Male Brain vs Female Brain. Different?
When we think of the awards that scientists receive as a result of their work, the name Alfredo Nobel immediately comes to mind.
Nobel Prizes began to be awarded at the beginning of the 20th century and since then the Nobel Prize has been one of the most important symbols of distinction in world society. Inevitably, throughout its history, for different reasons, there have been big problems, for example, in the case of the Nobel Peace Prize, characters like Gandhi were selected as candidates but never received the award.
Gandhi himself was a candidate on six different occasions, never received the Nobel Prize, and on one occasion he shared the candidacy with Adolf Hitler.
Throughout history, there were also people, mainly women, who were sidelined by the Nobel Committee. Also in some cases, some people received a single Nobel Prize when it is clear that they made many different contributions, perhaps the most notable of all being that of Albert Einstein.
Einstein published in 1905 five works that should have been awarded at least four Nobel Prizes, one of them for demonstrating, beyond any doubt, the existence of atoms and molecules, much of modern chemistry is based on a mathematical tool of Statistical nature that was developed by Einstein and it was also he who described the causes of a phenomenon known as the photoelectric effect, which is the basis of quantum mechanics and the basis of photoelectric technology among others. And there is the Theory of Relativity, another Nobel Prize, and there is the General Theory of Relativity, which is a spectacularly incredible development from relativity. They only gave him one. There are more cases, Tesla, the Rutherford case for example, etc …
Another pending issue between the scientific community and the Nobel Prize winners is that the Nobel Prize winners do not recognize certain categories that we currently consider crucial, for example, mathematics, for example, biology, most of the people who receive Nobel Prizes for making fundamental discoveries in the world of biology they receive the prize of medicine or physiology.
There is no Nobel Prize in biology, there is no Nobel Prize in mathematics, there are no Nobel Prize winners that recognize technological advances, as a general rule, when some technological advance is recognized in the world of Nobel Prize winners, it is done through of the Nobel Prize in physics, this is a consequence of the way in which Alfred Nobel established his prize system and the Nobel Foundation, which is one of the most effective and honest on the planet, has followed his indications to the letter.
It would not be highly advisable to change that, but it would be advisable for there to be some mechanism to publicly recognize and also with money in hand, people or teams that make important scientific developments.
The Nobel Prize today involves a few hundred thousand dollars and when this Nobel Prize is shared, which is what has been going on for a long time, it is shared between two or three people. Each person can get 300 or 400 thousand dollars, which is very good money, but for the work of a lifetime, for the work of people who probably managed to open the way for the development of new vaccines, etc., a job that in the hands of an industrialist it will become a multibillion-dollar industry, it seems that it is not a very big recognition. In addition, normally when scientists receive Nobel Prizes they do not use the prize to buy a yacht, there is the case of Niels Bohr, one of the greatest scientists in all of history, one of the few people who could talk about “you to you ”to Albert Einstein and he used the Nobel Prize money to fit out a house that he turned into a study center.
Scientists and the brightest students spent a season living in Bohr’s house, and that is where the magic happened, there were discussions between various people that lasted until late at night, in which new ideas suddenly appeared that with time they were crucial for the development of modern physics. This would not have happened if Bohr had used his money to buy a new house for himself.
There has been a new public recognition for seven years, they are called the Breakthrough Prize
These awards are for those who suddenly open the way to something new, if we are exploring new territory and we do not find a way and suddenly someone finds an unknown gap that allows us to move forward, it is a break that allows us to pass on the other side of a barrier, which can be physical or can be social or intellectual.
This award was largely funded at the behest of Yuri Mílner and his wife Julia Mílner. Mílner is a Russian millionaire who, like other young billionaires like Elon Musk, has an advanced technological perspective.
Mílner, for example, is involved in the development of a small constellation of spacecraft that could be the size of a cell phone that could be accelerated up to 10 percent of the speed of light. Mílner’s intention is to launch a small constellation of these micro spaceships, which will receive light from the Sun, when they are close to a star, or will receive from other energy sources, and the idea is to make them reach Alpha Centauri in about 40 years, so if all goes well, the first functional interstellar ships of the human species could be launched in a few decades as a consequence of the technological vision of this marriage.
It will cause a lot of talks, just like Elon Musk. These are characters whose existence was predicted by science fiction authors such as Carl Sagan or Arthur C. Clark, people with great technological talent, with great vision, with an enormous capacity to accumulate economic resources and who use those economic resources for the development of border technologies.
At the beginning of this new century, a very curious phenomenon occurred, suddenly many people with a lot of money and with a technological vision were synchronized in some way and began to push forward various new technologies, technologies that in the short term are going to put into our hands to the Moon and Mars, and that’s just to start.
Among the people who participated in the development of the Breakthrough Prize project are characters like Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, and other people, all of them young, Sergey Brin who is another person who has had a great impact on the Internet, he is one from the co-founders of Google. This gives you an idea of the social importance of Sergey Brin’s work, and there are several other names, it is an outstanding group that was the founders of this award.
These people provide a prize of 3 million dollars for each person or institution that wins in the categories they have contemplated. To begin with, the prize is much bigger than the most classic prize of all, which is the Nobel Prize, and that means that much more money is being placed in the hands of people who are likely to use that money for research projects.
So a lot of money is being put in very good hands and some categories that escape the Nobel Prize are being recognized. The Breakthrough Prize awards are given to people who make fundamental contributions in the life sciences, it is a more general term, in science, in fundamental physics it is the second category and the third category mathematics, very important, and if you search for Example in Wikipedia you will see who are the people who have received these awards.
Well, let’s talk about one of the awards that are going to be awarded this year, the person in question who is going to receive the Breakthrough Prize 3 million dollars, and a very high-level recognition in the category of life sciences is a biologist Catherine Dulac.
