摘要：测试一下你属于男性大脑还是女性大脑：测试结果可能会让你大吃一惊，不过它可以某种层面上阐述你的个性哦。

The tests that show if you've got a male or female brain: The answer may surprise you - and explain your personality

Sit down for a moment. Relax. Then clasp your hands together so your fingers entwine — don’t overthink it! Now look at your thumbs. Which one is on top — the left one or the right?

测试一下你属于男性大脑还是女性大脑：测试结果可能会让你大吃一惊，不过它可以某种层面上阐述你的个性哦。

坐下，放松，然后随意双手十指交叉，注意不要刻意安排哦。看看你的哪个拇指在上——左手还是右手?

【小测试答案】

If you are a man, the odds are it will be the left; if you are a woman, it is more likely to be the right. Now unfold your hands and take a look at your fingers, in particular your index finger (next to your thumb) and your ring finger (next to your little finger).

如果你是男人，左手就会在上，如果你是女人，右手就会在上。现在把双手张开，注意看一下食指和无名指。

This is the stuff of jokes and self-help books — but it is also shown to be true through science. The question is, do these tendencies result from nature — with the biological gender we are born with deciding our interests and personalities — or do they result from nurture, with society and upbringing creating the differing ways that men and women behave?

这类书籍属于休闲娱乐类书籍，但经科学证明也真实可信。问题在于这些倾向源于自然还是社会环境影响?我们的爱好和个性取决于与生俱来的生物性别还是后天培养?社会环境和教养方式不同，男性和女性的表现行为各异吗?

The BBC series Horizon asked Professor Alice Roberts and me to investigate. We started from very different positions.

我和爱丽丝•罗伯茨教授为BBC系列节目《地平线》进行调查研究这项工作，我们从不同的位置开始调查研究。

Alice thinks apparent brain differences between the sexes have been exaggerated by how our culture treats boys and girls. In the programme she carries out fascinating tests to prove her point, such as dressing up little boys as girls and vice versa and watching how people treat them.

爱丽丝认为大脑性别的明显差异夸大了我们对男孩和女孩文化的观点。在项目中做了有趣的测试来证明她的观点，比如，把小男孩打扮成小女孩，把小女孩打扮成小男孩，观察人们对性别互换的孩子们的看法。

Almost immediately, the girls start rough-housing and playing with trucks, while the boys are treated far more gently by the adults around them.

女孩们马上开始玩积木和卡车玩具，而男孩们则由成人温柔地呵护着。

She argues that parents’ unconscious actions — such as being gentler with girls and letting boys behave more roughly — often mould children into men and women who embody gender stereotypes.

她认为父母无意识的行为：对女孩很温和，对男孩们则比较放得开，正如男孩子女孩子日常被塑造的刻板印象。

While I agree that lots of wild generalisations about men and women are bandied around, I also think there may be something in claims that our fundamental biology influences how we behave.

虽然我同意关于男人和女人的很多草率概括，我也认为可能有些基本生物学影响着我们的行为。

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, an expert on the brain who I visited at Cambridge University, has done a lot of pioneering work on this. He believes, broadly, that people of whatever gender fall somewhere along a ‘systemiser’ to ‘empathiser’ spectrum.

大脑专家西蒙·巴伦科恩教授在剑桥大学做了许多开创性的工作。他认为从很大程度上无论是性别的“逻辑性”还是“同情性”都越来越不够明显。

Systemisters are people who enjoy breaking down and analysing systems.

系统逻辑性的人具有分解和分析的特质。

They are more likely to become train spotters or computer scientists.

他们更有可能成为火车的监察员或计算机科学家。

They are what he has called ‘male brained’ — as these qualities occur most frequently, but far from exclusively, in men.

他们的大脑属于所谓的“男性脑”，这些特质的表现最为频繁，但在男性身上却远远不止这些特质。

Empathisers, on the other hand, are more typically ‘female’ brained as they are more typically women.

“女性”的脑部表现出移情性，因为这个特质在女性身上更为典型。

你属于男性大脑还是女性大脑

Although there are exceptions, most men — when tested — come out as more ‘systemising’ than ‘empathising’, while for women it is the other way round.

虽然也有例外，但是经测试大多数男人的特质偏“系统性”，而女性则表现出“移情性”的特质。

A number of studies have shown that the greater the difference between the length of the ring finger and the index finger, the more ‘male’ your brain is likely to be.

