An interesting little finding:

Scientists investigating human sexuality have found that the brains of homosexuals have structural and functional differences from those of “straight” people.

Lesbians appear to have a lower proportion of grey matter in their brains than straight women, giving their brains a more “male-like” structure.

The brains of gay men appear to have structural similarities to those of heterosexual women. They also exhibit the same powerful response as straight women to the sex hormones released in male sweat.

The research comes amid growing interest in how variations in brain structure are linked to human behaviour.

This of course speaks directly to the theory behind our own EQSQ personality tests. We are, essentially, making the same assumption. That there’s a spectrum of brain types, from systemizing to empathic, and that these map pretty well to the stereotypes of male and female. Any individual, whether XX or XY, can have the “male” or “female” brain but as a matter of probability we find more XYs with the male and XXes with the female.

We also think that the mechanism by which said male or female brains are produced is the exposure to testosterone by the fetus while in the amniotic fluid. We don’t of course know whether this finding about sexuality has the same cause or not.

In fact, we don’t as yet know whether those two sets of brain differences are indeed the same or not: certainly, there’s no research as yet to even hint at the idea that male empathizers, or female systemizers, are more or less likely to be either gay or heterosexual.

Be interesting to find out though, eh?

Here’s something you might think it was unlikely you would ever see:

‘Not tonight, Joséphine.’ Napoleon Bonaparte’s lacklustre response to the bedtime blandishments of his wife is being repeated every evening in bedrooms across the country. Men are simply going off sex, according to the UK’s largest firm of relationship counsellors.

Relate, which provides counselling, sex therapy and relationship education, said there had been a 40 per cent increase in male clients admitting that, despite being physically able to have sex, they can’t be bothered.

No, it’s not because they can’t have sex, it’s because they’re not really worried about it. Even more, it’s not because they don’t want to have sex with their wives (a regrettable state of affairs to be sure, but not one that has been all that unusual in history) but would like to do so with women perhaps unobtainable. No, it’s just the whole idea of sex simply isn’t all that fascinating any more.

Who would have thought of that happening?

Various possible explanations are offered and the one I find funniest is the idea that as women know more about what they want these days, or perhaps it’s rather that they’re a great deal more vocal in letting on what they want, thus men find it all too much of a strain. That makes us sound even more wimpish than just not being interested really.

However, there is one explanation which we can reject entirely:

Professor Cary Cooper, president of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy, agreed. ‘Men have less social support and, as a generalisation, are less emotionally intelligent than women and have not traditionally been encouraged to share their feelings,’ he said.

Cooper, who is professor of organisational psychology and health at Lancaster University, also blamed Britain’s culture of long working hours. ‘Britain’s work culture has gone from 9 to 5 to extremely long hours, which makes for a very stressful life,’ he said. ‘Stress can be cumulative, which means eventually people can find it impossible to switch off and relax.’

I agree, as a thesis, it sounds plausible. The stresses and strains of modern life, long working hours culture, yadda, yadda.

The only unfortunate thing is, male working hours have been declining for at least a century, both paid work outside the home and unpaid work in it. So the stress associated with work has also been declining: so sad, isn’t it, when a beautiful theory gets destroyed by an inconvenient fact?

This is an interesting little right brain test. So interesting in fact that I still haven’t found the man after about 15 minutes of looking at the picture.

Have a look here for the picture and the rules.

To be honest with you, I’m not even sure that there is a man in the picture: either that or I have no right side brain at all.

Anyone mind if I stick with our own EQSQ personality tests? They are at least based on science: and I can do them too, which always helps.

It’s always amused me how fashions change: they all too often seem to come right around again to the starting point, even if the justifications have changed.

One example might be the breast feeding of babies. Once it was no longer necessary, with the invention of decent artificial milks, there was a huge swing away from it: now the advice is that one should indeed breast feed, it’s both good for the baby and the mother (the latter as a prophylactic against breast cancer is the latest word).

The same often happens in economics, although that’s more to do with the fact that the questions there never change, just the answers.

The latest reversal seems to be over single or mixed sex education. Time was when it was the logical assumption of all right on people that boys and girls should be educated together. This was an obvious part of creating gender equality, that they should be treated the same and raised and educated the same way. This appears to be changing:

Boys at primary school perform ’significantly’ better in English tests if they are taught in classes with fewer girls, a new study claims.

Research from Bristol University, which used data from every state school in England, found that as the proportion of girls rose, the results achieved by their male classmates fell. Steven Proud, who carried out the work, concluded it ‘might be beneficial for boys to be educated in single-sex classes’ in English.