What did this lady do?
We have long tried to understand how the brain works. Of all the known phenomena in the Universe, the human brain is by far the most complex, we do not know anything more intricate, more full of surprises than our own brain, and we are so ignorant about its functioning that we have even made some assertions about our brain that came to have important, serious negative social consequences, and which now turn out to be patently false.
Think about the supposed difference between the male brain and the female brain. Supposedly, women are better able to perform certain types of intellectual tasks than men, this way of thinking certainly seems sexist because that automatically can mean that women simply are not good at doing certain things.
There has been one who says that women do not know how to compose music, that women cannot carry out certain types of scientific work, that they certainly cannot direct the destiny of a country, and one only has to look at history in recent decades to realize that this is not true.
It was really thought that the physiological structure of the brain of men was different from the brain of women, and from time to time there is some work that says that if in this region you see x, or you see that there is a development in a slightly higher in the average of male brains in relation to the average of female brains.
It is a bit stupid, if you think about it, a bit absurd if you consider that in the end what determines a person’s sex is the production of certain types of hormones during fetal development. If you change the formula for the amount and type of hormone that you are delivering to a developing fetus, you can make that effect turn into a male or a female, and the brain will work just as well or poorly in both cases.
The brain study was very crude at first, all they had were formalin-preserved brains that they could see under a microscope. This is like having a computer turned off and trying to figure it out. Studying only the transistors of a computer to know how a computer can play chess or how a computer connects to the Internet.
The only analysis of the micro transistors, of the chips of a computer, does not reveal much about this, it is necessary to understand the nature of computer programs, the problem is that like computer programs, the personality, the individuality of a person vanish when the person dies.
Studying a dead brain does not reveal the software of the brain, it seems essentially impossible
In the 90s the doctor began to find some keys to understand the functioning of the brain in a male person and in a female person, the doctor worked with mice on the structure of the brain.
The general structure of the brain of a mouse is very similar to that of the human brain. All mammalian brains are very similar, the only difference is in the degree of complexity, if you have ever played with an 8-bit computer, the first personal computers that came out on the market, a Commodore, an Atari, you will realize, if you learned anything about computing, that those machines operated on the same principles as modern machines, only these machines that we have now are broadly between one and a billion times more powerful.
If you study an Atari 8-bit and see how the software works, you can find the basic principles of the operation of the software in general and that opens the way to begin to understand the very complex software of modern machines, it is a good starting point.
Similarly, Dr. Dulac went to work with the brains of mice and found that there are certain regions in the brains of mice that are activated differently in males and females, despite the fact that these regions are physiologically the same. . There is something that causes the same brain region to behave differently in a male than in a female.
What can that be?
Well, we know that our bodies are made of millions of millions of cells that need chemical substances to synchronize their behavior, there are chemical substances that act as messengers that help a part of the body, such as the pancreas, tell the whole body it should start to absorb glucose from the blood. These substances, which alter the general functioning of the body and which serve as messengers, are known generically as hormones. For hormones to perform their function, the cells that are going to receive the message must have proteins in their membrane that know how to trap these hormone molecules. These proteins are called receptor proteins, there are many different types of receptor proteins. If you want a cell to react to a hormonal signal, you need that cell to have a receptor protein that is capable of capturing the hormone molecule in question.
This is what the doctor found
She began to realize that there are different hormone receptors on some neurons located in certain regions of the brain in male mice and in female mice. The cells look the same, only they have different hormone receptors, the same hormones that stimulate the brain of a male mouse in a certain way do not stimulate the brain of a female mouse in the same way, because the cells that activate with males they are not activated in the case of females.
Dr. Dulac continued working with this and found a protein, galanin, this protein is only found in certain neurons that are found in certain places in the brain. If you turn off those neurons, if you kill those neurons, the mice change their behavior in a crucial way, the mice stop caring for their young, the same circuits that make male mice protect their young. In a way, female mice are responsible for this behavior.
The typical behavior of a male during the reproductive season was thought to be governed by regions of the brain other than the brain regions that make females behave as they do during the reproductive season. Suddenly, it turns out that they are the same brain regions, only they are activated differently in a male brain and a female brain.
The case of mice suddenly helped us better understand the general reproductive functioning of all mammals, helped us understand why humans react the way we react and also began to open up unexpected new routes in the world of psychology.
Instead of treating men and women as something different, now experts in psychology, even clinical psychiatry, can better interpret the workings of the human brain in general, because ultimately it is the same brain, and this certainly has. generated a whole host of other perspectives on human sexual behavior, which for a long time we thought had to fall into one category or another.
This is opening routes to understanding the molecular bases of behavior and that in turn is opening routes to better understand why behavior sometimes goes where it shouldn’t.
One last observation
This of course has a great social and economic value in itself because it helps to improve behavior therapies a lot, we understand the human brain better and we have better elements to cure or correct any behavior problem.
But there is something else, by revealing these mechanisms, this technology, this knowledge and the technology derived from it, could help us in the foreseeable future to better understand and better control the behavior, not only of an individual but of a community.
We could find the bases to stimulate rational thought, we could create pills like those in the novel “A Happy World” by Huxley, which serve to make people live in a cloud of joy and completely removed from reality, we could find the Biochemical means necessary to improve our best intellectual qualities.
The consequences that this would have in the long term would be wonderful, if we use that technology in a rational way, and this is where the problem is always with any new knowledge, knowledge gives power.
The work of this researcher and her team are opening direct and practicable routes to understand and control our character, understand why we are the way we are and be able to edit our character, edit our emotions, emotions that frequently dominate us and derail our life projects.
Taking control of our emotions would put our own destiny in our hands again and that is what this doctor is achieving with her work.
How nice that they gave him the award!
EPPUR MOVES
