Chapter One: The Birth of the Female Brain
Leila was a busy little bee, flitting around the
playground, connecting with the other children whether or not she
knew them. On the verge of speaking in two- and three-word phrases,
she mostly used her contagious smile and emphatic nods of her head
to communicate, and communicate she did. So did the other little
girls. "Dolly," said one. "Shopping," said another. There was a
pint-size community forming, abuzz with chatter, games, and
imaginary families.
Leila was always happy to see her cousin Joseph when he joined her
on the playground, but her joy never lasted long. Joseph grabbed
the blocks she and her friends were using to make a house. He
wanted to build a rocket, and build it by himself. His pals would
wreck anything that Leila and her friends had created. The boys
pushed the girls around, refused to take turns, and would ignore a
girl's request to stop or give the toy back. By the end of the
morning, Leila had retreated to the other end of the play area with
the girls. They wanted to play house quietly together.
The Female Brain
Common sense tells us that boys and girls behave
differently. We see it every day at home, on the playground, and in
classrooms. But what the culture hasn''t told us is that the brain
dictates these divergent behaviors. The impulses of children are so
innate that they kick in even if we adults try to nudge them in
another direction. One of my patients gave her
three-and-a-half-year-old daughter many unisex toys, including a
bright red fire truck instead of a doll. She walked into her
daughter's room one afternoon to find her cuddling the truck in a
baby blanket, rocking it back and forth saying, "Don'T worry,
little truckie, everything will be all right."
This isn't socialization. This little girl didn't cuddle her
"truckie" because her environment molded her unisex brain. There is
no unisex brain. She was born with a female brain, which came
complete with its own impulses. Girls arrive already wired as
girls, and boys arrive already wired as boys. Their brains are
different by the time they're born, and their brains are what drive
their impulses, values, and their very reality.
The brain shapes the way we see, hear, smell, and taste. Nerves run
from our sense organs directly to the brain, and the brain does all
the interpreting. A good conk on the head in the right place can
mean that you won't be able to smell or taste. But the brain does
more than that. It profoundly affects how we conceptualize the
world-whether we think a person is good or bad, if we like the
weather today or it makes us unhappy, or whether we're inclined to
take care of the day's business. You don't have to be a
neuroscientist to know this. If you're feeling a little down and
have a nice glass of wine or a lovely piece of chocolate, your
attitude can shift. A gray, cloudy day can turn bright, or
irritation with a loved one can evaporate because of the way the
chemicals in those substances affect the brain. Your immediate
reality can change in an instant.
If chemicals acting on the brain can create different realities,
what happens when two brains have different structures? There's no
question that their realities will be different. Brain damage,
strokes, pre-frontal lobotomies, and head injuries can change
what's important to a person. They can even change one's
personality from aggressive to meek or from kind to grumpy.
But it's not as if we all start out with the same brain structure.
Males' and females' brains are different by nature. Think about
this. What if the communication center is bigger in one brain than
in the other? What if the emotional memory center is bigger in one
than in the other? What if one brain develops a greater ability to
read cues in people than does the other? In this case, you would
have a person whose reality dictated that communication,
connection, emotional sensitivity, and responsiveness were the
primary values. This person would prize these qualities above all
others and be baffled by a person with a brain that didn't grasp
the importance of these qualities. In essence, you would have
someone with a female brain.
We, meaning doctors and scientists, used to think that gender was
culturally created for humans but not for animals. When I was in
medical school in the 1970s and '80s, it had already been
discovered that male and female animal brains started developing
differently in utero, suggesting that impulses such as mating and
bearing and rearing young are hardwired into the animal brain. But
we were taught that for humans sex differences mostly came from how
one's parents raised one as a boy or a girl. Now we know that's not
completely true, and if we go back to where it all started, the
picture becomes abundantly clear.
Imagine for a moment that you are in a microcapsule speeding up the
vaginal canal, hitting warp drive through the cervix ahead of the
tsunami of sperm. Once inside the uterus, you'll see a giant,
undulating egg waiting for that lucky tadpole with enough moxie to
penetrate the surface. Let's say the sperm that led the charge
carries an X and not a Y chromosome. Voilà, the fertilized egg is a
girl.
In the span of just thirty-eight weeks, we would see this girl grow
from a group of cells that could fit on the head of a pin to an
infant who weighs an average of seven and a half pounds and
possesses the machinery she needs to live outside her mother's
body. But the majority of the brain development that determines her
sex-specific circuits happens during the first eighteen weeks of
pregnancy.
Until eight weeks old, every fetal brain looks female-female is
nature's default gender setting. If you were to watch a female and
a male brain developing via time-lapse photography, you would see
their circuit diagrams being laid down according to the blueprint
drafted by both genes and sex hormones. A huge testosterone surge
beginning in the eighth week will turn this unisex brain male by
killing off some cells in the communication centers and growing
more cells in the sex and aggression centers. If the testosterone
surge doesn't happen, the female brain continues to grow
unperturbed. The fetal girl's brain cells sprout more connections
in the communication centers and areas that process emotion. How
does this fetal fork in the road affect us? For one thing, because
of her larger communication center, this girl will grow up to be
more talkative than her brother. In most social contexts, she will
use many more forms of communication than he will. For another, it
defines our innate biological destiny, coloring the lens through
which each of us views and engages the world.