He argued that girls tended to be ahead of boys in English, and so were more likely to answer questions, raise their hands and behave confidently in lessons. Boys studying alongside a large number of girls find it easier to ‘hide in the background’.

It would be very interesting to see if the same results were found in reverse in math classes. For in the above example it’s the girls’ greater facility at verbal communication which makes them more confident and thus pushes the boys into the background. As we know from our EQSQ tests, the flip side of that greater proficiency with language for girls is the greater math ability of the boys.

So in mixed math classes, do the boys dominate and push the girls into the background?

One other thing that we need to note, which is that it is only averages for boys and girls here: it’s not a definition, that girls are better than boys at language, rather, a probability. An individual can be anywhere on the spectrum, we just expect to see more girls at one end, more boys at the other.

Which leads us to an interesting possibility. That instead of arguing for single (or even mixed) sex classes, the actual argument should be in favour of teaching single ability classes rather than mixed. We’ll always find some girls who excel at maths (that is, using Simon Baron Cohen’s description of such a talent being a signifier of a “male type” brain) just as we’ll always find those boys who excell at language (similarly, “female type” brain). Those who excel at a specific subject should be taught alongside those others who also do. Those who are rather more duffers at a subject, as the above research shows, do better when taught with similar duffers.

So we might in fact take this research as showing that mixed ability classes are a bad idea rather than the point the researchers think they have found, which is that mixed sex classes are the problem.

However, even if this is the truth, I wouldn’t expect it to change very much: the idea of setting, of placing the bright with the bright, the talented in one subject with others who share the same talent is, at present at least, so deeply unfashionable that it’s difficult to see things revolving back on this point.

Apropos nothing very much, just really liked this blog post. From a woman with Asperger’s making sense of life:

Grounded in heart. That is often an aspergerian asset, a self-defense from squandering our lives in larger realms we cannot fathom. Contrary to the NY Times article – and my own life experience — I suspect there are numerous aspie women whose marriages succeed and therefore, their minds are never labeled. They are just appreciated by their families. They are honored as leaders in small groups. They produce and educate professionally accomplished sons.

No, I suspect that universal screening for aspies and other learning differences would yield a more complex picture of aspergerian women than this article held forth. Love is really the only thing that triumphs over this syndrome, and some of it has been romantic love. And it has been bestowed on us. Likewise, I cannot believe there have not been successful aspie women in unheralded careers. In fact, I consider it likely that many of the “behind every successful man” women – the ones who consistently find themselves training a succession of hot young male bosses – are aspies who deserve a lot more credit.

Worth noting:

Love is really the only thing that triumphs over this…

That is true, and wonderfully so, of so many things we encounter in this vale of tears.

Here’s an interesting little thing. In fast moving markets, it seems to be those with the most testosterone who actually make the money from trading.

Money doesn’t make the world go round: it’s testosterone. The more that traders have, the richer they’ll become - up to a point.

John Coates, who used to manage a trading floor at Deutsche Bank on Wall Street but is now at the Judge Business School at Cambridge University, and Professor Joe Herbert, a neuroscientist, set out to study the brains of City traders to discover what makes them tick.

They measured levels of testosterone and cortisol (a stress hormone) in 17 traders at a City of London bank for eight consecutive business days. They found that those traders with higher testosterone levels in the morning were most likely to make money on the day’s trading. One trader hit a six-day “winning streak” during which he made more than double his daily profit. During that time his testosterone levels went up 74%.

Now no, this isn’t an unalloyed good: too much testosterone leads to too much risk taking and that’s a great way to lose money in markets. There’s also the point made that it isn’t just a higher starting point of testosterone levels that causes it. There’s also a feedback, in that success increases those levels.

However, as far as we are interested here, it tells us something useful about employment in the financial industry. While overall it may indeed be an equal opportunities world, it might not be in every nook and cranny of it. If surging testosterone levels are what lead to trading success (as opposed to purely being results of it) then we might find that women don’t get an even break here, for biological rather than merely societal reasons.

An excellent post here enabling you to tell if you’re an “altie”. That is, a believer in alternative theories about health and medicine and such matters.

Now it is true that alternative explanations for things have been correct: just because everyone disagrees does not make at theory untrue, for science is not a democracy. Perhaps the most notable change in my lifetime hs been continental drift. First proposed in the 1950s, the idea that the continents float aroud the world was dismissed as ravings. By the time of my birth, early 1960s, it was still strictly for the fringe. By the time I was doing school exams in geography, it was the accepted mainstream explanation of how the world worked.

