Amygdala

The elephant in the room—the one everyone recognises—is overt bias: those charmingly blatant attitudes and prejudices someone proudly wears on their sleeve. It’s delightfully obvious and enables some truly impressive mental gymnastics. Then there’s the other elephant—the one lurking in the shadows, rarely discussed. This is unconscious bias: our hidden preferences for or against a person, thing, or group, neatly tucked away where even we can’t see them. Despite our best efforts to be impeccably fair-minded, we might harbour deep-seated resistance to differences—race, gender, physical traits, personality types, sexual orientation, you name it. How embarrassing. ...

The eternal quest to prove that men are from Mars and women are from Venus—neurologically speaking, of course. For over a century, scientists (and, let’s be honest, people with opinions) have been poking at brains, measuring corpus callosums, and squinting at amygdalae, all in the noble pursuit of confirming whatever gender stereotypes they already believed. Take the corpus callosum, that thick bundle of nerves connecting the brain’s hemispheres. Back in 1906, R. B. Bean—a man who clearly never met a bias he didn’t like—declared that its size correlated with intelligence and, naturally, that women (and certain races, because why stop at one bad take?) had inferior versions. His own lab director promptly debunked him, but the myth persisted. By the 1990s, pop science had rebranded the idea: Women have bigger corpus callosums! That’s why they’re so ~intuitive~! Cue a thousand think-pieces about “female intuition.” ...