Discussing the book in Newsweek, Sharon Begley writes, "adults perceive baby boys and girls differently, seeing identical behavior through a gender-tinted lens." When baby girls are presented to adults as "boys," the grown-ups are more likely to see them as "angry or distressed." And they perceive male infants as more "happy and socially engaged" when they mistakenly believe they are girls. Also, moms underestimate their baby girls' climbing abilities — and parents interact less with their boy babies, perhaps because they are more irritable than girls.

Of course, the idea that boys and girls are differently socialized is nothing new. But Eliot's theory is that the differences between men's and women's brains actually stem from very tiny differences present in infancy, which are magnified by parental treatment. Boys may become less social, girls less comfortable with physical challenges, all because parents react to very small variations in behavior. According to Begley, Eliot debunks the claims "that women are hard-wired to read faces and tone of voice, to defuse conflict, and to form deep friendships; [...] that 'girls' brains are wired for communication and boys' for aggression'" and "that toy preferences-trucks or dolls-appear so early, they must be innate." Instead, she says, parental treatment causes small differences to "snowball, producing brains with different talents."

Eliot says, "kids rise or fall according to what we believe about them," and reading about her research made me wonder about the ways my own parents might have unconsciously pinked out my brain. In general, they were super-supportive and gender-neutral, but I do sometimes wonder why my brother played four organized sports while I got put in what the school euphemistically called "adaptive" PE. Part of this is almost certainly innate ability — I'm convinced that there is a gene for reliably knowing the difference between right and left, and I don't have it. But were my early signs of klutziness magnified by my parents? It's possible. I certainly felt like they protected me more than my brother — he didn't have, for instance, a two-year-long no-driving-on-the-freeway rule after he got his license. Ultimately, though, it's pretty much impossible to determine which of my spatial deficiencies come from parental protection and which from some sort of congenital ass-vs.-elbow confusion. But maybe Eliot's book will help parents recognize their unconscious prejudices — leaving people like me with only bad genes to blame.

Pink Brain, Blue Brain [Newsweek]

Inhumane behavior often comes from having damage to prefrontal cortex, leading to bad self-control and moral reasoning. But brain damage is not a mechanism for becoming a genius. Basically there is no reason for the two to be correlated.

Maybe you need counterexamples?

Darwin: Devoted family man, not known to be a perv. Went out of his way to give joint credit to Wallace for the theory of natural selection. An asshole wouldn't do that.

Einstein: big pacifist. Worried like hell about war. Generally thought to not be an asshole. However, he was said to cat around a bit in his youth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein

Benjamin Franklin: definitely not an asshole. Came up with bifocals, showed that lightning was made of electricity, and thought of the ideas of positive and negative charge. Liked to cat around. Not a known perv, unless you somehow count the fur hat he wore when visiting France.

One of the problems is that it's easier to remember stories about geniuses who were assholes or freaks. Pablo Picasso (despite the song), Vincent Van Gogh, Isaac Newton. Maybe the myth comes from the fact that geniuses sometimes think that they don't have to follow other people's rules. Kind of like the very rich and very powerful.

Oh yes, ha ha, except! That nihilistic asshole you put up with until you realized he wasn't even actually smarter than you: neither rich nor powerful. Carry on!

Maybe this also explains why super-poor countries find it so easy to embrace super-restrictive religious sects requiring them to pray five times a day and not drink or wear miniskirts? Don't worry though, America has weapons to protect us from getting that poor.

Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind [NY Times]
Nigeria's Immorality Is About Hypocrisy, Not Miniskirts [Guardian]
Down The Tube: the Sad Stats On Happiness, Money, And TV [WSJ]

Days after Mrs. Tucker's brain scan, Dr. Brown, the neuroscientist, sat in her book-lined office looking at the results. "Wow, just wow," she recalls thinking. Mrs. Tucker's brain reacted to her husband's photo with a frenzy of activity in the ventral tegmental area. "I was shocked," Dr. Brown says.

Upstate New York mathematicians, naturally! When they met, she was 28 and he was 54.

They met sitting across a horseshoe-shaped table at a math conference in the Adirondack Mountains. "I knew immediately we'd get married," Mrs. Tucker says. They got their marriage license less than a year later, on Valentine's Day.

Keeping Love Alive [WSJ]