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Good morning. As part of International Women’s Day, neuroscientist Professor Gina Rippon claimed that gender differences are not hardwired into the brain but are the result of stereotypical attitudes and unconscious bias in our culture. Not only does this raise issues of roles of men and women in our society, but the more fundamental question of what is the mind and can we change it? This is a long and complex debate. If men are from Mars and women from Venus, is this different genes leading to different brain structure? Or how much is controlled by nature and how much by nurture? At the heart of such issues is the relationship between mind and brain. Michio Kaku, in his newly published ‘The Future of the Mind’, notes that we have ‘learned more about the brain in the last 15 years than in all of human history’. This field of neuroscience has demonstrated ‘the ever tightening relationship of mind and brain’ – the two are different but cannot be separated. We know for example that damage to the physical brain can lead to changes not only in memory but also personality. But also training the mind can lead to physical changes. MRI scans show that London cabbies who have to learn the Knowledge - of streets and landmarks - increase the size of the grey matter of the hippocampus at the base of the brain. This all can be a challenge for traditional belief in the soul, but I see it rather as an opportunity. The old Greek view which saw human beings as a dualism of evil body and distinct eternal soul has less resonance with this new science compared to the Judaeo-Christian tradition that sees the human person as a psychosomatic unity, where body, mind and spirit are all important and interdependent. Further, it contradicts the view that we are nothing but our genes, bound as victims to something beyond our power to change. There is in fact a much more subtle interaction between our physical inheritance, our environment and indeed our freewill choices – giving optimism that we can change. Such optimism, this time based on the generosity and forgiveness of God, led the apostle Paul to write, ‘Don’t conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind’. Gender stereotypes, as with many other cultural assumptions, can therefore be transcended and transformed, alongside celebrating difference and diversity. It means however that I can no longer use the excuse that my brain is not hardwired for multi-tasking - in remembering that the bins need to be put out tomorrow.