But that list:

YOU JUST MIGHT BE AN ALTIE IF…

1. If you believe that doctors, scientists, and the pharmaceutical companies conspire to suppress your favorite “alternative medicine” modality, you just might be an altie.
2. If you like to claim that science is a religion, you might be an altie (or at the very least a creationist).
3. If you accept without questioning vague and/or poorly documented anecdotes and testimonials as sufficient evidence for you that an “alternative” therapy can produce remarkable results “curing” cancer, heart disease, autism, Alzheimers, heart disease, etc., but routinely brutally nitpick and then dismiss well-designed randomized, double-blinded Phase III clinical studies for conventional medicine, you just might be an altie.
4. If you believe that liver “flushes” actually cause gallstones to be “flushed” from your gallbladder and remove “toxins” from your liver, you just might be an altie. (Actually, if you believe that liver “flushes” do anything except give you exceptionally stinky diarrhea, you are almost certainly an altie.)
5. If you believe that dichloroacetate is not cancer chemotherapy because it is a “compound” or because it is not a product of big pharma, there’s only an outside chance that you’re not an altie.

There’s 170 of these little ideas as well.

I take it that believing in a few of these is OK, if a little odd. Believe in more than half of them and you’re a woo woo, believe in them all and you must be Deepak Chopra.

This post by Orac is rather fun in the way that he excoriates the stupidity of some of those claiming that vaccines cause autism. Jenny McCarthy comes under quite serious attack.

No real comment to make about it other than the fact that it shows quite how strongly some people can be mislead, how they can believe in things almost beyond all reason.

This is from Anthony Cox and it’s another example of quite how barmy people have become over the issue.

Question
I have a 7 week old baby boy who has “the jitters” on and off in his legs. I am told by the hospital and health visitor that this is normal and due to his immature CNS still developing. I was initially worried it might be related to epilepsy as the paed doctor who examined him after birth hinted at this. Anyone know if vaccines can be more dangerous for a 2 month old with “jitters”?

Answer
Not sure, but vaccines can be dangerous for babies without jitters. My advice would be to not to vaccinate at all, or at the very least wait to until the baby is much older. 8 weeks is just far too soon to start injecting toxic cocktails directly into an infant’s blood.

Given that we’ve not found out how to cure any viral disease (no, seriously, not one, ever. We can treat the symptoms of some of them, but that’s it.) as yet, vaccination is one of the glories of modern medicine. We wiped out smallpox entirely with them, polio is now not known in the Western Hemisphere and the other diseases, at least until the recent scares, were all on a continuous downward slope of incidence.

How did we get to this point where people simply don’t believe in science any more? Don’t people understand that measles still causes up to 900,000 deaths a year globally?

Now here’s something that is really highly counter-intuitive. Apparently it’s already well known, the paper being referred to is one which has tested the already known result on a larger scale.

But the richer a society is, the larger the differences in personality between the genders. And that just doesn’t feel right at all at first.The paper is here.

My own view (before I read this of course) was that the higher the level of economic development the smaller the differences there would be between men and women. Think back to an entirely hunter gatherer existence (which is what has been true for most of the lifespan of our species and thus the crucible in which we were formed) and we would expect wide and quite rigid gender differences. Women would spend their adult lives either pregnant or suckling for example rather than as now say one tenth of their adult lives (with the average 2.4 children).

However, the result is entirely the other way around. The more egalitarian, wealthy and free a society is, the greater the personality differences (on average, of course) between men and women.

The scientists posit that the reason is that the freedoms which come from a rich and egalitarian society allow the innate differences to flourish, wheras in poorer societies everyone is constrained by that very poverty.

Another, less scientific, method of putting this would be that we have to be rich and free before we have the leisure to try and find ourselves: makes sense, there’s little time or room for self-discovery if life revolves around the view of the south end of a mule moving north.

Bryan Caplan’s post on the subject also conjures up some alternative explanations.

1) Heritability of traits rises with societal affluence (not sure I understand that one).

2) A richer society allows more specialisation and thus expression of innate differences (similar to the scientists’ ideas).

3) Hybrid vigour (ie, we’re marrying beyond the clan or tribe now).

4) The poorer the society the more tightly gender roles are marked out (yes, true, but why?)

But the basic truth remains. A rich and egalitarian (and free) society means that men and women become more, not less, different in their personalities. At the same time as said rich and free society offers similar opportunities to both men and women, desires seem to diverge.

Odd, eh?

I normally have no time at all for the United Nations but I’ll make a small exception for this: they’ve launched Autism Awareness Day which is today.

One thing that I really rather like is that none of the news stories carry any rubbish about how it is caused by vaccines: either the MMR or the mercury which used to be used as a preservative. Thanks for that, at least.