Reading Emotion Equals Reading Reality
Just about the first thing the female brain compels a baby
to do is study faces. Cara, a former student of mine, brought her
baby Leila in to see us for regular visits. We loved watching how
Leila changed as she grew up, and we saw her pretty much from birth
through kindergarten. At a few weeks old, Leila was studying every
face that appeared in front of her. My staff and I made plenty of
eye contact, and soon she was smiling back at us. We mirrored each
other's faces and sounds, and it was fun bonding with her. I wanted
to take her home with me, particularly because I hadn't had the
same experience with my son.
I loved that this baby girl wanted to look at me, and I wished my
son had been so interested in my face. He was just the opposite. He
wanted to look at everything else-mobiles, lights, and
doorknobs-but not me. Making eye contact was at the bottom of his
list of interesting things to do. I was taught in medical school
that all babies are born with the need for mutual gazing because it
is the key to developing the mother-infant bond, and for months I
thought something was terribly wrong with my son. They didn't know
back then about the many sex-specific differences in the brain. All
babies were thought to be hardwired to gaze at faces, but it turns
out that theories of the earliest stages of child development were
female-biased. Girls, not boys, come out wired for mutual gazing.
Girls do not experience the testosterone surge in utero that
shrinks the centers for communication, observation, and processing
of emotion, so their potential to develop skills in these areas are
better at birth than boys'. Over the first three months of life, a
baby girl's skills in eye contact and mutual facial gazing will
increase by over 400 percent, whereas facial gazing skills in a boy
during this time will not increase at all.
Baby girls are born interested in emotional expression. They take
meaning about themselves from a look, a touch, every reaction from
the people they come into contact with. From these cues they
discover whether they are worthy, lovable, or annoying. But take
away the signposts that an expressive face provides and you've
taken away the female brain's main touchstone for reality. Watch a
little girl as she approaches a mime. She'll try with everything
she has to elicit an expression. Little girls do not tolerate flat
faces. They interpret an emotionless face that's turned toward them
as a signal they are not doing something right. Like dogs chasing
Frisbees, little girls will go after the face until they get a
response. The girls will think that if they do it just right,
they'll get the reaction they expect. It's the same kind of
instinct that keeps a grown woman going after a narcissistic or
otherwise emotionally unavailable man-"if I just do it right, he'll
love me." You can imagine, then, the negative impact on a little
girl's developing sense of self of the unresponsive, flat face of a
depressed mother-or even one that's had too many Botox injections.
The lack of facial expression is very confusing to a girl, and she
may come to believe, because she can't get the expected reaction to
a plea for attention or a gesture of affection, that her mother
doesn't really like her. She will eventually turn her efforts to
faces that are more responsive.
Anyone who has raised boys and girls or watched them grow up can
see that they develop differently, especially that baby girls will
connect emotionally in ways that baby boys don't. But
psychoanalytic theory misrepresented this sex difference and made
the assumption that greater facial gazing and the impulse to
connect meant that girls were more "needy" of symbiosis with their
mothers. The greater facial gazing doesn't indicate a need; it
indicates an innate skill in observation. It's a skill that comes
with a brain that is more mature at birth than a boy's brain and
develops faster, by one to two years.
Hearing, Approval and Being Heard
Girls' well-developed brain circuits for gathering meaning
from faces and tone of voice also push them to comprehend the
social approval of others very early. Cara was surprised that she
was able to take Leila out into public. "It's amazing. We can sit
at a restaurant, and Leila knows, at eighteen months, that if I
raise my hand she should stop reaching for my glass of wine. And I
noticed that if her dad and I are arguing, she'll eat with her
fingers until one of us looks over at her. Then she'll go back to
struggling with a fork."
These brief interactions show Leila picking up cues from her
parents' faces that her cousin Joseph likely wouldn't have looked
for. A Stanford University study of twelve-month-old girls and boys
showed the difference in desire and ability to observe. In this
case, the child and mother were brought into a room, left alone
together, and instructed not to touch a toy cow. The mother stood
off to the side. Every move, glance, and utterance was recorded.
Very few of the girls touched the forbidden object, even though
their mothers never explicitly told them not to. The girls looked
back at their mothers' faces many more times than did the boys,
checking for signs of approval or disapproval. The boys, by
contrast, moved around the room and rarely glanced at their
mothers' faces. They frequently touched the forbidden toy cow, even
though their mothers shouted, "No!" The one-yearold boys, driven by
their testosterone-formed male brains, are compelled to investigate
their environment, even those elements of it they are forbidden to
touch.