大量的研究表明，无名指与食指的长度差得越大，越偏向“男性”大脑。

As you can imagine, this is a controversial area of science. Professor Baron-Cohen does these studies because he is interested in autism, which he describes as an extreme version of the male brain — more interested in systems and often struggling with empathy.

可以想象，这是一个有争议的科学领域。巴伦·科恩教授做这些研究工作，因为他对自闭症感兴趣，他将其形容为一种极端版本的男性大脑——对系统性更感兴趣，常常在同理心上表现得差些。

A while ago, when I was making a programme called Pleasure And Pain, we did a survey where we asked people which of the sexes they thought was better at tolerating pain — 81 per cent of women said ‘women’, while a mere 11 per cent thought men were the tougher breed.

前一段时间，我在做一个叫做“快乐和痛苦”的项目，我们做了一个调查，我们让人们给出他们认为善于容忍痛苦的性别，81%的人都认为“女性”善于容忍痛苦，只有11%的人认为男性具有较为强硬的特质。

Although men were more inclined to give themselves the benefit of the doubt, the majority, 54 per cent, still agreed ‘women’ were more stoical. But is this right?

54%的男性比较坚定地同意“女人”更加善于容忍痛苦。但这个结果正确吗?

One way to find out is to get male and female volunteers to take part in a cold water immersion test.

一种方法是让男性和女性志愿者参加一个冷水浸泡试验。

This is a standard pain test widely used because it causes acute pain without doing any long-term damage (as long as you don’t do it for more than 15 minutes).

这种测试方法是被广泛使用的标准痛苦测试法，因为它会引起剧烈的疼痛感，只要不超过15分钟就没有任何长期性损害。

In this test, you put your hand in a bucket of ice-cold water and see how long you can keep it there before the pain becomes intolerable.

在这个测试中，把手放在一桶冰冷的冰水中，看你能忍受多久。

I’ve done it a couple of times and oddly enough after the initial shock it doesn’t actually feel cold; below about 3 degrees Celsius your pain receptors overwhelm your temperature receptors so you are no longer able to tell if the water is hot or freezing.

我做了几次，奇怪的是最初有些疼痛难忍，之后实际上并不觉得冷，在大约3摄氏度以下的水温条件下，疼痛受体变麻木，所以不再能够感知水的冷热温度。

All you know is that it is incredibly painful.

你只知道，这种痛苦非常难以忍受。

When this test is done in a laboratory setting, men almost always outlast women. This may be pure machismo, but Professor Jeff Mogil of McGill University, Montreal, thinks there is more to it.

当这个测试在实验室环境中完成，男人几乎总是比女性持续的时间长，表现出纯粹的男子汉英雄气概。

A couple of years ago, I was in a large military hospital in Afghanistan, filming a series called Frontline Medicine for the BBC. I saw a number of soldiers, male and female, with serious head injuries.

几年前，英国广播公司拍摄一系列前沿医学，我在阿富汗一个大的军事医院。我看到许多士兵，男女士兵都有头部遇到严重受伤的情况。

I was told that the women were likely to make a better recovery than the men.Why? It may be, in part, because women have higher levels of progesterone.Progesterone is best known as a female hormone, involved in the menstrual cycle and pregnancy, but it is also important for the development of neurones — the cells that carry messages in the brain.

有人告诉我，女性可能比男性恢复地好。为什么?部分原因可能是因为女性的孕酮水平较高。孕酮即女性荷尔蒙，月经周期和怀孕都与女性荷尔蒙有关，但神经元的发育——在大脑中携带信息同样重要的细胞。

Animal studies and a few small human trials have shown that giving progesterone soon after suffering a brain injury improves survival and recovery.

对动物和人体的一些小的试验研究表明，在脑损伤后注射黄体酮恢复效果很快。

This, I think, is why researching gender differences is worth doing.

我认为这就是对性别差异做研究的值得所在。

It is not because it will help us understand why men struggle to remember their children’s birthdays or why there are fewer female darts players, but because it may help us find more effective ways to tackle disease.

并不是因为它有助于我们理解：为什么男人很难记住孩子的生日?为什么女性飞镖运动员越来越少?而是因为它可以帮助我们找到更有效的方法来治疗疾病。