Know your Women

Women can be the most charming creatures. Yet they can also be the most exasperating creatures ever to have walked upon this planet, aka "bitches". I can never ever  forget the look of despair that slowly spreaded across the face of Rex Harrison as he shook his head in a mixture of bafflement and disappointment whilst singing "Why Can't A Woman be More... like a Man" in the movie version of the Broadway musical based on G. B Shaw's play "My Fair Lady" when I was watching that movie at what was then the Royal Theatre in Mongkok years ago.  Well I think I have now got some answers. The answers lie in her different biology, her different physiology, her different hormones and hence her different psychology.

Thanks to advances in genetics and non-invasive brain imaging techniques like PET (positron-emission tomography) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans, which allow scienstists to peer into the brains of both men and women in real time whilst they are solving problems, producing words, retrieving memories, noticing facial expressions, establishing trust, falling in love, listening to baby crying, feeling depressed, fearful and anxious. This has enabled us to document differences between the structural, chemical, genetic, hormonal and functional brain dfferences between women and men. I found these out whilst reading one of the most enlightening texts for years, by Louann Brizendine, the head of the Women's Mood and Hormone Clinic in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California. Brizendine set out her findings in a book called The Female Brain. (2006) based on some 20 years of research and work as a neuropsychiatrist and other researches in cognitive neuroscience, child developmental pyschology, brain imaging, psycho-neuro-endocrinology.  What follows is taken largely from the Introduction and chapter six to that book. I shall write about her other discoveries in later blogs. The book is so full of nuggets of knowledge which  may help salvage so many man-woman relationships that have become strained, broken and even tragic, all due to nothing more than our sheer ignorance on how women's brains work. But I can't possibly include them all in the space of just one blog, no matter how long.

Brizendine has found that the female brain is so deeply affected by hormones at every phase of her life that their influence can be said "to create a women's reality." She says: "They can shape a woman's values and desires, and tell her, day to day, what's important. Their presence is felt at every stage of her life, right from birth,. Each hormone state--girlhood, the adolsecent years, the dating years, motherhood, and menopause--acts as fertilizer for different neurological connections that are responsible for new thoughts, emotions and interests." Such fluctuations begins when a girl is just 3 months old and last until after menopause and help explain a woman's proverbial capriciousness and fickleness. Compared to that of a man, a woman's "neurological reality" is hardly as constant. "His is like a mountain that is worn away imperceptibly over the millenia by glaciers, weather and the deep tectonic movements of the earth. Hers is more like the weather itself--constantly chaing and hard to predict," says Brizendine.

Research has shown that men and women have different brain sensitivities to stress and conflict: they use different brain areas and circuits to solve problems, process language, experience and store the same strong emotion. Women may remember the smallest details of their first dates and their biggest fights whilst their husbands barely remember that such things ever happened. The female brains process stimuli, hear, see, "sense" and gauge what others are feeling in different ways. In a German study, whilst they mentally rotated asbtract three-dimensional shapes, there were no differences between men and women but there were signficant sex-specific differences in the brain circuits they activated to complete the task: women spent more time than men picturing the objects in their minds.

Scientists have also found that women have 11% more neurons than men in the brain centres for language and hearing. The hippocampus, which is our centre for both emotion and memory formation, is larger in the female brain. The same is true of a woman's circuitry for language and for observing emotions in others. This explains why women in general are better at expressing their emotions and remembering the details of emotional events. But the typical male brain reaction to emotion is to avoid it at all costs!  Bursting into tears will definitely catch the male's attention but women's tears often come as a complete surprise to the men and cause them extreme discomfort  and actual pain about which he is completely helpless and his typical reaction is "Why are you crying? Please don't make such a big deal out of nothing. Being upset is a complete waste of time. It won't help you to solve any problem!"  They think so because men are used to avoiding contact when they themselves are going through an emotionally rough time and they process their troubles alone and think that women would want to do the same. It's the result of ancient wiring.

Men have two and a half times the brain space devoted for sexual drives and also larger brain centres for action and aggression. Sexual thoughts float through a man's mind many times a day but on average only once a day through a woman's brain and three or four times on her hottest days. In an experiment of a man and a woman talking about a neutral subject, the men's brain sexual area immediately lit up, seeing it as a potential sexual rendezvous whilst there were no corresponding movements in the women's brains.

