Pink Brain, Blue Brain… or How to Stunt Everybody’s Growth

The February 2012 issue of Sciences et Avenir reports on current scientific conclusions that male and female brains are the same; that any theories or postulates stating brains are hardwired according to gender are not founded in scientific proof.  We now know that cognitive functions such as memory, attention, and logic cannot be attributed to one gender rather than the other.  As points out Rebecca Jordan-Young of Barnard College, Columbia University, the consensus of the brain being differentiated by gender is both unscientific and political, “neuro-sexism”, as Catherine Vidal, neurobiologist and research director at the Institut Pasteur calls it. 

The article reports on a number of conclusive studies which both prove this basic, “hard-wired” equality and bring to light the realities of “soft-wired” inequalities rooted in “the stereotype threat” and other socio-cultural factors (math scores directly correlated with the country’s level of women’s emancipation, the clear impact of stereotypes on both men’s and women’s testing performances).

The article also explains that the human brain is made up of 100 billion neurons and one million billion synapses, governed by only 6,000 genes, not enough to control all the connections.  The scientists interviewed explain that at birth, only 10% of neurons are connected. The other 90% will connect progressively in interaction with family, education, and culture.  Nothing is “fixed” in the brain and it will be continually reconfigured through-out one’s life, which is known as cerebral plasticity (“plasticité cérébrale”).   Your brain will be what you do with it.  Any activity you spend time doing will reinforce the cerebral circuits mobilized by that activity, to the detriment of those not used.  Considering the difference in girls’ and boys’ social activities, it follows that their brains develop into functioning differently.  40 years of research show the most differences in gender are due to social, historical, or politic construction and that biology does not justify inequality.

It is this point I would like to build on in what I call my “stunted synapse theory” mentioned in my headings.

Thanks to the plasticity of our brains, we are (and we become) what we do.  This is of major importance in terms of our potential and possibility

• in an era and world in which we increasingly can (and are even required) to make ourselves, this fact of “becoming what we do” is essential to our lives (as opposed to preceding generations were fare more dependent on birth right and externally determined circumstances (place of birth, social milieu, sex, religion, etc.)
• in an era of ‘marketing of me’ and “projected identities”, our activities have more to do with portraying – spinning – storytelling than physically building
• in the virtual orientations of many of our jobs/livelihoods, as well as the economy, et al, this idea of ‘doing seems almost novel

So, we become thanks to our doing.  Indeed, a study conducted in 1997 on 2000 people concluded that multitasking is a myth and that humans can only do two things at once (one on each frontal lobe).   Our brains, thus, can only be focused on two activities at a time (focused in a way capable of creating new synapses – not what we call automatic pilot with which we act without focus).

Here is my thought:

As long as we’re focused on

• Contorting ourselves to maintain our still-life identity
• Constricting our bodies and eating in order to fit into unrealistic norms
• Paralyzing our bodies to meet the Beauty Myth
• Binging on consumer goods to avoid asking deeper questions

We’ll be reducing our brains to a conservative role instead of a constructive one, plus, we’ll be stunting our growth… and even, even more importantly, stunting our capacity to grow!

Many years ago I read a great essay in Rebecca Walker’s To Be Real titled, “The Fat Lady Sings’ in which the author testifies from her experience of not accomplishing her potential as long as her brain, mind, and body were being starved and obsessed by weight loss.  All of her brain waves were mobilized, first refusing to eat that treat, then the pride of having not eaten, then the frustration of not having the treat, then the anger of the refusal, then the eating of it anyway followed by the guilt and then the promise on never starting again… and so on until she realized she barely had the energy or availability to focus on anything else!  On thinking, or innovating, or doing, or building.

I have lived through the same trap.  I have also experienced the liberation of delving into a project instead of getting stuck in the egocentric quest for self-perfection.  As I’ve often exclaimed to friends, there’s no better diet than a project.  It stokes creative energies and canalizes them into constructive flow instead of imprisoning them to a closed circuit of misplaced control and repression.  It fosters  new connections in our brains and represent a learning curve… making new neuronal connections in the brain for real self-improvement instead of falsified (or temporary) self-perfection.

Women:  it isn’t our brains that’s our problem; it’s our choice of activities!

As long as we allow ourselves to be duped into spending disproportionate time on the Beauty Myth, Age-masking, still-life perfectionism, etc., we’ll continue to foster a kind of inertia around our development and progress. 

We have to push ourselves out of our comfort zones.  We must talk not only to like-minded people but also converse with others who are not convinced by the same arguments.  We must open ourselves, and our synaptic connections, to growth!  To creativity!  And above all, we must stop imposing upon ourselves this rigid exoskeleton of perfection.

Sincerely,

Eve

Rendez-vous next week for another bite from the apple.