Notice how the great brain debate is taxing grey cells around the world? A few days ago, Larry Summers, the presiding deity of Harvard University, had famously observed that women can’t add their two plus twos competently, or at least not as competently as men. Then, last week, a team of scientific brains (all-male, of course) reached the unmistakable conclusion, published in the scientific journal Intelligence that men can process data faster than women given their awesome Nerve Conduction Velocity, which—for poor female specimens who cannot quite grasp these complicated scientific phenomena—is the speed with which messages are passed along and between brain cells.Let me expand upon it a bit. When a full-grown male is in full mental flow (as for instance when he is watching a football game on television), a complex theoretical formulation—like ‘‘I WANT BEER NOW’’—can be transmitted with the speed faster than light, thanks to the subject’s high Nerve Conduction Velocity that causes cognitive messages to zip from brain cell to brain cell, until the subject’s hand gets to hold that mug of beer.Of course, one Summers does not make an unassailable theory but I, for one, believe that he has put forward a viewpoint that has truly revolutionary potential. Yes, yes, I know that scientists have also proved that women have more brain cells than men since their brains are more tightly packed with them in areas—like the frontal lobe—that control mental processes such as judgment and memory. I am also aware of a Lancet study that maintains that men’s brains shrink at a faster pace than women’s. I am told that another study puts forward the argument that parts of the corpus collosum—or connective tissue between the two hemispheres of the brain—are more substantial in women’s brains than in men’s, which seems to indicate that women are more likely to use both sides of their brains, while men use theirs more asymmetrically. There is also the theory that in the male physiognomy, the brain is located far lower to that of women and that when men scratch their crotch they are not being gross but are actually in deep and profound thought (going by the general incidence it would appear that there are an incredible number of men in deep thought, but since this theory is a bit below the belt and rather odious, I am compelled to reject it). In any case, what’s the big deal about mathematics? As that unusually intelligent man, Bertrand Russell, once observed, mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true. In other words, maths is only a tentative agreement that two plus two is four.But don’t knock Summers’s theory out of hand. It is actually an appeal to lock up all the men in the world into a giant nursery classroom and get them to do sums for the rest of their lives so that the rest of us can tax our puny, little, insignificant brains to figure out the ordinary business of life and living. Think about it, such a move, if it had been embarked upon earlier, would have spared the world the services of Hitler and Stalin, Attila the Hun, the Marquis de Sade and Jack the Ripper.Coming to more contemporary times, such a step would have had Osama bin Laden working out mathematical formulae instead of planning suicide missions and George W Bush worrying his little mind over sums instead of mounting civilisation-smashing wars in desert locations. It would have meant that Narendra Modi would have been theorising on action and reaction formulae safely from behind the bars of a classroom rather than presiding over the Gujarat riots and, who knows, Kim Jong-il may have actually been figuring out atomic numbers rather than atomic bombs designed to keep the world on edge.Sometimes it does appear that those with the supposed brains are the ones who conduct themselves in the most brainless manner possible, doesn’t it?
