Measurement or observation of brain events is in its infancy. The most powerful method available if the fMRI which can show real-time changes in brain activity. Lovely word, ‘activity’. What the machine actually shows is changes in blood flow in blood vessels. From that it is deduced that there is activity in proximally close brain cells but the number, activity, even the effects of the activity are guessed through the glass darkly. fMRI does not show actual brain cell activity. But the hyperbole tends to obscure that.

The idea that this ’side’ of the brain or that is responsible for specific functions is simply that; a shorthand for predominant styles of function, but by no means certain or even well mapped. It definitly does not locate ‘point’ and ‘picture’ as you suggest, and it is mendacious to say so. You are forgiven for that though as even the brain scientists themselves tend to get excited and overstate, enabling lay people to infer where nothing substantiable is being inplied.

The study also ascribes function to the Amygdala and the Hyppocampus, well beyond the range of functions that have been proven. The Hyppocampus is not a ‘centre’ for memory or anything like that. Its functions, to date barely understood, seem to be related to short and long term memory but just how, we don’t know. ‘Centre for’ is hyperbole. It has a contributory effect. It’s contribution my even be necessary but it is insufficient. In fact much of the study is about necessity and sufficiency.

The Amygdala we are fairly confident has a lot to do with memory, particularly memory of emotionally charged events, but again it is not a central feature but a ‘gate’ contrubutor. Necessary but insufficient to explain.

The study, even in its eagerness to relate issues on the basis of gender, completely ignores the corpus callosum, the ‘bus-bar’ between the two halves of the brain. Women’s CC is substantially thicker than men’s; it has some two hundred thousand more fibres for data transmission and is distributed to more cells and regions than in a man’s brain. No one knows quite yet what effect other than integration it has on conceptualisation, ‘point’ getting or ‘picture-making’.

It isn’t a question of ‘that’s not a knife; THIS is a knife’, it is a matter of cautious interpretation of results and proper, supportable, evidence-based inference; and distinguishing between the method and data on the one hand and hyperbole in reporting – even in scientific journals – on the other.

This increasingly common style of attracting attention by using unfounded inference is not confined to Feminist studies. There is an overarching ‘mendacity-creep’. The lay person can be forgiven for making incorrect assumptions, to some extent.

EGs assertions go well beyond even unsupported inference and interpretation. As I have repeatedly said, his ‘point’ is clear, but does not have a fact to support it. He ascribes features to a ‘Masculine Principle’ without ever showing that such an animal exists. His ‘point’ is imaginary. He is all ‘blood-flow and ascription to brain cell’ without defining the activity of the brain cell.

But move on to what? EG has already said that his next phase of writing will focus on “action”.

This is a key word for both myself and – obviously – for EG.

But in light of the general hocus pocus around “masculine” this and “truth” that, should I now conclude that all of this subjective talk about “action” is merely another “unseen” event?

You’re still not getting it. You’re trying to prove to me that, because you took masculine action on your website, then you can never be accused of rejecting masculine action on the issue of women’s inventiveness.

Concentrate on the here and now, and stop dragging the goalposts further and further away from me.

“Now, objectively, I understand that the average person might roll their eyes on hearing that their unschooled neighbor has originated a coherent Theory of Everything with practically no academic knowledge, no credentials, and no peer review.”

But I would not, because I would never sink to such a feminine way of evaluating someone’s ideas. (So, you see, the best part about knowing which traits are masculine and which are feminine is that a guy like me is much less likely to use feminine traits.)

TRUTH – If you’re masculine enough to see that masculine and feminine are unseen concepts, you’ll very quickly understand why the feminine unseen force never invents anything.

But if you’re NOT masculine enough to see that masculine and feminine are unseen concepts, you’ll try to prove that masculine and feminine don’t even exist by focusing the debate on penises and vaginas.

Masculine people focus on the unseen forces, while not-masculine-enough people focus on “men and women”, using the default logic of, “A man is anyone who has a penis, but a woman is anyone who has a vagina.”

TRUTH: No amount of feminine focus on the seen can compensate for the completely inability to grasp the unseen.

I know something about the “unseen”, MMX.

I have written down the broad outlines of my personal conceptualization of the Theory of Everything. You can get started by visiting my website BicameralUniverse.com.

Now, objectively, I understand that the average person might roll their eyes on hearing that their unschooled neighbor has originated a coherent Theory of Everything with practically no academic knowledge, no credentials, and no peer review.

But, there you are. I’m an “Action” kind of guy, and I don’t care who does not like it.

I write of the TOE because I have been an informal student of this question since I was a child.

Additionally, as a young man, I was exposed to “knowledge” from an “unseen” source – a “revelation” of sorts.

The knowledge I gained was an ineluctable fragment of what EG might respect as “Truth”. But at the age of 17, I had no context for such vast knowledge, so my intellectual quest for this context has been a life’s work.

But ‘revealed’ knowledge is not a substitute for observed knowledge and a common method of interpreting information.

