Why won't he ask for directions?

The Sex-Specific Brain: What It Means for Human Relationships
Seen one way, Liz’s fight with Tim is nothing more than a commonplace, garden-variety marital spat. But in another light, it perfectly typifies what so often goes wrong between men and women, and why.

We’re Different!

Liz and Tim don’t have a bad marriage, but when they fight like this, they feel completely alienated from one another. “I can’t understand how we can see the same things so differently. It’s like he’s another species entirely,” she says. Tim’s not an alien; they’re just different. Our mistake, whether we’re male or female, is to want — to insist, hanker for, demand — us to be alike. And the simple, irrefutable, fabulous fact is that we are not.

The differences between males and females are dramatic and incontrovertible to anyone who’s even casually observed animals. My male pug is bigger, stronger, and much more active than his sister. While she spends hours quietly wrapped around my feet and hides if she knows it’s cold or raining outside, he wanders through the house in search of a favorite toy, nips at her leg to encourage her to get up and play with him, and loves to go out for walks, taking on every pigeon in his path.

Why are they different? Over the past decade, there has been a crescendo of interest in exploring the precise nature and importance of the differences between men and women. The new science of gender-specific medicine is producing an amazing appreciation of how our biological sex modifies the way we operate in the world — and even our experience of disease. We are different, and vastly so, in every system of the body, from the skin that covers us, to the hearts that beat within our chests, to the guts that process the food we eat.

Nowhere is this more true than in the brain, the 3-pound organ that houses all that makes us human: our passions, our insights, our appreciation of the created world, our entire intellectual and emotional lives.

Men and women think differently, approach problems differently, emphasize the importance of things differently, and experience the world around us through entirely different filters.

Starting in the womb, and for as long as our lives last, we receive information into sex-specific brains that are significantly different in anatomy, chemical composition, blood flow, and metabolism. The very systems we use to produce ideas and emotions, to create memories, to conceptualize and internalize our experiences, and to solve problems are different.

How come we didn’t know this before? Because scientists didn’t study women; they studied only men. It has been only at the insistence of women themselves that researchers have been permitted (and indeed encouraged) to look at them directly. The result of this tremendous new step in investigative medicine is that we now have the science to confirm what we knew all along: Men and women are not the same.

I believe that the differences between us offer a key clue to the disconnect that sometimes happens between men and women. I’d like to show you what I mean, so let’s go back and look — not at who’s right and who’s wrong — but at the “anatomy” of the argument that began this chapter.

What’s really happening when Liz and Tim fight?

Anatomy of an Argument: The Postmortem
Within seconds of her arrival home, Liz’s body is in full battle readiness. As she processes each new stressor — the untidy house, the unmade cookies, the errant e-mail — her brain signals for hormones to help her cope with the stress, by raising her blood pressure and pushing her heart to beat at a rate almost twice what’s normal. In women, the amygdala, the part of the brain that receives and responds to stressors, has extensive connections to the parts of the brain that control blood pressure and heart rate. Men, on the other hand, have a less extensive network; Tim is engrossed in his game, untouched by stress.

Left to his own devices, and given the time crunch, Tim would probably say to forget the cookies because there will surely be enough food at the party without their contribution. But Liz releases a very important hormone called oxytocin that motivates her to make and preserve connections with other people, especially those who can help her with Ella, like Tim’s parents. Levels of this hormone are especially high when women are under stress — making oxytocin a gender-specific and powerful tool that helps women to meet challenges by recruiting others. In this case, the hormone powers Liz to go the extra mile by making a batch of cookies to facilitate bonding.

Liz has more gray matter in the frontal cortex of her brain, the area just behind the eyes, than Tim does. This is the executive center of the brain, the CEO that controls our complex behaviors. Liz also has more connections between the two sides of her brain, which may explain how she processes several different streams of information at the same time — modifying her presentation while following a recipe, for instance, or endlessly analyzing her argument with Tim while going over her notes. Tim, for the most part, activates only one side of his brain when processing information. This means that he deals with one thing at a time: He identifies a problem, comes up with a solution, and moves on. That’s one of the reasons he hasn’t paid better attention to Ella’s needs: His answer to the “problem” — that they’re going to be late to the party — is to get the child dressed as quickly as possible.

Liz, of course, focuses on a different problem: Ella’s dirty hands. Her larger executive center accesses this as a threat. It sends a message to the part of the brain that helps us to create memories from our experiences and to the part that stores our memories of emotionally charged experiences — like the results of Ella’s earlier lead test, which came back high after their apartment renovation.

Tim was afraid for Ella then too, but the experience was quantitatively more unpleasant for Liz than it was for him because of her biology. Women have higher levels of the hormone estrogen than men do, and estrogen does two things when women are under stress. First, it prolongs the secretion of the stress hormone, cortisol, so a woman feels more stressed in the moment than a man in the same situation. Estrogen also activates a larger field of neurons in the brain than is the case with men; these activated cells provide women with the network needed to form a much more detailed memory of the sequence of events. So Liz’s hormone levels guarantee that she actually has a more detailed and more vivid memory of the event than Tim does. This evolutionary adaptation allows her to take good care of Ella by remembering dangerous situations so she can avoid them in the future.

We can see the differences between Liz and Tim in the way they fight too. Liz’s left brain, the seat of our ability to process language, has more gray matter than Tim’s does, and she uses both sides of her brain for speech, while Tim uses only one. These factors may explain Liz’s rich, fluid accusations and Tim’s corresponding retreat into silence. We see those verbal skills at work as well in Liz’s rhetorical questions to Ella about her day at the park. It’s Liz’s biological “job” to push the pre-verbal Ella toward language.

That superior ability to communicate also explains how Tim’s sister is able to pick up on Liz’s distress right away. Women have to be better at reading the subtle and nuanced language of human expression than men, so that they can better determine the needs of their highly dependent, wordless infants. And as we’ll see, the bonding that takes place between the two women is a good example of a female behavior pattern in the face of stress; it serves as a better form of self-protection than the typical male “fight or flight” response.

I could go on and on, but you can see how complicated even this routine domestic conflict really is, and how sex-specific.

But what does it all mean?

If men and women are fundamentally, biologically different, what do those differences mean for the ultimate fate of our relationships? Are Liz and Tim destined to retreat to their sex-specific behaviors and biologically-informed brains, to glare angrily at each other over their grubby child?

Hopefully not. I sincerely believe that a better understanding of the differences between us and a genuine attempt to learn from our partners’ best coping strategies will help us narrow the gap.

Excerpted from “Why Men Never Remember and Women Never Forget,” by Marianne Legato, MD, FACP. Copyright ©2005. Published by Rodale Trade Books. No part of this excerpt can be used without permission of the publisher.

MORE FROM TODAY BOOKS: RELATIONSHIPS

Ex education: 10 signs you’re not ‘just friends’

Ex education: 10 signs you’re not ‘just friends’ ‘Superior Wife Syndrome’ aims to save couples RUEA? (That is, are you emotionally available?) Scorned lovers: Moving on is best ‘Revenge’ To snag a man, let him do the chasing What women can learn from bad pick-up lines New novel follows adventures of single women ‘Vixen Manual’ bares tricks to snare a man Boys 101: Writer offers teen girls a crash course How to get a great deal ... on a husband   Add Today Books: Relationships headlines to your news reader: