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<blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 1727125" data-attributes="member: 4720"><p>To clarify some of what I was talking about earlier...</p><p></p><p>There are many differences. Fewer and generally smaller than the popular press would lead you to believe, of course, but that's to be expected. One of the problems, however, is that we have no idea what most of the differences <em>mean</em>.</p><p></p><p>Example: Studies like the Shaywitz one die-kluge's link lead to are incredibly complex. fMRI shows you (basically) what parts of the brain are active at any time. The problem is that most of the brain is active most of the time. All of pictures things look like various amoeba doing naughty things to each other, and are very complex. They have to establish baseline activation, and then subtract that from the activation during the tasks. For a given language task, certain areas of the brain will show increased activation across a significantly significant subset of the subjects. That is good evidence that the area is used for some aspect of that task. Of course, unless the task is purely mental, you also have all the areas activated by, say, reading the words, or touching the button, but which are not necessarily important to the cognitive manipulation in question, so all that has to be accounted for as well. Plus, there's the fact that every brain is slightly different. Our brains are the product of a very complicated developmental process, and are as much a function of their early activity as they are of genetics (well, personally, based on my work I would say more so, but that's hardly widely accepted yet). So the precise location of a cortical area is not perfectly the same from individual to individual.</p><p></p><p>Given all that, it's very tough to say much that is definitive with fMRI, and it requires boatloads of subjects to be credible.</p><p></p><p>As for bringing this back to gender differences, multiple studies have come to the conclusion that women's language skills are less lateralized than those of men. That is to say, while performing a language task, men <em>tend to have</em> a fairly discrete set of areas that activate more, mostly on one side of the brain (left). Women, on the other hand, <em>tend to have</em> a larger, more diffuse increase in activation on both sides of the brain.</p><p></p><p>Now, here comes the tricky part... What the heck does that mean? Seriously, I know people who have been doing this for 30 years and more, and we're still kicking it around the office, so to speak. People will blather on about "distributed processing" and women being "evolutionarily inclined to a more complicated social context" and blah, blah, blah. But ultimately, we have no way of knowing what this means for their ability to perform the task (and they're not differing on any measure of performance), or the way they think.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost, post: 1727125, member: 4720"] To clarify some of what I was talking about earlier... There are many differences. Fewer and generally smaller than the popular press would lead you to believe, of course, but that's to be expected. One of the problems, however, is that we have no idea what most of the differences [i]mean[/i]. Example: Studies like the Shaywitz one die-kluge's link lead to are incredibly complex. fMRI shows you (basically) what parts of the brain are active at any time. The problem is that most of the brain is active most of the time. All of pictures things look like various amoeba doing naughty things to each other, and are very complex. They have to establish baseline activation, and then subtract that from the activation during the tasks. For a given language task, certain areas of the brain will show increased activation across a significantly significant subset of the subjects. That is good evidence that the area is used for some aspect of that task. Of course, unless the task is purely mental, you also have all the areas activated by, say, reading the words, or touching the button, but which are not necessarily important to the cognitive manipulation in question, so all that has to be accounted for as well. Plus, there's the fact that every brain is slightly different. Our brains are the product of a very complicated developmental process, and are as much a function of their early activity as they are of genetics (well, personally, based on my work I would say more so, but that's hardly widely accepted yet). So the precise location of a cortical area is not perfectly the same from individual to individual. Given all that, it's very tough to say much that is definitive with fMRI, and it requires boatloads of subjects to be credible. As for bringing this back to gender differences, multiple studies have come to the conclusion that women's language skills are less lateralized than those of men. That is to say, while performing a language task, men [i]tend to have[/i] a fairly discrete set of areas that activate more, mostly on one side of the brain (left). Women, on the other hand, [i]tend to have[/i] a larger, more diffuse increase in activation on both sides of the brain. Now, here comes the tricky part... What the heck does that mean? Seriously, I know people who have been doing this for 30 years and more, and we're still kicking it around the office, so to speak. People will blather on about "distributed processing" and women being "evolutionarily inclined to a more complicated social context" and blah, blah, blah. But ultimately, we have no way of knowing what this means for their ability to perform the task (and they're not differing on any measure of performance), or the way they think. [/QUOTE]
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