Wednesday, March 09, 2005
Juxtaposition (Pre-Coffee* Ramblings)
Sometimes on the internet, things get thrown together in funny ways. This morning on the BBC News website, the leftmost column showed a headline for a gallery of medical quackery, and in the rightmost column a self-test of "sex I.D." to "Find out how your mind works!"
Not to be put off, I took the test. My results came up strongly in the "female" direction, despite my rather obvious, uhm, maleness. I scored poorly on the 3-D rotation task because I ran out of time...a proper test would control for that. The finger length bit is deceptive - the scores are referred to an absolute average, but of course no one but politicians uses an absolute average for anything. Most interesting was my dichotomy on the emotion-versus-systemizing bit: I scored heavily female on empathy, and heavily male on systematizing. My conclusion from this little experiment is: our brains' "sex ID" is a range of things, and no one fits the profiles perfectly.
*Note: By "pre-coffee" I actually mean "between cups," but the first has worn off so it's all the same thing.
Not to be put off, I took the test. My results came up strongly in the "female" direction, despite my rather obvious, uhm, maleness. I scored poorly on the 3-D rotation task because I ran out of time...a proper test would control for that. The finger length bit is deceptive - the scores are referred to an absolute average, but of course no one but politicians uses an absolute average for anything. Most interesting was my dichotomy on the emotion-versus-systemizing bit: I scored heavily female on empathy, and heavily male on systematizing. My conclusion from this little experiment is: our brains' "sex ID" is a range of things, and no one fits the profiles perfectly.
*Note: By "pre-coffee" I actually mean "between cups," but the first has worn off so it's all the same thing.
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