Progress Daily

What makes men & women behave & respond differently?

Brain: slightly larger in men but women have more neurons in certain areas.

Amygdala: where anger, fear and strong emotions originate. Smaller in women, possibly making them less likely to fight.

Prefrontal cortex: larger and matures earlier in women, which may account for them being more patient than men.

Anterior cingulate cortex: stress and mood centre. It is also involved in decision-making. Larger in women, possibly making them more prone to deliberation and worry.

Language: hemispheric asymmetry is less pronounced in women. Their language capability is dispersed across both hemispheres, unlike men.

Hearing: a 1997 study found that in the range of 1,500hz (the range of sound critical for understanding speech), the average baby girl has an acoustic brain response about 80% greater than the average baby boy. May explain why music therapy for premature babies works for newborn girls but not for boys.

Sight: in boys, the eye is more sensitive to movement, in girls to colour and texture. May account for newborn boys’ preference for toys that move, such as trucks.

Emotion: in young children, negative emotion in response to disturbing images seems to be centred in primitive areas of the brain, specifically the amygdala. In girls, by the teenage years, a larger portion of the brain activity involved in processing negative emotion is located in the cerebral cortex, which is associated with reflection, language and reasoning. Boys continue to process negative emotion in the amygdala. This may be why boys find it hard to talk about their feelings.

“Lobal warfare” by Carol Midgley

Virginia Postrel is excited by her purchase of a five-pound bag of flour for $0.69.

Consider the overwhelming bulk of our ancestors half a millennium ago — Eurasian peasants circa 1500. Something like 3/4 of the value of what they and their villages produced was foodstuffs. And hey were lucky if the foodstuffs they produced got them 1900 calories a day.

The sixty-cent-bag of flour contains 7500 calories — 7500 calories of higher nutritional quality and easier to digest than the bulk of the calories our ancestors ate. That’s four days’ worth of food, or a value equivalent to three days’ worth of total production.

Today output per capita in the United States is close to $100 a day (not per workday, per day). To one of our ancestors alive in 1500, a bag of flour is the same fraction of their economic resources — material welfare — as $300 would be to an American today.

A bag of flour is 450 times smaller a share of economic activity today as half a millennium ago.

“(One Piece of) The Real Headline News” by Brad DeLong