New Study Finds Women and Men's Brains Are Hardwired Differently
Posted by Zenphamy 11 years, 4 months ago to Philosophy
So once again, how do we as Objectivist thinkers accept these differences and their consequences to our lives and governance and derive ways and methods to compensate and correct for skewing towards 'gut feeling' decision making?
"Because the female connections link the left hemisphere, which is associated with logical thinking, with the right, which is linked with intuition, this could help to explain why women tend to do better than men at intuitive tasks, she added.
“Intuition is thinking without thinking. It's what people call gut feelings."
"Because the female connections link the left hemisphere, which is associated with logical thinking, with the right, which is linked with intuition, this could help to explain why women tend to do better than men at intuitive tasks, she added.
“Intuition is thinking without thinking. It's what people call gut feelings."
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The background extinction rate for species generally is measured in millions of years. The average mammalian species goes extinct in the neighborhood of 1 million years.
Since our species has barely reached the 10% mark in terms of average longevity, it is not "proven". The ~100,000 year existence of Homo Sapiens is scarcely a blip in evolutionary time. It is as if we sat down to an evolutionary 12-course meal… Homo Sapiens would be the belch at the end.
As for "value" - no such notion exists in nature. Utility, perhaps. But value is a false notion you impose from your purely parochial viewpoint.
Statistical analysis of raw data often explains why a result looks surprising. Analysis of raw numbers can reveal the "thumb on the scale," or numbers that are cleaned up to look better, or even numbers that are wholly made up. (How? Well, for one thing, people inventing random numbers tend to believe that odd numbers are more "random" than even numbers.)
If the study was funded by a government grant, we might like to see what agency gave the money and why.
I wonder if I can get a grant to study the incidence of fraudulent research?
The shark is far older than Man... but let's see how well he survives in Utah. Even if he's a Mormon shark.
As Heinlein pointed out, once you get to orbit, you're halfway to anywhere. It takes as much delta-v to get to orbit as it takes to get from orbit to the outer planets.
"Warp drive" is nonsense. If there is any 'shortcut" to interstellar travel, it'll be via "gates" such as portrayed in Babylon 5 or the Mote in God's Eye / Falkenberg's Legion books. A hole will have to be punched in spacetime.
But, imagine us 6,000 years ago, just forming the first civilizations. People want to leap to the stars when there's still so much history to be made here.
There are asteroids that can be scaled in to Earth and harvested both for their mineral and chemical content, as well as their angular momentum. Titan is a world of petrochemicals to be harvested. Venus and Mars are entire worlds to be Terraformed.
There is much to do before we worry about heading for the stars.
Another interesting segue is driving, which involves both concentration and dealing with distractions. Why are men (on the whole) better drivers? It would seem that the number of things one must keep track of when driving would tend to fall more in the multi-tasking range of things...
Ideas?
I will note that brain activity and connections between the hemispheres are different in right and left-handed people. There may or may not be a correalation to thinking, behavior, levels of creativity, or yes, "intuition".
I would actually like to read the complete paper on this study if it is readily available. If indeed it is accurate, it may be an explanation of what has long been deemed "intuition". If it is the result of "brain wiring", it is not a "special power", but rather, the way in which the right hemisphere of the brain communicates what it is receiving from the left. It is entirely possible that "intuition" is reason processed in a "warm fuzzy" manner. It's accuracy would still be dependent on the ability to reason.
The challenge, if this is indeed the case, would be to distinguish the results of "intuition" processed from reason from those that are merely the results of an endorphin rush or similar (as occurs, for example, in a crisis situation).
I think it would also be important to note that value must also be in the eyes of a beholder. So are we valuing humankind in they eyes of other humans (seems a bit of a potential flaw, there) or someone/something else?
Oh, wait, it's the boys they drug up with ritalin so they'll sit still and... focus...
Will the Sugar Plum Fairy give us warp drive?
Be serious. Homo Sapiens will never leave this solar system. It's highly unlikely that we will ever venture in significant numbers (over 10,000) farther than the moon, and in the time it takes to travel to Mars (just the length of the trip, not including any preparation), the earth's population will increase by more than 35 million people.
