just sit around there doing nothing. They are involved in how the brain responds to the environment. Why? Because they have to be involved in that. If you're going to be having a child and you're going to be bringing that child up, your body has to respond and your brain has to respond to be able to look after that next generation, and the hormones prompt that. So, just as a very brief explanation in relation to hormones and neurotransmitters, estrogen is working with serotonin throughout the female reproductive cycle. When estrogen is high, serotonin is high. The same for progesterone. As progesterone fluctuates, GABA fluctuates. Gamma aminobutyric acid, which is related to us feeling calm and and secure and and at peace. Serotonin related to a whole lot of different aspects of our functioning, including feeling safe and secure and stable, appetite, sleep, melatonin, and so on. So as those hormones fluctuate, so do our neurotransmitters. We are not discussing something that we can negotiate with here. This is just happening under the covers because we are the carriers of the next generation. This is just neurobiology.
Now, how can it be that we sit here in 2025 and that there's anyone who claims that the human, that humans are a blank slate or that there's no differences biologically meaningfully between men and women? How? Because it, that is like, that is the equivalent of be, believing in a flat earth. Maybe it's even worse than that, because most people will never get in a rocket ship and see the spherical nature of the planet with their own eyes. But we all live in reality with boys and girls all around and can see the patterns really easily.
That's, it's a really good question, and I don't have an answer to that. But I have something that I want to throw into the discussion that may highlight something that very few people think about, and I haven't read enough about it, and I think it needs to be part of this discussion. In utero, and as the body and brain are developing, we are exposed to all sorts of different compounds. But particularly in utero, hormones play a very big role in gendering the brain. And there are compounds called endocrine disrupting compounds, EDCs, that interfere with our hormonal system. And these, the way our genes set up how these hormones are going to play out in the brain development and how the brain is setting itself up for male or female, because these EDCs can interfere with these pathways. They either mimic a hormone, or they block a hormone, or they just stop the whole process from occurring the way it should.
Yeah. Now, there are a lot of EDCs in our environment. We find them in pesticides. We find them in plasticizers. We find them drifting around, and there are a lot of them, and they are accumulating because they don't break down with great ease. So my question is, is it possible that what is happening is that more women are exposed to higher concentrations of these EDCs today than they have in the past? And so children are born with a particular biological body, but their brain hasn't been gendered as strongly as it should have been gendered. Now, this is a question that I'm asking because I have not seen a lot of research into this, but I've looked at the effects of EDCs in the developing brain and in gendering the brain, and it's pretty sobering. So, that's one question that I have. The other question that I have is that, and we've, we've discussed this, you know, hormones play this big role in how the brain functions, but, but believing that what you feel is more important than reality, and believing that it's weighted really heavily, has possibly counted against us in this instance. Because if you have a whole lot of people saying, "How you feel is more important than objective reality," then you will follow that path, especially as your brain is developing. And if you've got a parent that has bought into this, because maybe this parent has, has a challenge with their sexuality and who they're attracted to, then they will be inclined to follow that particular narrative and introduce the child to this idea long before the child has ever thought about what particular inclination it has or how it feels. So you've got that aspect of it. Then you've got the child that is getting to the age between 10 and, and 12, as I mentioned earlier, where peers become more important than family. Connecting with your community is, is seen as a priority because now you're moving away and you have to go and form connections with, with people that you are going to be spending the rest of your life with. What happens if in those environments, there's a kind of like a social contagion because you've got these very high levels of anxiety? They impact how you're thinking and how you're feeling. And now you've got someone saying to you, "Well, if you don't feel okay, and you feel a little bit disassociated, and you feel a little bit numb, because the world is a challenging place, and you know that your emotions are so important, maybe it's because you're in the wrong body." So we have all of these confluencing variables that are operating in different ways in our society, and we can't separate our biology from that. And that's why I bring in the discussion about the EDCs, because they are very impactful on our, on our hormonal system and on our, how our brains function. And just as an example, we know that pesticides, which are EDCs, are contributing factors to Parkinson's disease. And we know that because of robust research showing that conventional farmers have significantly lower rates of Parkinson's versus farmers that don't farm.
Oh, I didn't realize that. I'm not, that's the first time I'm hearing that. What, what is the, um?