In addition, the centre of the brain for processing fear, anger and aggression, the amygdala, an almond- shaped structure located deep within the mid-brain and connected to the gut, the skin, the heart, muscles, eyes, face, ears and adrenal glands, is larger in men than in women. The amygdala is closely connected to the hypothalamus, which controls blood pressure, heart rate, breathing rate and stimulates the fight or flight response after gettting the relevant emotional signal from the body. The amygdala is also closely connected to the cortex which is our organ for sizing up the emotional situation, analyzing it and determines how much attention it deserves and if enough emotional intensity is registered, then the cortex which functions unconsciously, will inform the pre-frontal cortex and also the anterior cingulate cortex , which is the brain's decision making center for determining whether to trigger appropriate action response to fear, anger and aggression, is much larger in women than in men and . This explains why men can get angry and switch into fistfights in a few seconds whereas women are much better at anger and aggression control. Even if a woman decides to be aggressive, this initial reaction will often be overwhelmed by another response: fear that the display of an aggressive response will risk angering the other person and therefore risk rupturing and causing the complete loss of the carefully built up relationship!  In ancient times when women still live in the wild, the loss of male protection if they were to fly off in retaliation in their rage, would  mean that they stood less of a chance to protect their young. Studies have shown that when a conflict or argument breaks out in a game, girls' typically decide to stop playing to avoid any angry exchange while boys generally continue to play intensely, jockeying for position, competing and arguing hour after hour about who should be the boss or who will get access to the coveted toy. If a women is pushed over the edge when she finds out that her mate is having an affair or if her child is in danger, her anger will blast off, otherwise, she will avoid anger or confrontation the same way a man will avoid an emotion. Instead of rushing into action when angry, women move their anger through the brain's gut feeling, conflict-pain anticipation and verbal circuits. Women will typically talk to others first when they are angry at a third person.

However, the stress generated by conflict is registered more deeply in those areas of the brain processing such stress in the female brain. Part of the reason for this is that a woman's amygdala is more easily activated than that of a man by emotional nuance or weak signals. The stronger the amygdala rsponse to a stressful situation such as an accident or threat or a romantic dinner, the more details the hippocampus will tag for memory storage about that experience and because women have a bigger hippocampus, they have better memories for the details of both pleasant and unpleasant emotional experiences (when, who, what, how in three dimensional sensory snapshot involving sight, sound, touch, smell ).

We have brains that were built some 400,000 years ago when men and women were still living in the wild. Our stress responses were designed to react to physical danger and life-threatening situations, not to mental tasks of contemporary sedentary urban life. Men will not react to danger unless it is clear and present or physical but a woman will react to the slightest signs of impending danger  e.g. a few unpaid bills as if it were a life-endangering catastrophe.If say, a woman has been cohabiting with a man and has dropped numerous hints e.g how she love having kids, about the possibility of buying a house, about which aea in town might be a nice location to have a house in etc, the man might not react at all, not that he is insensitive but because he actually might not take them to be related to their future life. he would take them as the woman's general attitude to life and living conditions. One study has shown that newly born girls less than 24 hours old will rspond moe to the cries of another baby and to human faces than to boys. Girls as young as a year old are more responsive to the distress of other people especially those who look sad or are hurt but men pick up the subtle signals of sadness in a female face only 40% of the time whereas women can pick up similar signals 90% of the time. Whilst both men and women are comfortable with being physically close to a happy mate, only women will feel equally comfortable being close to someone sad! When a girl hears that another is sad, she will ask what happened, when it happened, what was said, whether you have been able to sleep or eat and whether the sad person would like her to come over but seldom would a man do so. He would think that she would need some time on her own! A man's brain will however react quickly to immediate aggression or a threat of desertion. This may be well be the the only situations when he is instantly emotionally sensitive. 

On average, males and females have the same intelligence but the female reality has often been misinterpreted to mean that she is less competent in certain areas eg. maths and science. We now know that at puberty, differences in boys' and girls' mathematical and scientific capacity is non-existent but as estrogen floods the female brain, they start to focus on their emotions and communications--talking on the phone and liaising with their girl friends at the mall and as testosterone takes over the male brain, boys grow less communicative and become more obsessed with scoring in games and in the backseat of a car. When the time comes for them to start thinking about their possible career paths, girls usually choose those with more opportunities for interacting and communicating with others whilst boys will be happy if they can pursue their interest alone. It is not unusual that many women who had been engineers and scientists will contemplate career change after a mid-life crisis to switch to jobs or careers which enable them to have more human and social contacts. These are value decisions shaped by hormonal effects on the female brain compelling connections and communication. The fact that there are few women in top level science and maths has nothing to do with their ability, it has everything to do with their hormones.  Women have certain talents hardwired into her brain: they have outstanding verbal agility, ability to connect deeply in friendships, a nearly psychic ability to read faces and tone of voice for others' emotions and states of mind and the ability to defuse conflict. 

As first emphasized by Schopenhauer, developed by Darwin and as further elaborated by Freud, Otto Rank and other psychologists, the biology of sex lies at the foundation of our personalities and behavioral tendencies. And to that end, women have been built for connecting with other people and for fostering rather longer lasting male-female relationships. But our biology is not completely deterministic. We are not doomed to our biological fate.  Biology may powerfully affect our thinking and our behavior but it cannot however completely determine how we think and act. We are also capable of learning. Brizendine concludes: "We can alter that reality and use our intelligence and determination both to celebrate and when necessary to change the effects of sex hormones on brain structures, behavior, reality, creativity and destiny". If it did not help me understand anything else, that first introductory chapter of the book has already solved several mysteries for me: why women are such gossips, why having three women in my house, our telephone bill is so enormous, why they seem to change their minds on practically everything even after a decision has theoretically been made and why they would always try to patch up relationships and are at pains to avoid dealing with any problems which may involve a confrontation. Come to think of it, are these not some of the most characteristic features of Chinese society? If so, is the Chinese social brain not more female than male?