In a controversial new book, this psychiatrist argues that differences between men and women start with their brains
By Peg Tyre and Julie Scelfo Newsweek July 31, 2006 issue -
Last week a routine casemeeting turned into a teachable moment for California neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine and her eight medical residents. Briz-endine, who works at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute in San Francisco, was listening to a resident run through a new patient's medical history. A successful, high-functioning working mother had come in complaining of short-term memory loss and persistent anxiety. The resident ticked off the usual details: lab tests were normal, her overall mental health was strong, no fam-ily history of early-onset Alzheimer's. The young doctors around the table looked baffled. Brizendine, who has made a reputation for pinpointing the science behind a wom-an's most complicated and bewildering feelings, immediately focused on hormones. "Is she still breast-feeding?" she asked. The resident checked her notes and nodded. "And how's her sleep? Is her husband supportive?" A typical breast-feeding woman, Brizendine explained, is awash with the hormones oxytocin and prolactin, making her more wakeful, less interested in sex and, sometimes, hyperalert. Could this explain her symptoms?
Women and hormones has long been a marital minefield and the subject of innumerable off-color jokes, but Brizendine has made it her medical specialty. For 20 years, first as a medical student at Yale, then as a faculty member at Harvard Medical School, then as director of the Women's Mood and Hormone Clinic at UCSF, she's been developing what she describes as a female-centered strain of psychiatry focusing on the complex interplay between women's mental health, hard-wiring and brain chemistry. Now her first book, "The Female Brain," which she describes as a kind of owner's manual for women, is due in bookstores next month. (yes that will be in my library.) Brizendine realizes she's going to take some heat. "I know it's not politically correct to say this," she says, "and I've been torn for years between my politics and what science is telling us. But I believe that women actually perceive the world differently than men. (Why is this such a problem? I dont get it. What I do get, and what I want to briefly mention again is that for a woman to have a deep sense of ....contentment? in her R, the mans frame has to be stronger.) If women attend to those differences, they can make better decisions about how to manage their lives."
To write the book, Brizendine melded her rich clinical experience with thousands of research studies other neuroscientists have conducted over the past 10 years. Her conclusions will seem like common sense to some and nothing short of heresy to others: she not only discusses the biological reasons girls gravitate to dolls instead of trucks but tracks the hormonal imperatives at play when a teenage female becomes obsessed with text messaging and shopping. (hmm nothing new here, except maybe some data on hormones and MRI's. Corporations allready plan there store layouts and designs around evolutionary?, instinctive, hardwiring for gathering.) She describes the neurological reasons why women think about sex less than men but, in their drive to produce genetically superior babies, may be having more extramarital affairs than their frustrated husbands might imagine. She also explains how changing brain chemistry can prompt a postmenopausal woman to forgo marriage counseling and dial up a divorce lawyer instead. Her ideas are certain to spark controversy from some doctors and social scientists who think books like this undercut women and reinforce old gender stereotypes. Examining the biological underpinnings of gender difference is bunk, these critics say, because there aren't many. Last year prominent psychologist Janet Hyde examined decades of studies that compared the emotional and behavioral lives of men and women and concluded that most differences between the genders were statistically "close to zero." "There is no gender-difference phenomena to explain," she says.
At first glance, Brizendine doesn't seem like the backlash type. A smallish woman with a long auburn ponytail, Brizendine, 53, talks about women's mental health with the kind of zeal she learned from her parents, who were Protestant missionaries and civil-rights activists. As an architecture student at Berkeley in the 1970s, Brizendine had a part-time job in a feminist bookstore before an internship at an immunology lab changed her life. "I realized that I loved looking at complex puzzles," she says. And nothing, she found, was more complex than the mind—especially the female variety. Her professors, though, didn't share her passion. Throughout her medical-school years at Yale, she says, no one ever mentioned women and hormones in the same breath. "When I asked about it," she says, the professors said women weren't included in mental-health studies "because their hormones would mess up the results."
By the 1990s, though, the scientific community began to recognize that, medically, women were not just small men, and started throwing research dollars into studying gender-specific medicine. Briz-endine, then a single mother with a small son, started specializing in gender-specific psychiatry, including treating women with severe PMS. "When these patients tried to talk to their own doctors or psychiatrists about how their hormones were affecting their emotions, they would get the brushoff," she says. Twelve years ago she opened her clinic, which now treats about 600 women a year with hormone-replacement therapy, psychopharmacology and cognitive behavioral therapy.
