In a discovery that will surprise absolutely no one who hasn't attended graduate school, a researcher who has spent years studying human brains--that is, actual physical brains removed from cadavers--has found significant differences between men's and women's brains. The researcher, Canadian Sandra Witelson, has the world's largest collection of brains:

She measured her brains.

She weighed them.

She cut them up and counted the cells.

She traced synapses, the junctures where impulses pass from one neuron to another in the hidden root cellars of the brain.

Wherever she looked, she discerned subtle patterns that only gender seemed to explain.

"We actually didn't set out to find sex differences," she said. "Sometimes as a scientist, you are doing one thing and you bump into something else."

The brains in Witelson's freezer are contested terrain in a controversy over gender equality and mental performance.

Her findings — published in Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet and other peer-reviewed journals — buttress the proposition that basic mental differences between men and women stem in part from physical differences in the brain.

Witelson is convinced that gender shapes the anatomy of male and female brains in separate but equal ways beginning at birth.

On average, she said, the brains of women and men are neither better nor worse, but they are measurably different. Men's brains, for instance, are typically bigger — but on the whole, no smarter.

"What is astonishing to me," Witelson said, "is that it is so obvious that there are sex differences in the brain and these are likely to be translated into some cognitive differences, because the brain helps us think and feel and move and act. "Yet there is a large segment of the population that wants to pretend this is not true."

Is it too late for Harvard to get its $50 million back?

Posted by John at 06:56 PM  |    |