Brain Rules (Updated and Expanded)

Brain Rule #10
Study or listen to boost cognition.
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Formal musical training improves intellectual skills in several cognitive
domains. Music boosts spatiotemporal skills, vocabulary, picking out
sounds in a noisy environment, working memory, and sensory-motor skills.
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Formal music training also aids social cognition. People with music
training are better able to detect the emotional information in speech.

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Empathy skills and other prosocial behaviors improve.
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Variations on these effects have been shown in adults, college students,
schoolchildren, even infants.

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gender
Brain Rule #11
Male and female brains are different.

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THE MAN WAS A HOT DOG. The woman was a bitch.
The results of the experiment could be summarized in those two
sentences. Researchers had asked people to rate a fictional person’s job
performance—an assistant vice president of an aircraft company. People
were divided into four groups, each group with an equal number of men and
women, for the experiment. The groups were given the vice president’s
brief job description. But the first group also was told that the vice president
was a man. Asked to rate both the competence and the likability of the
candidate, this group gave a very flattering review, rating the man “very
competent” and “likable.” The second group was told that the vice president
was a woman. She was rated “likable” but “not very competent.” All other
factors were equal. Only the perceived gender had changed.
The third group was told that the vice president was a male superstar, a
stellar performer on the fast track at the company. The fourth group was
told that the vice president was a female superstar, also on the express lane
to the executive washroom. As before, the third group rated the man “very
competent” and “likable.” The woman superstar also was rated “very
competent.” But she was not rated “likable.” In fact, the group’s
descriptions included words such as “hostile.” As I said, the man was a hot
dog. The woman was a bitch.
The point is, gender biases hurt real people in real-world situations. As
we hurtle headlong into the controversial world of gender differences,
keeping these social effects in mind is excruciatingly important. There is a
great deal of confusion regarding the way men and women relate to each
other, and even more confusion about why they relate to each other
differently. Terms are often confused as well, blurring the line between the
concepts of “sex” and “gender.” In this chapter, sex will generally refer to
biology and anatomy. Gender will refer mostly to social expectations. Sex is
set into the concrete of DNA. Gender is not.

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Differences between men’s and women’s brains can be viewed from
several lenses: genetic, neuroanatomical, and behavioral. Scientists usually
spend their whole careers exploring only one. So our tour of all three will
be necessarily brief.
How we become male or female
The differences between men’s and women’s brains start with genes, which
determine whether we become male or female in the first place. The road to
sex assignment starts out with all the enthusiasm sex usually stimulates.
Four hundred million sperm fall all over themselves attempting to find one
egg during intercourse. The task is not all that difficult. In the microscopic
world of human fertilization, the egg is the size of the Death Star, and the
sperm are the size of X-wing starfighters.
X is the name of that very important chromosome that half of all sperm
and all eggs carry. You recall chromosomes from biology class. They’re
those writhing strings of DNA packed into the cell nucleus that contain the
information necessary to make you. You can think of chromosomes as
volumes in an encyclopedia. Creating you takes 46 of them. Twenty-three
come from Mom, and 23 come from Dad. Two are sex chromosomes, either
X or Y. At least one of your sex chromosomes has to be an X chromosome,
or you will die. If you get two X chromosomes, you go into the ladies
locker room all your life; an X and Y puts you forever in the men’s. The Y
can be donated only by sperm—the egg never carries one—so sex
assignment is controlled by the man. (Henry VIII’s wives wish that he had
known that. He executed one of them, Anne Boleyn, for being unable to
produce a son as heir to the throne, but it would have made more sense to
execute himself.)