I'm still making my way through these two studies, but given all the posts on sex and gender over the past few weeks I thought it was kind of kismet and worth sharing.
I came across the first study, titled "Male Microchimerism in the Human Female Brain" in a press release that announced "Men on the mind: Study finds male DNA in women's brains".
The headline is a bit misleading, at least the first part. No one was thinking about men. Rather the researchers looked at the brains of 59 women, who died between the ages of 32 and 101 and found that 63% of them had male DNA in their brains. They call this phenomenon male microchimerism and they suspect that the DNA came from a male fetus the women would have carried at some point in their lives. They aren't 100% sure of that - they didn't have pregnancy histories for all the brain-participants - and they don't really know what it means. They are interested in what effects, positive or negative, having male DNA in one's brain might have on long term health (for example the likelihood of developing Alzheimer's disease). I'm interested in how this might help us complicate all the talk of male brains and female brains and how one comes from earth and the other from some far off planet.
The second study I came across this week is titled "Cross-Category Adaptation: Objects Produce Gender Adaptation in the Perception of Faces" and concerns not sex or brains but gender and minds. The researchers here are interested in a phenomenon called an "adaptation aftereffect". This describes something our minds do after we perceive something that in fact changes our perception. We actually think we're seeing the opposite of what we just saw. Here's an example:
If you stare at red screen for some time and then look at a white screen most people will perceive it not as white but as green, which is red's opposite.
The researchers, god love them, were curious if this would work with perception of gender. And so they showed people objects which they say are gendered (things like high heels, an electric razor, a motorcycle, a bra) and then showed them faces that had been manipulated to look either "absolutely male" "absolutely female" "relatively male" "relatively female" or neutral.
They found that the same effect happened. After someone looks at male objects, they were more likely to perceive faces as female, and vice versa. As with the first study described above, the researchers, to their credit, only guess at what this might mean. They suggest that their findings might point to the fact that reading gender and perceiving gender are two separate if related activities in the brain.
I like the idea of trying to more carefully parse just how it is that we experience/perceive/identify gender. Although I have a hard time with the gendered objects. Sure, most people would likely associate a bra with women, but are the neural pathways that get us from bra to female always the same? Is perceiving gender the same as perceiving red? I tend to think not. But I'm happy for the occasion to ask the question.
And thanks to the wonders of open access journals we all have access to the papers and the many questions they raise.
Read More:
PLoS One: Male Microchimerism in the Human Female Brain and Cross-Category Adaptation: Objects Produce Gender Adaptation in the Perception of Faces
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