It is rare that an individual with highly specialised knowledge can communicate it to a general audience. If Susan Greenfield is a ubiquitous media figure it's because not only does she talk about the brain so clearly but she also passes on some of the excitement of working with scientific ideas. Susan talks about the brain the way other people talk about fine art or football. It is a thing of endless beauty and fascination.

Perhaps the public have taken to her because they recognise that she is, by her own account, something of a maverick. Susan was the first member of her family to go to university – her mother was a chorus girl, her father an electrician – and she grew up with this idea that everything was a laugh. Unusually for an Oxford Professor of Physiology, she doesnít have a chemistry O-level and suspects she would score poorly in an IQ test. She was the first woman to give the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, and has written a book about the brain aimed at non-scientific readers.

So do men and women have fundamentally different brains? Well, she says, if you put them side-by-side you wouldn't be able to see any difference. While brain physiology may be similar, Susan believes there are gender differences in how men and women process knowledge. This may be a factor in the numbers of women who take up science: 'One of the problems is that women have always had more complex lives, so are more interested in weighing things up. Science is taught in a fact-oriented way, and boys are happier going for facts and getting something right or wrong. If only schools showed what you could do with the facts, girls would be more interested.'

Further reading:
The Royal Institution