 |
| This is what a bunch of hungry neuroscientists look like when it's 5pm and the poster session is over. |
One of my mentors likes to occasionally tease me when I
bring him data: “You’ve discovered something new. Men and women are different.”
He kids, of course. Male and female brains are different in
funny and fascinating ways we don’t quite understand. My poster (which I presented this afternoon) was on gender
differences in the loss of slow-wave sleep across adolescence. I just had a
paper accepted (today, actually!) on gender differences in some aspects of sleep
apnea. (I could actually probably build a pretty successful career on studying
gender differences in sleep alone, actually. If I wanted to.)
So I was very excited to attend Dr. Margaret (Peg) McCarthy’s talk on the origin of sex differences
in the brain earlier this afternoon.
Let me get two things out of the way before I begin. First
of all, I really admired Dr. McCarthy, who hails from the University of
Maryland School of Medicine, for how she spoke about her past and present colleagues,
giving credit where credit was due to previous labmates and graduate students.
You don’t realize how few people do that until someone does it explicitly.
Secondly, McCarthy covered the history of research in sex
differences in the most genius way possible: a parody of The Big Bang Theory theme song. Seriously—it was golden.
The simplistic view of biological sex differences goes a
little something like this: an undifferentiated group of cells destined to
become the gonads will, by default, be ovaries. But it’s the influence of the Y
chromosome that gives half of our population testes. In this way, too, the
“female brain” is the “default brain.”
