Societies' Anchor on Plasticity

Lise Eliot, who is associate professor of neuroscience at Chicago medical school - Rosalind Franklin University has quite some interesting observations about gender based neuroscience in her book titled Pink Brain, Blue Brain, chiefly focusing on brain plasticity. As she would explain, it's much like taking petroleum based plastic and molding and forming it into the countless uses our society has for it: grocery bags, equipment, etc. Plasticity is the grounds for all learning and is essentially the formation and redirection of signaling in our brains, which takes place during learning, our early childhood, and even when recovering from brain injury (it's practically our only hope for recovery). A great example is the computer you're working on right now, I might lose you a bit since I've worked with electrical engineering, but all of our computers have a processor which is arguably the most important part of a computer; different processors have different micro-circuitry fused onto their silicon chips. Depending on what you do with your computer might suggest which circuitry is best for your processor. The micro-circuitry in the processor of a high end server versus a gaming computer versus a cheap computer will all be radically different; not only in performance but also in responding to errors. In the same way, different learning methods, nurture elements, and how we expose/use our brains along with how it recovers during injury vary due to neuro-plasticity. 

It's no surprise then when Dr. Eliot references epigenetic interactions with regards to the environment shaping our genes to an extent and furthermore our brains becoming what we expose them to. Sure, there are physiological differences with our bodies with regards to gender (even though they appear androgynous early on), but gender with regards to our brains isn't an anchor once you're out of the womb, rather it's the way an individual is raised depending on a variety of environmental factors. There have been many studies outside of the scope Dr. Eliot mentions that focus on gender-based differences in plasticity and how aside from the obvious methods of parenting, things like geology are a factor as well. Where you are born can have minor or radical differences with regards to culture and quality of life in how you're raised. A child born in Chicago will be subjected to a good educational system and gender specific raising, such as the toys they play with, the colors they are exposed to (think clothing, room paint), the way they are talked to and cared for. A child born in Zimbabwe however is more than likely subjected to a poor educational system, with a tribe-based raising where family status matters more than gender, and regardless of your gender you are chosen to hunt, cook, sew, build based on skills that are observed from early on in your childhood. Obviously when comparing children from the two areas, difference plasticity is more based on location than it is gender.

Needless to say, Dr. Eliot still has more to say in an article from this month in the Huffington Post titled, "Women's Hockey and Hardwiring". In this article Dr. Eliot makes much of the same argument with an interesting twist: referencing sports. While she claims that physiologically men are obviously different than women (which they are), due to obvious increased muscle mass and general taller heights, we fall into the issue of nurtured perspectives again. Is this really what defines sports? In the past 40 years the amount of women participating in professional sports has increased by ten-fold, and it's obviously not because of some overnight evolutionary change, but a change in societies prospective; this being that a Winter Olympics hockey match amid Canada and the US is just as intense, fair a game, and enjoyable to watch regardless of the gender of the players. While Dr. Eliot does reference statistics of how women tend to not participate in sports, claim lower paying jobs, and achieve less rigorous academic degrees she uses these findings in her aid to establish the truth: societies' nurture-anchor is responsible for this. This can be said because just like professional sports, in the last 40-50 years we have also seen women claiming higher paying jobs and pursuing more rigorous degrees increase by ten-fold as well; after all 57% of all college students in the US are women. At the end of the day, we might point out traditional differences amid men and women and the state of their minds, but as Dr. Eliot points out: at the end of the day an intense Olympic skiing race is just as competitive, fast, and fierce regardless of the genders participating and the recorded times even exist to prove it. Maybe when society lifts it's anchor up a bit more, we can allow men to compete with women in sporting events and we might realize the differences are little to none, because not all individuals are prone to the mindset and plasticity society presumes of them.


By: George Stathopoulos

Eliot, Lise. Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps--and What We Can Do About It. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lise-eliot/womens-hockey-and-hardwiring_b_4834418.html