雙語測試：你屬於男性大腦還是女性大腦

摘要：測試一下你屬於男性大腦還是女性大腦：測試結果可能會讓你大吃一驚，不過它可以某種層面上闡述你的個性哦。

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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?

測試一下你屬於男性大腦還是女性大腦：測試結果可能會讓你大吃一驚，不過它可以某種層面上闡述你的個性哦。

坐下，放鬆，然後隨意雙手十指交叉，注意不要刻意安排哦。看看你的哪個拇指在上——左手還是右手?

　　【小測試答案】

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，左手就會在上，如果你是女人，右手就會在上。現在把雙手張開，注意看一下食指和無名指。

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?

這類書籍屬於休閒娛樂類書籍，但經科學證明也真實可信。問題在於這些傾向源於自然還是社會環境影響?我們的愛好和個性取決於與生俱來的生物性別還是後天培養?社會環境和教養方式不同，男性和女性的表現行爲各異嗎?

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

我和愛麗絲•羅伯茨教授爲BBC系列節目《地平線》進行調查研究這項工作，我們從不同的位置開始調查研究。

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.

愛麗絲認爲大腦性別的明顯差異誇大了我們對男孩和女孩文化的觀點。在項目中做了有趣的測試來證明她的觀點，比如，把小男孩打扮成小女孩，把小女孩打扮成小男孩，觀察人們對性別互換的孩子們的看法。

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

女孩們馬上開始玩積木和卡車玩具，而男孩們則由成人溫柔地呵護着。

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.

她認爲父母無意識的行爲：對女孩很溫和，對男孩們則比較放得開，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.

雖然我同意關於男人和女人的很多草率概括，我也認爲可能有些基本生物學影響着我們的行爲。

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.

大腦專家西蒙·巴倫科恩教授在劍橋大學做了許多開創性的工作。他認爲從很大程度上無論是性別的“邏輯性”還是“同情性”都越來越不夠明顯。

Systemisters are people who enjoy breaking down and analysing systems.

系統邏輯性的人具有分解和分析的特質。

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

他們更有可能成爲火車的監察員或計算機科學家。

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

他們的大腦屬於所謂的“男性腦”，這些特質的表現最爲頻繁，但在男性身上卻遠遠不止這些特質。

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

“女性”的腦部表現出移情性，因爲這個特質在女性身上更爲典型。

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

雖然也有例外，但是經測試大多數男人的特質偏“系統性”，而女性則表現出“移情性”的特質。

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，無名指與食指的長度差得越大，越偏向“男性”大腦。

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，這是一個有爭議的科學領域。巴倫·科恩教授做這些研究工作，因爲他對自閉症感興趣，他將其形容爲一種極端版本的男性大腦——對系統性更感興趣，常常在同理心上表現得差些。

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.

前一段時間，我在做一個叫做“快樂和痛苦”的項目，我們做了一個調查，我們讓人們給出他們認爲善於容忍痛苦的性別，81%的人都認爲“女性”善於容忍痛苦，只有11%的人認爲男性具有較爲強硬的特質。

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%的男性比較堅定地同意“女人”更加善於容忍痛苦。但這個結果正確嗎?

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

一種方法是讓男性和女性志願者參加一個冷水浸泡試驗。

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).

這種測試方法是被廣泛使用的標準痛苦測試法，因爲它會引起劇烈的疼痛感，只要不超過15分鐘就沒有任何長期性損害。

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.

在這個測試中，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.

我做了幾次，奇怪的是最初有些疼痛難忍，之後實際上並不覺得冷，在大約3攝氏度以下的水溫條件下，疼痛受體變麻木，所以不再能夠感知水的冷熱溫度。

All you know is that it is incredibly painful.

你只知道，這種痛苦非常難以忍受。

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.

當這個測試在實驗室環境中完成，男人幾乎總是比女性持續的時間長，表現出純粹的男子漢英雄氣概。

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.

幾年前，英國廣播公司拍攝一系列前沿醫學，我在阿富汗一個大的軍事醫院。我看到許多士兵，男女士兵都有頭部遇到嚴重受傷的情況。

I was told that the women were likely to make a better recovery than the ? It may be, in part, because women have higher levels of esterone 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.

有人告訴我，女性可能比男性恢復地好。爲什麼?部分原因可能是因爲女性的孕酮水平較高。孕酮即女性荷爾蒙，月經週期和懷孕都與女性荷爾蒙有關，但神經元的發育——在大腦中攜帶信息同樣重要的細胞。

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

對動物和人體的一些小的試驗研究表明，在腦損傷後注射黃體酮恢復效果很快。

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

我認爲這就是對性別差異做研究的值得所在。

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.

並不是因爲它有助於我們理解：爲什麼男人很難記住孩子的生日?爲什麼女性飛鏢運動員越來越少?而是因爲它可以幫助我們找到更有效的方法來治療疾病。