Are mirror neurons behind behavior differences between boys and girls?
Most small boys insist playing with trucks, most small girls with dolls, as every parent knows. It doesn’t matter if the parent tries to give toy trucks to doll-preferential girls and Barbie dolls to truck-preferential boys, the “wrong gender toys” are simply rejected. For some people, this seems to point to the existence of innate gender differences. However, such observations don’t tell us what these innate differences are, specifically. To maintain that small boys have got their keen interest in trucks from evolution is clearly absurd. Nor is there anything inherently “male” about trucks -– any woman can drive a truck as well as a man; some actually do. Preferential imitation It is more likely that there is a “mirror neuron” mechanism at play here. The mirror neurons of girls may have been programmed by evolution to preferentially imitate what women around them do, and the boys’ mirror neurons preferentially to what men are doing. Almost all truck-drivers in our society today happen
