,
10 tweets,
7 min read
Read on Twitter
@philipcball Hmm... I wouldn't summarise it quite like that. But if you've got your copy of #Innate lying around, chapter 9 gives an overview of how I think we should think about sex differences in brain wiring and in behavior 😉
@philipcball The difficulty is there are many different intertwined issues that require some care to tease apart. It's common to see, for example, people objecting to the over-interpretation of a finding therefore rejecting the finding itself
@philipcball One very general problem, highlighted by @ginarippon1, @Lise_Eliot and others, is that neuroimaging studies of sex diffs have many methodological problems. But that is a general issue with neuroimaging - it's just a bit crap.
@philipcball @ginarippon1 @Lise_Eliot Or, at least, it has been. It's getting much better, to be fair, as sample sizes increase and statistical rigor and experimental design improve. And it is okay for finding differences. What it's bad at is linking them to diffs in behavior.
@philipcball @ginarippon1 @Lise_Eliot That's true for all kinds of behaviors - not just related to sex. There just are not very many neuroimaging parameters that convincingly even correlate with behavioral traits, of any kind.
@philipcball @ginarippon1 @Lise_Eliot Partly that is because the parameters people have looked at are super crude and simplistic - the volume or the thickness of some region, the fractional anisotropy of some tract. Why should these correlate with specific traits? The brain is not that modular.
@philipcball @ginarippon1 @Lise_Eliot So, until we develop some much more sophisticated ways of looking at individual differences in neuroimaging data, I see no reason to expect much insight into what any observed structural differences mean for behavior.
@philipcball @ginarippon1 @Lise_Eliot And there is no reason that we should look to neuroimaging as the arbiter of whether sex differences in the brain exist. There are lots of differences known in humans that are not apparent on an MRI (and really LOTS in other mammals).
@philipcball @ginarippon1 @Lise_Eliot For some people, "neuroscience" seems to mean "neuroimaging" and not much else. But the experimental approaches possible in other animals are much more powerful and informative and reveal many interesting sex diffs that are linked to behaviors
@philipcball @ginarippon1 @Lise_Eliot While many of the particulars will vary, there's no reason to think that similar mechanisms are not at play in humans. In fact, that would be a bizarre prior expectation to hold for any biologist.
