In December of last year,
the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science published a study by
researchers at Tel Aviv University, catchily entitled “The human brain mosaic”.
The great thing about it is
that in one single piece of research, it sums up everything that I have ever
wanted to scream at people.
To quote the abstract, “Brains with features that are consistently at one end of the
“maleness-femaleness” continuum are rare. Rather, most brains are comprised of
unique “mosaics” of features, some more common in females compared with males,
some more common in males compared with females, and some common in both
females and males. (…) These findings are corroborated by a similar analysis of
personality traits, attitudes, interests, and behaviors of more than 5,500
individuals, which reveals that internal consistency is extremely rare.“
In other words, we are all individuals with unique brains and
personalities.
So why is this so difficult for us to wrap our heads around? Why
do we believe books that tell us “Men are from Mars, women are from Venus” and
raise our children differently because “boys will be boys”?
