Self Portrait: Zombie Food (My Brain)

I've been rereading The Alphabet vs The Goddess, by Leonard Shlain. Published in 1998, it was inspired by a 1991 tour of ancient Greek sites led by a University of Athens professor. At every site toured in Greece, Crete, and Turkey, the professor explained how the site had originally been consecrated to a Goddess and later was repurposed for a male deity. Leonard Shlain was a brain surgeon. On the way home from his trip, he was contemplating what could have caused such a widespread cataclysmic change in human culture. He hypothesized that the development of alphabetic writing may have had enough of an effect on human brains that it moved our societies from being peaceful and Goddess focused, valuing the feminine, to being patriarchal and violent, valuing the masculine. He spent the next seven years researching and then published his national bestseller.

It's a fascinating book, especially in light of recent debates over differences between male and female brains.

Before reading about male and female brains in the context of trans activism, I had read about gender and the brain in education courses, and in The Alphabet Versus The Goddess. I've read a lot more in the past few years as my daughter has been exploring the idea of gender.

This is my brain, based on an MRI from a couple of years ago. My corpus callosum is in gold.

Self Portrait: Zombie Food (My Brain), original painting by Echoing Multiverse. Available for purchase via Saatchi Art. Prints, stickers, and other merch available through RedBubble or Fine Art America.

The primary function of the corpus callosum is to connect the two hemispheres of the brain. Different sections of the corpus callosum connect different functional areas. Women's corpus callosums are differently shaped than men's and have higher densities of connective tissues. Our right and left brains are more well connected (source). Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania note, "The female connections likely facilitate integration of the analytic and sequential processing modes of the left hemisphere with the spatial, intuitive information processing modes of the right side" (source). In terms of shape, women's spleniums are more bulbous. The splenium is the most posterior part of the corpus callosum (closest to the back of the head). A 1991 study from the Journal of Neuroscience illustrate the difference in shape of corpus callosum between males and females (source).

A: Male corpus callosum. B. Female corpus callosum. Source: https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/11/4/933.full.pdf

My splenium is clearly female based on this diagram and my MRI.

Our brains are like the CPUs of a robot. Connected to our brains, we also have sensors. There are also sex differences in our sensory organs. Men's and women's eyes have different ratios of rods to cones. Men and women literally see the world differently. Additionally, our hearing tends to differ by the equivalent of approximately 3 volume notches on a car stereo. (Source: Why Gender Matters by Leonard Sax).

Even our senses of smell operate differently. Dr. Sax writes, "In the laboratory Dr. Pamela Dalton and her colleagues exposed men and women to several smells. Not just once, but over and over again. Dr. Dalton and her coworkers found that with repeated exposure, the women's ability to detect the odor improved. How much did it improve: By a factor of 50 percent? Or maybe by 500 percent--a fivefold improvement? No, the average improvement for women was an improvement of 100,000-fold: the women were able to detect the odor at a concentration once 100,000th of the concentration they had noticed at the beginning of the study. The men, on average, showed no improvement at all in their ability to detect the odor."

At the Mutter Museum recently, I saw Einstein's brain. It was unusually small for a man, closer in size to the brain of an average woman. It was also more well connected.

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