How robust? You say it's robust. How robust? It's observational. So you can never ethically go and expose people to this. But we know that there's a significant difference between conventional farmers and farmers that don't, don't farm with pesticides. Why this occurs at the neuronal level is because pesticides are fat-soluble and they accumulate in our membranes, cellular and neuronal membranes, and impact how the neurons, neurons function. And they're particularly active in the cerebellum, which is where the movement disorder occurs in Parkinson's. So we know that these, that these compounds impact the, the hormones of the pests, which is why they were developed. They were developed to interrupt their hormonal cycle so that they stop breeding. Now, whoever said to themselves, "Well, they're not going to impact humans." I'd like to meet that fellow, but never mind. Um, what if that is part of this problem that we're seeing? What if it's a social contagion coupled with this EDC exposure, coupled with this feeling of, "Your feelings are more important than objective reality"? What happens if these are all combined, and now we're sitting in this mess? Because we know one other thing from a psychological perspective. We know that people who disassociate because of trauma, and this, this is often related to abuse, they disassociate from their body because it's too uncomfortable to live in their body. And so it's very easy for them to believe that disassociating from their body is also disassociating from their gender. And so that could be a confusion that a lot of these people are experiencing. But they may just want to fit into a tribe, and they may want to just be individuals. These are questions we don't know. So whenever I look at the research, I'm troubled because I think the research is, or the data is dirty now. And, and the reason I say this is because the last time I looked at gender dysphoria as a, as a true, um, diagnostic condition where this is a true case where this does happen, I think it was 0.005% of the population.
Yes. And then to 0.0014. So that's a very, very small percentage of the population. When you look at the data now, it's gone up substantially, and also seems the, the data, at least in terms of, surveys, varies by by political area. Like California has a lot more self-identified LGBTQ people. And then you dig in, you're like, "Oh, a lot of them are like women who say they're bisexual but have never had a bisexual relationship." And that gets dismissed in our discourse. As there's these two things that happen with this issue that, um, I think contribute to to broken conversation. So one is, why are you obsessing about this? It's such a tiny portion of the population.
To which I respond, yeah, that's fine, except that actually all of our kids are being hit with the messaging. So, it's, and I've seen it firsthand. I've talked about it at great length on the show. That's why I talk about it because I've watched the impacts on young developing kids like mine. And like, "Why am I being told this? Why am I, why have I been given a pamphlet at my middle school saying that playing with boys' toys is patriarchy," which he's gotten. He brought home. Um, but then also, it's like, we do see these measurable massive changes like that are way out. I mean, when you say like something like 25% of Gen Z say that they're not heterosexual, not just plain old normal heterosexual going to have kids the normal way, that's a crazy high number.
It's a very high number. But how much of our environment is responsible in terms of a neurobiological or, or neurochemical perspective? How much is it the social contagion? How much is it because they need to fit in with their peers? How much is it because these people feel disaffected? How much is it because there's been real trauma? These are all issues that cloud this conversation. But just, you know, maybe just to, to put a bookmark again around this con, conversation, there is a distinct difference between the male and the female brain. There honestly is. And hormones have a huge role to play in that. You know, even in relation to, um, vis, visospatial skills and capacity, we know that men have a greater skill in that area. We know that women are more prone to cooperate. Uh, we know that women's brains are busier than men's brains. A large study that examined differences in, in areas that light up in terms of activity found that women's brains were busy in 70 of the 80 areas examined, versus the male brains that were busy in significantly less areas. You know, that's why you can have a woman making dinner, telling the child, "I need to sign that form for school." Um, "What are you having for lunch tomorrow?" This isn't multitasking. This is just the capacity to touch on a few things at the same time, whereas the male brain is much more comfortable to be focused on one or two things.
Over the course of these couple years I've been doing this show, I found I found myself more comfortable talking about these more difficult things in a way that doesn't make me uncomfortable, um, because I feel like it has to be talked about. We have to be able to talk about and grapple with reality and understand reality. One outcome of that is that I don't see, I don't know how to think about, and I'd like to try to do this, is hold two things in your head at the same time, which is on average, there's substantial differences that we can all see and that we all make jokes about, and that used to be the subject, and still is in many cases, the subject of just standup comedy about men and women, about relationships, about kids, about groups. Um, stereotyping. Stereotypes have kernels of truth. They do.