In the past six years, Brizendine says, advances in neuroimaging and neuro-endocrinology began supplying exciting new insights into how women and men use their brains differently. For example, different levels of estrogen, cortisol and dopamine, she says, can cause a female to be more stressed by emotional conflict than her male counterpart. A few unpaid bills can set off a cascade of hormones in a woman that can catapult her into a fear of impending catastrophe, a reaction triggered in men only by physical danger. In my sitch I can see the fight<me>/flight<x> response clearly. I know how I react when personal safety is endangered, <recent work accident barely controlled rage> and x's personal safety was endangered <no chance of fighting back against my verbal hack and slash because of lack of education, and more importantly male dominance abused.> ) Women have 11 percent more neurons in the area of the brain devoted to emotions and memory. Because they have more "mirror neurons" they are also better at observing emotions in others, she says. WOW! I have so much to say on those to sentences. Stig where are you?
All of which outrages some of Briz-endine's peers. Hyde, a psychology and women's studies professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who conducted the meta-analysis of men and women last year, says she's disgusted by scientists, writers and publishers who exploit trivial differences between the genders. Books like this "are bad for my blood pressure," she says. Dr. Nancy C. Andreasen, a psychiatrist and neuroimaging expert at the University of Iowa's medical school, says nurture plays such a huge role in human behavior that focusing on biology is next to meaningless. "Whatever measurable differences exist in the brain," says Andreasen, "are used to oppress and suppress women." How is acknowledging differences oprresion and suppression? No one said better or worse, right or wrong, the doctor just says different. <ugh, frustration>
Brizendine is unfazed. This fall, she's expanding her hormone and mood clinic, opening it up to teenage girls as well as women. She's thinking about writing a brain book for young girls, too. She predicts that unlike women today, the next generation—and their psychiatrists—won't assume that brain difference implies inferiority. "Doctors will help women to better manage the subtle pressures and emotional nuances in their lives," she says. And what makes them unique, she says, will help empower them, too. That's a vision of the future few women would debate.
I'm living all this right now. I've even experienced mirroring and allowing myself to be 'lead.' Huh, and LOOk at that... I can even freely admit it. Whew. What's up with that? Must be my hormones... <giggle>
There really is a lot to this stuff, and having been what I've been through, and now going through what I am going through, I can say that it is much... hmmm... easier(?) to accept the biological facts of m/f, and their interactions in that regard, learn about it and learn how to WORK with it, than it is to deny that I am more a 'bag of chemicals' than I'd like to admit. (Did that make any sense?)
I read a similar book once entitled "What could he be thinking?" or something like that. It was based on research that detailed how men's brains are constructed differently and what impact that has on behavior. It was very enlightening, and a good read at a time when I was doubting MrH's masculinity, etc. It turns out that he is a man's man and I was only focused on the areas in which he was weakest at showing it. After reading all the other examples, I could plainly see that there aint nothin wrong with his masculinity.
Anyway, I was totally fascinated by the book. It didn't delve into the female brain, other than to say this is different than the female brain in the following way: xyz, but one could read between the lines and figure out the differences.
I have never understood the feminist insistence on absolute equality, even in light of obvious differences. I think that it sets the feminist cause back quite a bit, in fact, because it makes the originators look unintelligent.
Thanks for finding that, BF. I've always thought that there are differences between the male and female brain. Although not an ability difference more of an operating system difference more akin to Mac vs Windows. You can do most of the same stuff on both systems, both have their strengths and weaknesses. I'll put the book on my list at the libary.
Scott
"Satisfaction is not guaranteed." Rule #19 Ferengi "Rules of Acquistition"
HA!! thats exactly the analogy I was thinking of last night.
They have different GUI's (thank god LOL) and how to operate each one requires a dfferent approach. They can communicate with each other, but if you get the protocol mixed up.... holy SH!te .... everything collapses and goes haywire.
oh yeah... hormones affect men too, If anyone saw the danny bonniducci (sp?) train wreck-tv show, when he started juicing (taking steroids) his personality, demenaor, physical apperance changed.
he had no control over it once it was taken.
my point in the article is not to take it and point it out to women and go... see your a mess, or try to logical her out of it, or even explain why.
It was to accept they are different, require different handling, (mmm handling. yum.) and not expect to receive what we want by giving it to them, or doing it for them as an effort thru example.
For example, x and I would fight the same day every month. EVERY month, I could predict it just by looking at her Pill (birthcontrol) pack. I never knew what the fight would be about, but eventually when the fireworks and waterworks would start, I would just go grab the pill pack, point to it, and say we will talk about this in a couple days. Im going to go to ...(fill in the blank) Ill be back in a few hours. I would leave -the phone would ring -she would want to set up QT for later when I got done with my (fillintheblank) and wa-la much better.
Well, the windows must be the men and Mac the ladies; Us men are apparently mostly pretty transparent, and well the ladies...we can't see inside to figure out what makes them tick. Seems pretty clear to me