The moon is 1.3 light SECONDS away. Mars is 3 light-MINUTES distant. The nearest star is over 4 light-YEARS away. We'll be "space-faring" in the same sense that someone is a "global traveler" after they make a million circuits of the local WalMart parking lot.
That said, the cost of getting stuff to orbit IS coming down. Costs have dropped from $10,000+ per pound to around $2500/lb and are on track to hit $1000/lb in the near future. I don't doubt that at some point the cost will drop to as little a $100/lb. So local space traffic is probable. I wouldn't be surprised to see a small lunar colony, or extensive asteroid mining. I would expect most of that to involve sending robotic vessels. Life support is simply too expensive for extended travel.
Species extinction is a lot more likely. The Dinosaurs were around for 250 million years. Homo Sapiens has been here for about 0.04% of that time. In short, we're not yet a proven species.
More seriously, have you noticed how many hollyweird actors are left-handed?
calling
me
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woman.
And that's a problem with most women (and some men). If they don't "like" facts, they don't accept them. So the "fact" that the welfare society promoted and foisted upon the rest of us by women is not sustainable, that it will collapse and cause untold harm and pain to millions of people… is disregarded as a fact they don't "like".
The FACT that we cannot continue to borrow 25 to 40 cents of every Federal dollar spent, increase our debt and pay an extra (unfunded) $211 trillion over the next 50 years is a mathematical certainty which is not accepted by women because it doesn't "feel" right. (Or more likely, lacking responsibility, they don't wish-think it will affect them personally.)
The practice of doing research and finding facts that support a hunch is problematic. The process rarely weighs the quality of data. A 10-year peer-reviewed study that is "unliked" has less weight that the "liked" results obtained from a Ouija board. Reason is destroyed. All that is left is the label, misapplied to a process that is not reason at all.
How many of use would like to be able to fly just by wishing it so? For those who reject fact on the basis of emotional wishing: Gather all the "facts" you can that prove that you can fly just by wishing it to be true. Take your selected "facts" and stand on the edge of a tall cliff. Jump. Wish with all your might that you can fly. Who knows? You might be able to do it.
Those who base their decisions on whether they "like" facts are not even honest. When the danger is real and personal, even the "wishers" don't follow through. They may "like" to believe that being hit by a bus won't hurt them, but too few are willing to test the hypothesis. But when the danger is more abstract and distant (the economic collapse of the USA), the wishers allow themselves to deny the consequences of their greedy actions ("I want more money from the 'government'"). In short, they "believe" whatever they need to believe to get what they want right now and damn the consequences.
Mimi, don't think for a second that those of us who value thinking over feeling WANT the disaster that is coming. The difference is that we don't reject truth simply because the truth isn't what we want.
I completely agree that what seems to cause the differences to develop are the sex hormones, both on the testosterone and estrogen sides, but I'd add to that, the body and brain aren't only flooded during puberty but also at least twice during pregnancy, again in early childhood, and more or less continually during the teen years. The brain doesn't even complete it's wiring in many areas till approximately 25 or so. I'm also fairly certain that each individual is subject to differing levels of this 'flooding' at differing times and are impacted individually by those exposures as is evidenced in transgender and hermaphodite births as well as homo-sexual births (still fought in PC and religious circles).
I really don't have an interest in discussing or even thinking along lines leading to which is better or worse than the other, except as necessary for descriptions of factual information. I personally feel strongly that the differences compliment each other and jointly have led to our survival as a species. But as many like to mention, the human animal seems to be different from other animals in our abilities to reach such a high level of consciousness and what-if types of imagining. We've also been able to significantly alter our environment to suit our use and to continue to innovate new exploitations and expansions of our environment as well as the other life around and in us.
As well, we've developed to a degree which permits the artificial (vs. biologically developed) altering of our natural societies, including governance, to ones experimenting with new (or historically different) priorities and controlling parameters. But we've done so without the full inclusion or recognition of our biology in our thinking and development. Many of us believe (not just a feeling) that this last is a dangerous situation threatening our superiority and even continued evolution as a species, much less our societal development. A good example is that of necessity (we've almost outgrown our Earth, and based on the history of the planet we will face an eventual extinction event) we will become a space-faring species. Maybe the first in the Universe, though I personally doubt that.
Tired now, will add more later.