How do genes and hormones like gender affect the brain?

New  evidence from neuroscience wet labs and AI give us a radically new understanding of how brains really work. Saving the World: How Our Brains REALLY work: best new information on functional neuroscience (drpauljohn.blogspot.com) That in turn gives us a new, more complete answer to the basic question: How do genes and hormones like gender affect the brain?

I owe great thanks to the three brilliant women who led me to explain that answer this week. They got me started by commenting  on recent Harvard research on brain differences between males and females, and on the trouble Larry Summers got into when he speculated on that issue. They strated by citing:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/catherine-dulac-finds-brain-circuitry-behind-sex-specific-behaviors-20201214/

 

After my initial response, getting into how brains work, I received three replies, and then got deeper into how brains work in my final reply.

 

My INITIAL RESPONSE -------------------------------------------------

On a quick glance...

 

I am reminded how many papers with the words "sex" or "soul" or "God" in them activate hot buttons in the reader which tend to blot out what the authgor was really working on. But even authors can get mixed up; I remember many proposals at NSF whether the project summary and the actual project seemed to be "on different planets," showing and espousing totally different things.

 

HAVING studied brains in incredible detail... here not only published papers but unpublished ones and conference discussions which SHOULD have gone further.,.. held back by sheer complexity... I interpret the main results as follows.

 

Mammal brains like ours COMBINE a universal learning ability (to learn new weights W and new connections) TOGETHER WITH important, informative INITIAL WEIGHTS. (And also some other parameters, like cognitive style and value weights.) E.O. Wilson, whom I cite a lot in one of my early unpublished papers from Harvard days on this topic, ALSO spends a lot of pages in his classic book Sociobiology on "predispositions," which includes INITIAL WEIGHT INITIAL BEHAVIORS which are easily unlearned. There are many many examples in the animal world. (I seem to recall a teenage gorilla looking puzzled and thinking "WHY am I building this dumb nest which has no use at all here?", outgrowing a behavior which HAD been useful in an environment he never grew up in.) 

 

And that's pretty much the core of it. My understanding of how brains work (.e.g in Werbos and Davis) builds on Lashley, Pribram and Freeman, asserting a UNIVERSAL LEARNING capability in the higher, larger part of  mammal brains (including human ones). (Humans have a little more, but no difference in the new machinery between males and females.)

 

This paper also reminds me of a woman I met briefly, who spoke at one of Bob Narendra's workshops at Yale -- the woman who took over for Patricia Goldmann-Rakic, one of the world's top systems neuroscientists before her death in a car crash. 

If I were still handling brain stuff for NSF, that woman at Yale would have a central role, because of the unique importance of HER fundamental work. She was CONNECTING endocrinology and functional neuroscience, showing for example how dozens of hormones in the bloodstream change the fundamental neural dynamics which Patricia helped us understand. That is such an important connection! But males and females both experience ups and downs which sometimes strengthen and sometimes blot out their higher abstract intellectual abilities. It helps to understand what is going on.

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THE THREE REPLIES ======================================================

FIRST-------------------------------------

Larry spoke on gender differences at a private conference on the position of women and minorities in science and engineering, hosted by the National Bureau of Economic Research. a lengthy address delivered without notes

As an example, Dr Summers told the conference about giving his daughter two trucks. She treated them like dolls, and named them mummy and daddy trucks, he said.

 

This reminds me of a story one of us told about one of his daughters making a family out of counting bears instead of mechanically grouping and counting them. She was onto something, because the essence of counting objects is that they are identical, and whoever invented counting bears should have realized that adding a pink mama bear to a green daddy bear doesn't just create two bears, but a new object -- a family unit ;) Boys most likely don't care about such social constructs early in life. I don't know who larry's daughter became, but this girl moved on to get a PhD in hard science.

SECOND REPLY------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Of course, women are different from men. However, insinuating that women are inferior to men got Summers in trouble -- deservedly in my opinion. He should have been smarter in how to express his belief or better a scientific fact!

THIRD REPLY-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

We always knew it is right.  This belongs to the things we should not say - women and men are different   shhhh.....  :-)

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MY FINAL REPLY:

 

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Discussing the Harvard woman's paper further..  the commenters rightly noted that universal learning ability does NOT make males and females learn the same. 

 

Male versus female is just one special case of what genes do to us -- XX versus XY in this case.

 

I mentioned THREE types of effects of genes on behavior:

 

(1) Predispositions which can be unlearned;

 

(2) Deep hardwired VALUE parameters, not for the learned values, but for primary reinforcement, for the

utility function which the rest of the brian learns to ,maximize; and

 

(3) cognitive style parameters, basically like the learning rates or learning rate parameters which any competent neural network system has (even when it has adaptive learning rates).

 

The actual circuits we observe in brains cut across many parts of the brain, and are the COMBINED result of all three genetic effects and many levels of learning. Approaching these circuits as ONE THING can be very misleading. I liked that Yale woman who disentangled dozens of hormones. 

 

The commenters mentioned a male mouse eating baby mice instead of building a nest. Yes, that example is very different from the example of a young gorilla, which was about unlearning a predisposition(genetic effect 1). It was basically about that male not loving the babies as much as the mother mouse did. That is governed by a utility function parameter, genetic effect type 2. Love is not a scalar hardwired thing, but it is certainly AFFECTED by genetic things. Like an adaptive learning rate, it changes, but there are genetic factors affecting how it changes.

 

Why don't we have a paper on this? Good point. I can help,  but I can't write. It's ironic that my English is usually so inferior to that of the rest of you. I guess THAT is an example of learning effects! (Actually, of all three types of starting point effects as well!)

 

[I actually do have an old paper buried in my deep files, which makes the key points in connections with sociobiology and international politics. In truth, Karl Deutsch asked me to wrote it for his festschrift, he liked it, but the editor at MIt said "these things have nothing to do with cybernetics." That was back when I started a new faculty job at UMCP, and was a PI on a DARPA grant I focused my energy on. No time for stuff they weren't interested in.