The Brain can only focus on 2 things - perhaps why binary is so rigidly enforced

[Autumn]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/whywecantdo3thingsatonce

To make things even more complicated, the researchers introduced a third letter-matching task. Here, they saw the subject's accuracy drop considerably. It was as though, once each hemisphere was occupied with managing one task, there was nowhere for the third task to go.
"[The] subjects perform as if they systematically forget one of the three tasks," Koechlin told LiveScience.
Decision-making
The results might also explain why humans seem to have a hard time making decisions between more than two things, Koechlin said.
Previous work has indicated that people like binary choices, or decisions between two things. They have difficultly when decisions involve more than two choices, Koechlin said. When faced with three or more choices, subjects don't appear to evaluate them rationally; they simply start discarding choices until they get back to a binary choice.
This is perhaps because your brain can't keep track of the rewards involved with more than two choices, Koechlin said.

Basically, the human brain has major difficulties comprehending more than two options.

The article says nothing about sexuality or gender, but it is the first thing that came to mind was wondering if perhaps this explains why so many people are so incredibly bothered by stepping outside the black and white.

[brainiac]

Well, personally, I think that the black-and-white thing has to do more with categorization than decision-making.

This experiment specifically looked at the ability to perform two tasks at once. The prefrontal cortex is associated with what we call executive function, which involves a lot of different processes like holding information in your working memory, evaluating consequences, inhibition (controlling your responses), regulating your emotions, and decision-making. What this task was tapping into wasn't switching between two concepts or options, but switching between two "programs" to execute in terms of action and processing.

In general, our brains like to take the most economical route whenever possible. Categorization is an extremely valuable mental process--it allows us to learn, organize the world in a coherent way, and generalize or infer--but it also means that in order to take shortcuts, we end up creating fairly rigid boundaries between categories. Spending time contemplating every single category you form would take a ton of time and energy. So if our categories are reinforced time and again, we take those boundaries for granted. So, that's why we get stereotypes, racism, sexism, etc. I would claim (controversially) that these prejudices are "natural", since categorization is natural. That does NOT justify them, though. It's why these things aren't just going to go away, and we need to constantly work against prejudice and stereotypes through education no matter what our society is like.

Did that make any sense?

[cynthialee]

yes it did

[Julie Marie]

The brain can handle not just black and white but the whole rainbow and all its colors.  That's why we need to promote the concept of a gender continuum and get rid of the gender binary.