A Neuroscience Lesson for Charlotte Allen [Updated]

March 4th, 2008 | 5 Comments

If you’re just cruising in due to the Charlotte Allen flap and don’t know who I am, let me introduce myself:

I am a graduate student in cognitive psychology. I have concentrations in neuroscience and education research. My dissertation research is on spatial skills and math achievement. In other words, when Allen starts spewing nonsense about brains and math, she is making a mess on my academic home turf.

And her understanding of the science is so wrong, it makes my head hurt. I care not that she thinks women are only suited for staying at home and counting their shoes. As I said before, I’m very supportive of her doing exactly that, and leaving the scientific commentary to those who are qualified to do it.

Commenter Adam Klasfeld of Stinky Journalism challenged that I didn’t go far enough in my refutation of her science, and sent me to this piece about the folly of stuff like trying to use brain size to predict intelligence. He’s right, and the piece is well worth reading.

I found the additional commentary at the bottom of the article particularly interesting, including this choice tidbit from Allen herself:

It’s incontrovertible that men’s brains are relatively larger than women even when the measurements are adjusted for body size. One leading such study is Jill Goldstein’s “Normal Sexual Dimorphism of the Adult Human Brain Assessed by In Vivo Magnetic Resonance Imaging,” published in the journal Cerebral Cortex in 2001. There, Goldstein and her research team found that men have proportionately larger parietal lobes, which are associated with the mental manipulation of objects and relation of numbers to each other.

Should I assume she’s just being tongue-in-cheek here, too?

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