They're funny because we experience them. They're funny in a Seinfeld way. Um, and you have to, I, you have to be able to see those things and then also take each person as they come, and not use your pattern recognition to stereotype the individual or have your own views turn into genuine bigotry. And I am somebody that doesn't like to clutch my pearls about all this stuff. People throw around bigotry language all the time. "Oh, you're a bigot. You're an anti-Semite. You're this. You're that." And those people are just part of the toxic discourse. But it can be the case that you can just become like a stereotyping person that is not really looking at reality anymore, and you're not taking people as they come. An example of this would be, um, the comment that will sometimes happen saying, "We should, is it the 19th Amendment that women's suffrage in the US? I forget. But repeal, repeal women's suffrage. That the problem in America is women vote." Oh my goodness. Now, I'm going to steal man that for a minute. The claim here is, well, uh, voting public policy to do it, well, can't be driven by emotion. It has to be some kind of like greatest good for the greatest many calculation, taking into account costs and benefits. It should be thinking slow, not thinking fast. It shouldn't be, it shouldn't be, um, feelings of knowledge. It should, it should be actual reality. Like, "Hey, I know we say the minimum wage is good because it feels good, but it actually hurts the very people it's supposed to help. So we shouldn't just do what feels good." And, and the argument would be, women in general are more emotional. They're more prone to emotional reasoning. They're higher in neuroticism. So we would have better public policy that's more rational and more cost-benefit oriented if women didn't vote. Now, I'm bringing this up for a reason. Yes. To, to, to because I want, I'd like you to help me and help the viewer grapple with confronting the differences between men and women that are real, and holding on to what I would call fundamental American values of all men and women created equally and treated equally in law, but also treated equally in how we approach each other, which is to say, you see somebody from across the room, I don't know that person. I can make a guess because I know they're a, but I'm not going to actually do that really. I'm just going to try to meet them and get to know them. And I'm not going to go online and say these kinds of things about, "All women are this," or "All men are that," or "All gays are this," or "All blacks are that," because that's not even true. That's like just false.
Okay. Loaded question. [laughter]
Question, which is my way sometimes. This is a very good question because it does call into play the strengths of the male brain and the strengths of the female brain and the weaknesses. Which is why if you had to live in an ideal world, which we're never going to get to, but it shouldn't stop us from striving towards, you would have an equal representation of these strengths, and you would work with them to find the best solution, the best long-reaching solution that benefits everybody. Now, that would mean that sometimes you would lean more towards the emotional side, and that would mean at other times you would just be pragmatic and rational, because this is what life requires. Sometimes you have to be one more than another. And I think that's one of the problems we've had in our society. We have tended to become more emotional, or more feminized, if I can put it that way. And I don't want anybody to take this out of context because I think it's just a pendulum swing away from women having very little representation. So now we also have the virtue signaling involved in this. So even if you don't feel very deeply about whatever, if you don't say that you feel very deeply about this, then you're a bad person. Because you know, we have this capacity with the way we think is that if I believe something, it means it's good, and if you believe it, it's very different to mine, it's, it's bad. So we have that dichotomy. So if we, if we look at, um, what happens in the C-suite in terms of organizations, there's some research to show that you have a good mix of male and female in the, in the C-suite organizations are more successful. Because when they're sitting around making a decision, the males at the table will say, "Let's go for this. This is a great opportunity. We can make a lot of money, and it's fantastic." And the female brains will go, "Hold on a second. That's going to be damaging for the environment. We don't want to do it that way. We want to do it a different way because we care about the children and we care about the environment." So then what happens is the male, "Let's just go for this and let's hunt and gather." This thing has to stop and say, "Okay, hold on a second. That, that's not so good because if that gets out into the public, that won't be a good thing." And so now, now they negotiate, and that's what we need. What has happened today is that that is seen as a bad thing when people say, "There, there is a reality." Because the men will say, "Hold on a second. This business is for profit. We need to make money in this business. We are not, this is not a charity. So we have to, you know, let's look at this rationally." And I think that's what we've lost, John. We've lost the capacity to say, "You know, you bring some strengths, I bring some strengths. Let's look at them rationally and see what the outcome's going to be."
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