Ungender me here

miceMale and female brains are pretty much the same, but male and female behaviour is different. It turns out that the same neural circuitry exists in both, but is differently used.

A word of caution. We are talking about mice, in the main: those obliging creatures who seem ready to provide evidence to back all sorts of fascinating theories that somehow don’t transfer to human beings. And we’re also talking specifically about parental behaviour patterns; it seems those are rather well conserved between species – up to a point – but we shouldn’t generalise recklessly.

Catherine Dulac of Harvard explains the gist in this short Scientific American piece. A particular network of neurons in the hypothalamus was observed to be active during nurturing parental behaviour by females; by genetic engineering (amazing what we can do these days) those neurons were edited out of some females who then showed no caring behaviour towards infants. Meanwhile a group of males in which those neurons were stimulated (having been made light-sensitive by even more remarkable genetic manipulation) did show nurturing behaviour.

For male mammals it seems the norm is to kill strange infants on sight (I did say we should be careful about extrapolating to human beings); another set of neurons in the hypothalamus proves to be associated with this behaviour in just the same kind of way as the ones associated with nurturing behaviour.

One of the interesting things here is that both networks exist in both sexes; no-one knows at the moment why one is normally active in females and the other in males. If we were talking about human beings we should be tempted to attribute the difference to cultural factors (I hope that by now nobody is going to be astonished by the idea that different cultural influences could lead to different patterns of physical activity in the brain); it doesn’t seem very plausible that that could be the case for mice. It goes without saying that to identify a new hidden factor which sets certain gender roles in mice would inevitably trigger a highly-charged discussion of the possible equivalent in human beings.

So much for the proper research. Could we dare to venture on the irresponsibly speculative hypothesis that men and women habitually think somewhat differently but that each is fully capable of thinking like the other? I shouldn’t care to advance that thesis and the whole topic of measuring the quality and style of thought processes is deeply fraught scientifically and beset with difficulty philosophically.

There is, though, one rather striking piece of evidence to suggest that men and women can enter fully into each others minds; novels. Human consciousness is often depicted in novels; indeed the depiction may be the central feature or even pretty much the whole of the enterprise. Jane Austen, who arguably played a major role in making consciousness the centre of narrative, never wrote a scene in which two men converse in the absence of women, allegedly because she considered she could have no direct experience of how men talked to one another in those circumstances. Moreover, while she was exceptionally skilful at discreetly incorporating a view from inside her heroines’ heads, she never did the same for Darcy or Mr Knightley.

But others have never been so restrained; male authors have depicted the inward world of females and vice versa with very few complaints; that rather suggests we can swap mental gender roles without difficulty.

But are we sure? I suppose it could be argued that as a man I have no more access to the minds of other men than to those of women, so to a degree I actually have to take it on trust that the male mind is accurately depicted in novels. In some cases, certain allegedly typical male thought patterns depicted in books (Nick Hornby choosing a routine football match over a good friend’s wedding) are actually rather hard for me to enter into sympathetically. For that matter I recall the indignant rebuttal I got from a female fan when I suggested that Robert Heinlein’s depiction of the female mind might be slightly off the mark. Perhaps, then, none of us knows anything about the matter for sure in the end. Still I think nil humanum me alienum puto (I think nothing human alien to me) is a good motto and, I’m slightly encouraged to think, an attainable aspiration.