Or, rather less technically, women always had two left blobs and one right blob, while men had either two right blobs or two left blobs, depending on the task – painting a rather less striking image of contrast. (Bear in mind, too, that blobs represent differences in brain activity, not brain activity per se. If a search for regions activated more in men yields a blob-free left hemisphere, for example, that doesn’t mean that that hemisphere is switched off in men. Rather, it means that the researchers didn’t find any regions in the hemisphere that were activated more in men than in women.)
My research supervisor at Cambridge, Richard Dyball, had a *killer* set of jokes about scientists who relied on brain imaging. He specialised in electrophysiology - recording the electrical signals from nerve cells.
Like many talented scientists I've known, he married a deep technical and scientific skill with something that resembled artistry when it came to crafting and placing electrodes, or listening to the tell-tale sounds of cell signals. Scientists like to pretend that everything they do is easily replicable, as long as you read the instructions and methods, but nothing could be further from the truth. It really is an art.
