测试：你属于男性大脑还是女性大脑

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.
前一段时间，我在做一个叫做“快乐和痛苦”的项目，我们做了一个调查，我们让人们给出他们认为善于容忍痛苦的性别，81%的人都认为“女性”善于容忍痛苦，只有11%的人认为男性具有较为强硬的特质。

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%的男性比较坚定地同意“女人”更加善于容忍痛苦。但这个结果正确吗？

One way to find out is to get male and female volunteers to take part in a cold water immersion test.
一种方法是让男性和女性志愿者参加一个冷水浸泡试验。

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).
这种测试方法是被广泛使用的标准痛苦测试法，因为它会引起剧烈的疼痛感，只要不超过15分钟就没有任何长期性损害。

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.
在这个测试中，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.
我做了几次，奇怪的是最初有些疼痛难忍，之后实际上并不觉得冷，在大约3摄氏度以下的水温条件下，疼痛受体变麻木，所以不再能够感知水的冷热温度。

All you know is that it is incredibly painful.
你只知道，这种痛苦非常难以忍受。

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.
当这个测试在实验室环境中完成，男人几乎总是比女性持续的时间长，表现出纯粹的男子汉英雄气概。

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.
几年前，英国广播公司拍摄一系列前沿医学，我在阿富汗一个大的军事医院。我看到许多士兵，男女士兵都有头部遇到严重受伤的情况。

I was told that the women were likely to make a better recovery than the men.Why? It may be, in part, because women have higher levels of progesterone.Progesterone 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.
有人告诉我，女性可能比男性恢复地好。为什么？部分原因可能是因为女性的孕酮水平较高。孕酮即女性荷尔蒙，月经周期和怀孕都与女性荷尔蒙有关，但神经元的发育——在大脑中携带信息同样重要的细胞。

Animal studies and a few small human trials have shown that giving progesterone soon after suffering a brain injury improves survival and recovery.
对动物和人体的一些小的试验研究表明，在脑损伤后注射黄体酮恢复效果很快。

This, I think, is why researching gender differences is worth doing.
我认为这就是对性别差异做研究的值得所在。

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.
并不是因为它有助于我们理解：为什么男人很难记住孩子的生日？为什么女性飞镖运动员越来越少？而是因为它可以帮助我们找到更有效的方法来治疗疾病。