That’s what you don’t get. But don’t worry – you’re in good company. This sort of argument has been going on for centuries. I see EG’s construct as a pipe-smoking knock-off of Nietzsche’s Blond Beast. But the days of being able to Will Yourself to Power are over, son. Will is very, very good – even indispensable – but it is empty without the disciplined use of common methods.

“At the bottom of all these noble races we cannot fail to recognize the beast of prey, the blond beast splendidly roaming around in its lust for loot and victory. This hidden basis from time to time needs to be discharged: the animal must come out again, must go back into the wilderness,—Roman, Arab, German, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, Scandinavian Vikings—in this need they are all alike.” – On the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche

I’m sending amfortas my best wishes, my feelings of comeraderie, and my blessings. Nothing else. I am not devoting effort to making a man see what he will not see.

Also, as I have said before, I am not here to evangelize but to share a viewpoint, or is it a point? My article Picutures and Points, along with Joyanna’s responding ariticle and this one have already elicited more that 200 responses, not only from the regulars, but from those who are new to or relatively new to my writings. That shows interest, and since most of the comments were in the affirmative, understanding.

Let’s move on.

(1) “Cons, the studies do NOT relate these qualities to males and females. They show that the degree of effect is slightly more pronounced in one or the other sexes, but no study shows exclusivity.”

Exclusivity has nothing to do with the masculine and feminine concepts, because these concepts are not exclusive. How, otherwise, would feminized men be able to argue like little girls? Masculine and feminine are unseen concepts that are not, and have never been, exclusive.

This is why we all know men who agrue like girls, and women who work like men. Because we know that masculine and feminine are concepts, we don’t have the often sad-looking need to focus on men and women!

(2) “I do not seek the lowest common denominator. In fact the opposite. The highest common factor is intelligence.”

Okay, first you want it to be gender neutral, as in, “doesn’t show up more prevalently in one gender than it does another. But then you focus the burden of proof to exclusivity?!? That’s demanding the impossible, just so no one can move forward.

As in, MMX acquires the fifty-five wealthiest businessmen and convinces them to lecture freely on how men can builds habits by which they can become wealthier. Just as the first lecturer is about to speak, amfortas brings the ONE wealthiest businesswoman and declares that the conference cannot possibly work, because much of what the businessman will say can also work for women. Thus, the lecturers are really teaching the men to behave like girls, which is a no-no, even if it’ll make them wealthier.

Exclusivity is a cockblocking device, a way of extending the proof such that it’s not provable. And so you’ll feel superior to us by presenting us with an argument that no one can solve, rather than allowing us to solve the arguments we can solve.

(3) “To me it is more a matter of intelligence, not simply masculinity – unless you can show otherwise.”

It’s your fault that you can’t see it, because you have a need for 100.0000000000000000000000000% exclusivity which ignores the 99.99999999999% pattern. This is very much like a man who cannot eat a sundae because it has half a peanut on the very top, “because I’m allergic to peanuts.”

Just take your spoon and remove it. Then eat! For God’s sake, EAT!

To me it is more a matter of intelligence, not simply masculinity – unless you can show otherwise. It would be fine to think of men in general as all having a level of masculinity or any other feature that is sufficient for the purpose described but that is not my experience of men in general or women for that matter. It is a matter of specificly talented individuals. A small percentage. 50% of both sexes are below average and of those a considerable proportion have difficulty with shoe laces and dribbling.

Maybe the analogy could be correct if you didn’t move it to physical strength! The physically strong do not have to see everyone else as ‘weaklings’ when recognising and correctly assessing their own abilities. It isn’t an issue of looking down on people, rather simply one of recognising particularities.

Whatever that avenue, it doesn’t advance us further along the issue of the Assertion. That simply hasn’t been addressed by either EG or you, or anyone else other than Mike.

I don’t usually do this but I wonder if you’d care to email me. We can discuss things of experience in a more discreet manner. Do you have a blog or something with a contact point on it that I can email you on?

Failing that, MIKE, how do I get my email address to conservativation without my disclosing it here for everyone to see? Can you dig into the MND innards and fetch out our email addresses and send mine to him?

1.Men are faster at mentally rotating an object—imagining what something looks like from a different perspective—and have an internal compass that enables them to squint up at the sun to figure out cardinal directions. Women, on the other hand, rely on landmarks—bear right at the church, turn left after the fire station—to find their way around.

2.Brain imaging techniques revealed that men found their way out of the maze using the left hippocampus, a memory storage region that also governs spatial mapping in the physical environment. Women employed their right parietal and prefrontal cortices, which are linked to visual identification and reasoning. The women’s use of the prefrontal cortex, say researchers, suggests that they relied on landmarks and pictured the objects in their minds, while the men used both landmarks and geometric cues, like shapes and angles, to escape the maze.

3.We also know that the brain’s right hemisphere distills the essence of a situation, the central idea, while the left side mulls the finer points and tracks the details. Consequently, this right-left amygdala division may also illuminate why women remember every excruciating detail of a blowup they had on their honeymoon—where they were, what they were wearing, the time of day—while their husbands barely recall the tiff.

