July 17, 2005

Dude, I think I have guy brain

Don't worry, it's not a social disease. (Pause for you to fill-in the follow-up joke.)

I was just watching this BBC show about brain diffrences between men and women, and which of them are caused by hormones and so forth. Apparently, your exposure to testosterone in the womb, in addition to regulating several of the, ahem, more obvious gender distinctions, also detemines the length of your ring and index finger. One of God's freebies. (Men and women both have testorone, men just have a lot more than women.) Most women's ring and index are even steven, as they're not exposed to much of the hormone while developing, while most men have ring fingers that are signifigantly longer than their index. They did this experiment where they gave a scientist who studies this stuff photocopies of the hands of several athelets --- 5,000 meter runners. He measured the difference between their fingers with callipers and predicted thier finishing places in the race on that basis---and he was damn near perfect, except he had the third place guy coming in fourth, and vice-versa.

Well, my ring finger is way longer than my index, on both hands. Now I have to go to the website and take the test to find out if I have total guybrain or what. You'd think I'd be better at math. It does explain that competative streak. Like that time I cheated at Stratego with B by moving my flag. (I am sure B remembers this, as witnessing the iniquity of others inevitably brands his brain permantly, such is his righteousness, but I am sure that he will also recall that Mom caught and punished me at the time.)

Speaking of Mom --- Mom, yo. What up? Why you got all this testosterone floatin' around your womb? I'm the oldest, for goodness sake. Supposedly, once a woman has one boy child, that elevates the latent testorone levels for any subsequent siblings. Maybe Sull has guybrain, too. Sull! Look at your hands! I'm gonna go take the test.

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Dude, just measured my fingers --- I'm a freak. My ring finger is 8 mm longer than my index on my right hand, and 5mm longer on my left, giving a ratio .88 righty and .92 lefty. Doesn't sound like much, does it? Nooo. But: Average female ratio: 1.00. Average male ratio: .96. Jesus. Get me a cage next to the bearded lady. Oh, wait.

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Well, fiished the test, finally. Overall my results were pretty average, and I'm about halfway down the scale of chick-brainedness. (Wow, is that not a word.) Meh, I say, meh. On the other hand, I am apparently attracted to manly-looking men, as oppossed to girlie-boys, so that's something.

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P.S. Did I tell you that on the T.V. show, they ran exaggerated versions of the online tests with a mixed group of men and women, some of them cast according to type (male investment banker, male engineer, female housewife, female manicurist) and some against (female flight test engineer, male childminder) and the this one guy --- the male engineer --- was apparently a roiling ball of testoterone. They had them race go carts at one point (tests competativeness, ya know?) and sadly for one stereotype at least, out of the ten of them none of the women finished top five. Ouch. But, more interstingly, the enginner-guy was in the lead for most of the race and then was overtaken by the investment banker (Did I mention that the investment banker had artistic sideburns? You know the kind I mean. Yeah. Anyway.) and the engineer dude lost it. Spun out three times trying to catch up. And then they showed the tests on their hormone levels and you could see his going through the roof. Then, later, they show this guy playing checkers (sorry, they were English ---- "draughts") with his son, who was like 8, and he wouldn't let the kid win. And then when the kid lost, the kid cried and he laughed at him. Dude, I was sitting there like, whoa, Cap'n Evil. Did it not occur to you that this was going to be on national TV? Man. I wouldn't want to go to the grocery store with him after that program aired. I bet he gets hissed at.


Posted by Diablevert at July 17, 2005 05:12 PM
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