Sadly however, I haven’t seen any mention of our own hero, Simon Baron Cohen, in the coverage. No acknowledgement of perhaps the strongest theory to explain both the cause, an extreme version of the male brain (the same theory our EQSQ personality tests are based upon) nor the way in which the observed rise in frequency is best understood by both the expansion of the diagnosis in the 1980s and the rise in assortative mating as the workplace and social lives change.

But we can’t have everything, right?

Anyway, here’s a selection of the news stories on and about Autism Awareness Day.

World observes first autism awareness day
Inquirer.net - Philippines
The Autism Society of the Philippines, in partnership with SM-The Block, celebrates World Autism Awareness Day with a concert featuring Thristan “Tum Tum” …

First World Autism Awareness Day
Manila Bulletin - Philippines
THE General Assembly of the United Nations designated April 2 as World Autism Awareness Day beginning in 2008. On this day, member nations will seek to …

Easter Seals Celebrates World Autism Awareness Day With Campaign …
PR Newswire (press release) - New York,NY,USA
“World Autism Awareness Day provides us with an opportunity to help raise awareness about autism services and treatments available to families today and the …

International Community marks World Autism Awareness Day
Student Operated Press - Vero Beach,FL,USA
Autism Speaks Co-Founders Bob and Suzanne Wright, along with other families affected by autism, will kick off World Autism Awareness Day with a visit to the …

Autism Awareness Day: One Boy, 3 Dogs, 27 Years
Seattle Post Intelligencer - USA
Today is Autism Awareness Day. Many parents of children with a diagnosis of autism won’t be aware of this special day, set aside to bring to light the …

Autism Awareness Day
WITN TV - USA
This is the first world autism awareness day, adopted last year by the United Nations. It’s meant to increase awareness of autism, a complex brain disorder …

World Autism Awareness Day
Tampa Bay’s 10 - St. Petersburg,FL,USA
Ttoday is World Autism Awareness Day. It’s a day to increase global awareness about autistism spectrum disorder. In the US, an estimated one in 150 children …

Autism Awareness Day observed today
CNN-IBN - New Delhi,India
New Delhi: Today is Autism Awareness Day and it is being marked in the world. But what picture comes to your mind when you think about an autistic child? …

Autism awareness: Every day a blessing and a struggle for couple …
Lufkin Daily News - Lufkin,TX,USA
In observation of National Autism Awareness Day today, the Jones’ were able to give a local insight into what it’s like to treat a disease that affects …

Autism, Awareness, and April Fools Day
About - News & Issues - New York,NY,USA
And speaking of autism, awareness and politics: today is the first day of Autism Awareness Month, and the day before World Autism Awareness Day. …

World Autism Awareness Day and ‘postcode lottery’ for early years …
By Trisha xx(Trisha xx)
… with the challenges their lives will bring but also in helping parents and carers cope, understand and support the demands of their children. Today is World Autism Awareness Day. Let’s hope that the Medway authorities are taking note.
ripplestone review - http://ripplestonereview.blogspot.com/

National Autism Awareness Day
By Ginger Carter Miller, Ph.D.(Ginger Carter Miller, Ph.D.)
To this day, he can memorize and recite hundreds — maybe more — movie segments, song lyric, and NASCAR statistics If you have the chance to support an autism awareness group like Autism Speaks, I encourage you to do so.
Gluten Free in Georgia (and Florida) - http://gfingf.blogspot.com/

World Autism Awareness Day
By Ellen(Ellen)
An organization called Autism Speaks has designated April 2 World Autism Awareness Day. For those of us who love someone with autism, it’s an important opportunity to spread the word about this often devastating disorder. …
Side Dish - http://ellenmeister.blogspot.com/

Autism Awareness Day
By Landru(Landru)
Today has been designated as the first World Autism Awareness Day. You’ll likely hear a lot about the topic today; CNN is devoting a day to a lot of coverage (unfortunately, some portion of it is going to be crap, for reasons I’ll …
You Are My Minions - http://minionses.blogspot.com/

On World Autism Awareness Day Have Hope But Do Not Sugar Coat …
By Autism Reality NB(Autism Reality NB)
History is being made today; the first World Autism Awareness Day as declared by the United Nations General Assembly. Qatar led the international effort to being about this result and that effort should not be overlooked or diminished. …
Facing Autism in New Brunswick - http://autisminnb.blogspot.com/

World Autism Awareness Day
On the first World Autism Awareness Day, we pause to reaffirm our commitment to protecting the health of children in our country and throughout the world.

World Autism Awareness Day » Right Pundits
The United Nations has designated April 2, 2008, as World Autism Awareness Day. Watch the video. I am the mother of a child with autism, and Right Pundits …