4.In a subsequent UC Irvine experiment, Cahill and his colleagues gave study participants a drug, the beta blocker propranolol, which blunts emotionally charged memories by blocking signals to the amygdala. Then they were shown an emotionally disturbing movie about a boy run over by a car. A week later, when volunteers were quizzed about the film’s content, the males with the beta blocker had trouble remembering the gist of what they saw—the boy being run over by a car. In females, the drug did the converse, interfering with their ability to recall peripheral details, like the fact that the boy had been carrying a soccer ball.
In number 1. note the “concept” of the rotated view, something for which there is no picture available to the man. Note the landmarks for the woman, these are pictures.

In number 2 they identify the women using the part of the brain that stores PICTURES!

Number 3 talks of the POINT, that being as they say the “distillation of the essence of the situation”, the “central idea”, THE POINT! The left side, where the women fire it up, stores the details (excruciating it says), THE PICTURES.

Finally note the beta blocker experiment and exactly WHAT was blocked in the women. It was THE PICTURES, the details.

Amfortas I’m just not sure that, if you accept this study, you can claim there exists no evidence any longer.

Even today – in the Eastern world where ‘Patriarchy’ reigns supreme – Habeas Corpus remains an elusive ideal. Eastern patriarchies don’t like Habeas Corpus because it puts a crimp in the unseen authority of privileged men to oppress unprivileged men.

I absolutely agree with you on the stratification by intellect and I’m glad that somehow I’ve found my way at least to the middle, and can find others there as well. We needn’t all be hyper genius to have a better ordered situation.

The evidence you seek is not presented le by others very easily. It is in your daily doings. It is in your experiences with the genders. And you like most here have some trouble in your past with marriage, that pinnacle of gender relation, and I dare guess the matters of subject here are/were applicable to the dynamics inside most failed marriages (those that fail not due to tangible grounds, but because the people just don’t get on well)

I did bring a piece of third party evidence to the original points and pictures post, that being the study I read about gender and debate or argument. The conclusions there were massively indicative of what EG has asserted here. I wish I could send a link but I read it and moved on.

There is an article posted here about wives and power. If I could get my hands on those tapes I guarantee you I’d show you evidence. These men in general were not being out debated by the women, the men were acquiescing to the fact that to resist is futile. But did you see the conclusion? Marriages are happier in proportion to the level of influence the man accepts from the woman. Like I keep saying, the country and western writers had that nailed without a fancy study. If momma ain’t happy, nobody is happy.

I spoke of an impeachment exercise and how I’m loath to participate. But do let me ask a couple questions and leave a teaser. If you accept the differences, then where do you go from there? What are the differences? The answer to that question is the point of these articles. Don’t get lost in the seeming hyperbole in EG’s writing. Re-read it using less exacting adjectives and verbs. Mike got a little concerned with the absolutes and the definitions. Don’t do that.

I think you actually agree with us here, but somehow, and it is not in your nature, you are missing the point a bit or focusing on that micro aspect of inventiveness. The point is not controversial. You live it daily. Just watch.

Very well put. The motivation behand the actions of your father were unseen qualities. They did not require proof. They were understood. Maybe not even understood, just felt.

It is refreshing to read a positive description of someone’s father.

I do not seek the lowest common denominator. In fact the opposite. The highest common factor is intelligence. If anyone is looking at the lowest common denominator it is EG and by extension, you. Don’t go projecting your misapprehensions onto me! ‘Masculinity’ covers 50% of the population. It is precisely the differences in thinking that I am pointing at. That is my point.

My intent was not to say everyone is lame. Normal everyday behavious tend to be much of a muchness, and fine for that, whereas invention tends to be reflective and intellectual and set apart.

EG (and you) may have a terminological handle to grasp in this ’seen and unseen’ thingo, but neither of you have shown any empirical proofs. Frankly Until you do, all I see is a lot of cock and bull.

tell, me Con – and I generally resspect your views, you know that – tell me why I should blindly accept some assertion when I cannot for the life of me see any connections to reality being made.

Cons, you know full well that I am not thick. Please don’t assume that I am just because the hill you stand on is covered in clouds.

Mike LaSalle — These conceptual innovators, of course, were all men – Western men.

Does that mean that any man born East of the Bosporus is incapable of conceptualizing human liberty? And does that then mean Eastern men are more prone to lies than Western men?

The implications are indeed slippery.

There are no implications to this at all, (except if you believe there’s something mystically magical about being in the “West” that can never be found in the “East”.)

Besides, since YOU proposed that there are implications, YOU have to outline whichs ones you see and WHY they exist.

He could have shown me the definition of honesty in the dictionary. But that would not have taught me honesty. His daily, living example taught me. I see people every day who know the definitions of honesty and truth, but practice neither.

Honesty and truth, principles and strength of character … these are not definitions in a book. They are ways of life. They are forces that affect all the lives around us.

I hope this comes across correctly. My desire to express myself often exceeds my ability …

… and, thanks Dad.