The tape measures and weighing scales of the Victorian brain scientists have been supplanted by powerful neuroimaging technologies, but there is still a lesson to be learned from historical examples such as these. State-of-the-art brain scanners offer us unprecedented information about the structure and working of the brain. But don't forget that, once, wrapping a tape measure around the head was considered modern and sophisticated, and it's important not to fall into the same old traps. As we'll see in later chapters, although certain popular commentators make it seem effortlessly easy, the sheer complexity of the brain makes interpreting and understanding the meaning of any sex differences we find in the brain a very difficult task. But the first, and perhaps surprising, issue in sex differences research is that of knowing which differences are real and which, like the intially promising cephalic index, are flukes or spurious. Cordelia Fine
About This Quote

The most important thing is to know we are not perfect we all make mistakes and that we can improve ourselves and we can learn from our mistakes. In my personal opinion i think that the brain is a work in process and the tools to study the brain are evolving as well. The Victorian’s brains was more of a science experiment instead of a measurement of how it worked. The Victorian scientists wanted to discover the difference between male and female brains.

They wanted to prove that men were supposed to be stronger than women. Although they were never able to find a difference between male and female brains, they did find that there was a difference between men and women's brain size. The Victorians used children as test subjects because they were small enough for the scientists to have access to their brains without having to access their parents consent.

In my personal opinion, brain scans do not measure all of what goes on in our brains at once, but they do give us an idea about how the brain is functioning at any given time, which is more important than what gender happens to be at any given time for each individual person.

Source: Delusions Of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, And Neurosexism Create Difference

Some Similar Quotes
  1. A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment. - Jane Austen

  2. I would always rather be happy than dignified. - Unknown

  3. Well, it seems to me that the best relationships - the ones that last - are frequently the ones that are rooted in friendship. You know, one day you look at the person and you see something more than you did the night before. Like... - Gillian Anderson

  4. It’s probably not just by chance that I’m alone. It would be very hard for a man to live with me, unless he’s terribly strong. And if he’s stronger than I, I’m the one who can’t live with him. … I’m neither smart nor stupid,... - Coco Chanel

  5. I am not an angel, ' I asserted; 'and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me - for you will not get it, any more than I shall... - Unknown

More Quotes By Cordelia Fine
  1. In the statistical gargon used in psychology, p refers to the probability that the difference you see between two groups (of introverts and extroverts, say, or males and females) could have occurred by chance. As a general rule, psychologists report a difference between two groups...

  2. The tape measures and weighing scales of the Victorian brain scientists have been supplanted by powerful neuroimaging technologies, but there is still a lesson to be learned from historical examples such as these. State-of-the-art brain scanners offer us unprecedented information about the structure and working...

  3. Here’s another example that some overworked mothers might find inspiring. We saw in Chapter 2 that being the one who producesthe sperm doesn’t dictate, by universal principle, that parenting is out of the portfolio. However, in the case of the rat (as with mostmammals), the...

  4. Blatant, intentional discrimination against women is far from being something merely to be read about in history books.

  5. While parenthood served as no disadvantage at all to men, there was evidence of a substantial "motherhood penalty". Mothers received only half as many callbacks as their identically qualified childless counterparts.

Related Topics