BBC Reel｜男性和女性的大脑有差异吗？

男性和女性的大脑有差异吗？
Are male and female brains different?-BBC REEL

I think in the 21st century, we have an opportunity to rethink our understanding of the gendered brain. Because neuroscience can tell us much more about what our brains are for and how the world affects our brains. I think the most common myth that I've come across is that neuroscience has proved (in inverted, commas) that there are clear-cut differences between the brains of men and the brains of women. And that just isn't the case.
我认为在 21 世纪，我们有机会重新思考我们对性别化大脑的理解。因为神经科学可以告诉我们更多关于大脑的作用以及世界如何影响我们大脑的信息。我认为我遇到过的最常见的误解是，神经科学已经证明“男性大脑和女性大脑之间有明显的区别”。可事实并非如此。

When I talk about the pink and blue tsunami, it's really a reflection of how our culture codes differences between girls and boys. So that right from the moment a child is born when people arrive with those awful"It's a girl, pink. It's a boy, blue." cards, they are very quickly being introduced to a gendered world. The multitasking versus map-reading dichotomy where women are supposedly very good at doing lots of different things at once, and men are brilliant at map reading in any kind of spatial tasks.
当我谈到“粉色代表女生，蓝色代表男生”的观念时，它确实反映了我们的文化如何对女孩和男孩之间的差异进行编码。因此，从孩子出生的那一刻起，当人们带着那些令人讨厌的“这是女孩，粉色。这是男孩，蓝色。”视角对号入座时，新生儿很快就被引入了一个依照性别分类的世界。“一心多用”和“读图”的二分法，女性被认为非常擅长同时做很多不同的事情，而男性在任何类型的空间任务中都擅长读图。

And yet when we look at the data that we have for that, we'll see that how you measure those skills makes a difference. And if we look at the brain imaging data, we'll find that really there are no clear-cut findings. Have we actually found any differences between the brains of men and the brains of women? The answer is no.
然而，当我们查看这方面的数据时，我们会发现，你如何衡量这些技能对实际情况很有影响。如果我们看一下大脑成像数据，我们会知道并没有明确的发现。我们是否真的发现了男性大脑和女性大脑有什么不同？答案是否定的。

On average, women's brains were 5 ounces lighter than men's and the early scientists got really excited and thought "Oh, that's the explanation for all the gender gaps." But then somebody pointed out two things. First of all, if you just thought it was a size matters issue, then sperm whales and elephants have got bigger brains than men, and they're not renowned for being that much brighter.
平均而言，女性的大脑比男性的大脑轻 5 盎司（约 142 克），早期的科学家们非常兴奋，他们认为，“哦，这样就能解释所有的性别差异了。”但后来有人指出了两点。首先，如果你认为这只是大小的问题，那么抹香鲸和大象的大脑比男人的大脑大，但它们并不以更聪明而闻名。

If you then look at human brains, you'll see that there's a big overlap in the kind of measurements that you get. So you get a distribution of size in men's brains and distribution of size in women's brains but they overlap. So that you get women with big brains and men with small brains. If you assume that every bit as I do that every brain is different from every other brain, what you need to understand is how you arrived at the identity or the feeling that you have of what gender you are.
如果你再观察人类的大脑，你会发现你得到的测量结果有很大的重叠。所以你得到的是男性大脑的大小分布以及女性大脑的大小分布，但它们是重叠的。这样你得出的就是女性有大的大脑而男性有小的大脑。如果你像我一样假设每个人的大脑都不同于其他人的大脑，你需要了解的是，你是如何对自己的性别形成认同或者形成相应的感觉的。

I think one of the problems we have in the 21st century is that what I call gender bombardment, it's much more intense. There's much more in the social media and a whole range of marketing initiatives which make a very clear prescriptive list of what it's like to be male or what it's like to be female. And if somebody looks at that list and thinks "Well, I'm supposedly a male, but none of the above is true of me." Very often people think that there is something wrong with them.
我认为我们在 21 世纪面临的问题之一就是，我称之为“性别轰炸”，它更加激烈。在社交媒体和一系列的营销举措中都有很多说辞，它们好似约定俗成一般，都非常明确地指向了男性应该是什么样子，或者女性应该是什么样子。如果有人看到这些指向性说明，会觉得“其实，我应该是男性，但以上这些都不符合我。”而通常人们会认为这是他们自己有问题。

My claim is actually we should be looking at the list a lot more carefully and saying that perhaps what we've assumed was a very clear distinction between males and females is nothing like as clear as has been claimed. So an understanding that every brain is different from every other brain and not necessarily just a function or the sex of the brain's owners is a really important step forward in the 21st century.
我的观点是，实际上我们应该更仔细地看看这些说明，并说，也许我们所假设的男性和女性之间非常明确的区别并不像大众所说的那样明确。因此，认识到每个大脑都不同于其他大脑，而不一定只是因为大脑功能或大脑主人的性别做区分，是 21 世纪向前迈出的重要一步。