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I found this week’s class’s topic about all brains are somewhat the same and somewhat different very interesting. It seems like very logical explanation about the brain, yet I did not think about brains in this way until discussed in the class. Of course, I always thought that human’s and cat’s  (for example) brains would be different. Yes, they can both make sound, therefore they have some similarity in the brain for that function! Then it got more interesting, how about different individuals in same species? So we talked about differences in brains between men and women. Although people often assumed there would be difference between men and women, this is only from the statistical point of view and it, in fact, is found that there is no specific differences between men and women. I have a question about this. What does it mean by only statistical differences? Because in the studies that I’m familiar with, mostly psychology, we cannot test a hypothesis on every single person in the earth, therefore we select samples to represent the whole population. And when there is statistical difference above certain level, we assume that this is true and can be applied to the large population. Therefore, I’m not really sure why we can’t say there is difference between brains of men and women.

Another question I have is are similarities and differences in brains directly proportional to how similar and different their functions are? For example, if one is more similar with my father than with my mother, will one’s brain be more similar to one’s father’s to one’s mother? How about in the case of identical twins? There are many differences between identical twins, how they think, act, etc. However, there DNAs are same and physical features are often very similar. Then how about the brains?