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Title details for Gender and Our Brains by Gina Rippon - Available

Gender and Our Brains

How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds

by Gina Rippon
Hannah Curtis
Audiobook
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A breakthrough work in neuroscience—and an incisive corrective to a long history of damaging pseudoscience—that finally debunks the myth that there is a hardwired distinction between male and female brains
 
We live in a gendered world, where we are ceaselessly bombarded by messages about sex and gender. On a daily basis, we face deeply ingrained beliefs that sex determines our skills and preferences, from toys and colors to career choice and salaries. But what does this constant gendering mean for our thoughts, decisions and behavior? And what does it mean for our brains?
Drawing on her work as a professor of cognitive neuroimaging, Gina Rippon unpacks the stereotypes that surround us from our earliest moments and shows how these messages mold our ideas of ourselved and even shape our brains. By exploring new, cutting-edge neuroscience, Rippon urges us to move beyond a binary view of the brain and to see instead this complex organ as highly individualized, profoundly adaptable and full of unbounded potential.
Rigorous, timely and liberating, Gender and Our Brains has huge implications for women and men, for parents and children, and for how we identify ourselves.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    August 27, 2019

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781984889799
      • File size: 447506 KB
      • Duration: 15:32:18

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Narrator Hannah Curtis's light and airy British accent adds even more legitimacy to Rippon's dispatching of misinformation, shoddy research, and sexist assumptions relating to the myth of male and female minds. Her voice proves welcoming in its warmth and energy but is equally assertive and filled with conviction as she narrates Rippon's prose. She proves adept at communicating Rippon's arguments and sometimes ribbing commentary. Curtis fluctuates her tone actively to meet the context of the writing, making the experience feel almost conversational to the listener. Her performance seems entirely in sync with the author. Rippon's writing will rile many as she systematically dismantles the current scientific research on gender to illustrate how much of the research is flawed, limited, or intentionally ignoring evidence to the contrary. L.E. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 27, 2019
      Neuroscientist Rippon painstakingly refutes in this exhaustive study long-held beliefs about gender’s role in the development and functioning of the brain. Rippon demonstrates how researchers’ expectations can alter a study’s findings and how false statistics become lodged in the popular imagination and repeated as facts long after they are disproven, such as the popular belief that women “on average use 20,000 words a day and men use only 7,000.” The most illuminating aspect of her account is an explanation of the “plastic” nature of the brain, particularly among infants and children. The brain’s “trajectory may not be fixed but can be diverted by tiny differences in expectations and attitudes.” Consequently, children as young as 21 months can recognize genders, and by age 5 are adhering rigidly to gender roles (centered around choice of toys, for example) based on the perceived expectations of the adults around them. This is a powerful and well-constructed argument for gender as a social construct—nurture rather than nature. Some of the harder science in the book is not layperson-friendly; Rippon’s frequently accessible contradiction of sexist myths also contains massive amounts of neuroscience data. Nevertheless, those interested in gender-related brain differences (or lack thereof) will find this riveting.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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