Nature-nuture researcher
Are women’s and men’s brains actually different? Steve Kilgallon settled down to watch a documentary aimed at answering that thorny question.
Nathan Wallis was prepared to go as far as it took to examine the human brain, short of having his removed and pickled in a jar. He had an MRI, he had some sort of flashing web strapped to his cranium like Dynamo in the movie The Running Man.
Wallis, a brain development expert, was the narrator of All in the Mind (Sunday, 8.30pm), Prime’s one-off documentary on the human brain from Wellington production house Gibson Group.
Wallis possessed one of the strongest rolling Rs this side of 800 Words actor Erik Thomsen, but was otherwise quite convivial company.
His premise was to discover whether the male and female brains are structured differently – if we can really say that women are more intuitive and emotional and men are more practical and so forth.
He negotiated this rather dangerous territory with aplomb, conducting a circuit of various academics and researchers, who threw out little gobbets of information on the way, such as the percentage of gay sheep.
The best bits was when he recreated several famous psychological natureversus-nurture experiments. So we saw monkeys being offered the choice of trucks and dolls, and parents asked to estimate the height from which their babies could safely crawl down a slope. And best of all, some psychology students asked to play with babies dressed as the opposite sex without the students’ knowledge. Results? Male monkeys prefer trucks. Mothers underestimate the crawling ability of female babies. The students subconsciously usher the girls to the dolls and the boys to the cars.
But some bits seemed pointless. Nathan driving around Manfeild race track against top rally driver Emma Gilmour provided a hardly scientific sample size of two. Intersex person Hami Bruce Mitchell was interesting, but could hardly give us any science behind their story.
As the experts say, our families, the media and the general environment all conspire to shape us. By the time they get to study adult brains, they’ve been changed by our experience.
Short of cutting brains out of an adult male and an adult female and slicing them chunks out of them, definitive conclusions seemed difficult. Nathan settled for this: our brains aren’t particularly different at all, but the way our environment shapes us is.
This summer’s surprise guilty pleasure – the admission of which will remove the last vestige of credibility from this television reviewer – has been the double-slice of Australian rubbish provided by I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here (TV2) and Married at First Sight (TV3).
I’d not seen the first one before, but its dry, wry hosts, former vet Chris Brown and actor Judith Lucy are superb, and watching the remarkable prospect of a renaissance for Australia’s most loathed individual (usually quite unfairly), Anthony Mundine, was refreshing.
Married at First Sight is far superior to our own version, which is to say, even more squirm-inducing and morally bankrupt. The Australian producers had found a much more loathsome combination of unfortunates, topped off by the treacherous Dean and Davina, who by the second week had planned to ditch their new spouses for each other, only for Dean to lose his cojones on camera.
Far surpassing their tawdry melodrama is Kiwi psychologist John Aiken, who is interspersed into the action to mouth mindless platitudes about how you need to make an effort in relationships, how upsetting things can upset you, and how the sun is orange and the grass is green.