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The story comes to us from the Daily Mail. Where else?
Before you begin scoffing, I will add that the research was conducted at
Stanford University. It was published in a serious academic journal, called
Depression and Anxiety.
The researchers wanted to study the different ways
that the brains of boys and girls react to severe stress. While no one seems to
want to say it, the question points at a significant biological difference
between the sexes.
The difference concerns a part of the brain responsible for
feelings and action, called the insula.
Wikipedia offers an explanation of its function:
The
insulae are believed to be involved in consciousness and play a role in diverse functions
usually linked to emotion or the regulation of the body's homeostasis. These functions include perception, motor control, self-awareness, cognitive
functioning,
and interpersonal
experience. In
relation to these, it is involved in psychopathology.
They discovered that when boys and girls are exposed to stress the girls’
insulae shrink while the boys’ insulae grow.
The Daily Mail reports:
Girls
react differently to stress because it changes parts of their brain, new
research suggests.
Traumatic
situations cause the section of their brain responsible for feelings and
actions - known as the insula - to shrink.
Whereas
stress has the opposite effect on boys, causing theirs to grow.
Among the consequences, researchers believe that girls who
are exposed to more stress might age more quickly and experience puberty
earlier. Thus, that the stress is more damaging for them than for boys. And
girls will have more difficulty dealing with certain kinds of extreme stress
than boys.
Does this not tell us that men and women in the
military probably react differently to extremely stressful situations? Thus,
that women are more likely to be traumatized and more likely to have more
difficulty functioning than men. The problem lies in the brain, not in a social
construct.
2 comments:
Let me begin by saying that (1) men and women are biologically different, and (2), in my opinion, women have no business in military combat roles, irrespective of insulae, for a wide variety of reasons.
Having said that, fMRI results should be taken with large scoops, indeed shovelfuls, of salt. Understanding brain function using fMRI is akin to taking a satellite infrared scan of a factory roof and trying to figure out what is being made inside. There are obvious constraints on factory floor processes that help, but at the end of the day it's a futile pursuit, fraught with potential for error. Frankly, fMRI is a high-tech version of phrenology.
One major problem is that fMRI images are the result of mathematical signal processing algorithms. To get the pictures, numerical thresholds are set to determine which pixels with be red (active), and which pixels will be gray (inactive). The numerical thresholds are arbitrary. And, in fact, the images can look completely different merely as a function of different CPU chips because different chips handle floating-point operations differently. Like the beautiful Hubble images you see on the internet, raw fMRI "images", to the extent they should be called "images" at all before they are processed, look nothing like the pictures shown in journals (FYI, there is actually no color in those popular Hubble images you see on the internet - they are all "colorized" for your enjoyment. As NASA has noted, the colorization "is equal parts art and science".)
I raised the fMRI issue at a NATO conference many years ago, but no one listened. Nevertheless, in May of this year, PNAS published a study (Eklund, et al) that found "that the most common software packages for fMRI analysis (SPM, FSL, AFNI) can result in false-positive rates of up to 70%...". That is a stunning finding, and casts thousands of journal pages in serious doubt.
Beyond that, please note the Wiki entry quoted above carefully says that "The insulae are believed to be..." That's a guess. It's an educated guess, yes, but jeez... it was an "educated guess" that Hillary was 14 points ahead and that the Arctic would be ice-free last summer.
Despite the pop-sci appeal of fMRI imaging (and it seems all the cool kids with Federal grants have a machine these days), there is good reason to exclude women from some military roles. As I've noted here before, when I was told I would be paired with a woman in the volunteer fire department I served in, I explained I would be delighted to serve with her after she demonstrated an ability to carry me down a flight of stairs while wearing bunker gear. Otherwise, the battalion commander could go pound sand. Neither insulae nor fMRI imaging entered into my decision.
Stuart: Does this not tell us that men and women in the military probably react differently to extremely stressful situations? Thus, that women are more likely to be traumatized and more likely to have more difficulty functioning than men.
No, it's not clear at all that a study on boys and girls applies at all to men and women who are considering military service.
However it may suggest we should worry more about intervention with girls in unstable family situations.
If I look at my own family's stressful times, like with my parents yelling and fighting in the years before their divorce, I'm sure my sister took it harder than me. She convinced herself that she was a bad daughter and believed if she was good enough, they'd stop fighting and we could be a happy family again. I had no such delusions, correctly concluded that it was not my problem, and retreated to my own space.
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