Because their brains did not undergo a testosterone marination in
utero and their communication and emotion centers were left intact,
girls also arrive in the world better at reading faces and hearing
emotional vocal tones. Just as bats can hear sounds that even cats
and dogs cannot, girls can hear a broader range of emotional tones
in the human voice than can boys. Even as an infant, all a girl
needs to hear is a slight tightening in her mother's voice to know
she should not be opening the drawer with the fancy wrapping paper
in it. But you will have to restrain the boy physically to keep him
from destroying next Christmas's packages. It's not that he's
ignoring his mother. He physically cannot hear the same tone of
warning.
A girl is also astute at reading from facial expression whether or
not she's being listened to. At eighteen months, Leila could not be
kept quiet. We couldn't understand anything she was trying to tell
us, but she waddled up to each person in the office and unloosed a
stream of words that seemed very important to her. She tested for
agreement in each of us. If we appeared even the tiniest bit
disinterested, or broke eye contact for a second, she put her hands
on her hips, stomped her foot, and grunted in indignation.
"Listen!" she yelled. No eye contact meant to her that we were not
listening. Cara and her husband, Charles, were worried that Leila
seemed to insist on being included in any conversation at home. She
was so demanding that they thought they had spoiled her. But they
hadn't. It was just their daughter's brain searching for a way to
validate her sense of self.
Whether or not she is being listened to will tell a young girl if
others take her seriously, which in turn goes to the growth of her
sense of a successful self. Even though her language skills aren't
developed, she understands more than she expresses, and she
knows-before you do-if your mind has wandered for an instant. She
can tell if the adult understands her. If the adult gets on the
same wavelength, it actually creates her sense of self as being
successful or important. If she doesn't connect, her sense is of an
unsuccessful self. Charles in particular was surprised by how much
focus it took to keep up the relationship with his daughter. But he
saw that, when he listened attentively, she began to develop more
confidence.
1. Dr. Brizendine begins by describing the lack of clinical data
on female neurology, psychology, and neurobiology she encountered
as a medical student. How did years of emphasis on male subjects
skew medical treatment for women and men alike? What did it take
for physicians such as Dr. Brizendine to turn the tide?
2. Discuss the book's discussion of gender and aggression in
young children. What do these revelations, such as the fact that
girls may inherently go through phases of bossiness as well as
cooperatively taking turns, indicate about the way we should
socialize children? Should our expectations of "acceptable"
childhood behavior be altered in recognition of these innate
patterns?
3. How does an understanding of the adolescent female brain ease
or even alleviate your own memories of teenage angst? Which
episodes seem less disconcerting when put in the context of
physiology? Considering the way pleasure centers are stoked by
gossip and sexual attractiveness takes priority, is it futile to
try to tame the teen-girl brain?
4. What is the best way to reconcile the fact that most girls
shun conflict while boys often enjoy it? What are the benefits and
challenges of this contradiction? How do the adult manifestations
of these features play out in the workplace?
5. Which aspects of Melissa and Rob's case study regarding
dating resonated the most with you? Can these findings be
translated into a "prescription" for love? What lessons should
single women take away from the observation that men are
essentially chasers and women are choosers?
6. What surprised you in Dr. Brizendine's chapter on sexual
satisfaction? Did her distinctions between male and female orgasms
differ from what you had previously believed? Does
twenty-first-century dating accommodate these inherent gender
differences?
7. What are the implications of the "mommy brain" for working
mothers of newborns? Would it be beneficial or destructive if more
fathers experienced the "daddy brain," even extreme manifestations
such as Couvade Syndrome? Do women inherently want to share the
tasks of parenting?
8. Discuss the dangers and advantages of being able to read a
man's expressions with stealth and precision. If you were able to
reduce your emotional attentiveness, would you do so?
9. With a better understanding of the inherently different
communication styles possessed by men and women, can relationship
woes be eased? Or is the communication gulf cause for despair?
10. Does American society embrace the wisdom of menopausal and
post-menopausal women? Do contemporary grandmothers receive greater
or less respect than in previous generations?
11. Based on the findings in Appendix One, how would you
approach the controversial topic of hormone therapy? What is the
best way to gain trustworthy advice on this subject from
doctors?
12. What predictions can you make about shifting perceptions of
gender wars in a culture that becomes more aware of neuroscience?
How will the idealized and the fully realized woman be re-defined
by our daughters?
13. How might the types of data revealed in Appendix Three shape
future discussions about sexual orientation?
14. do the book's extensive notes and references indicate about
the nature of current research? Which fields appear to be the most
progressive? What types of research needs are being addressed? What
research question would you want to explore if you were to design a
study regarding the female brain?
15. What is the effect of reading about personal, often
emotional topics through the lens of science? What disputes in
previous generations could have been resolved with our current
scientific knowledge about gender differences?
16. Which stage currently matches your status in Dr.
Brizendine's chart, "Phases of a Female's Life"? In what ways does
the chart help explain your past behavior and predict your future
responses?