50 Psychology Classics by Tom Butler-Bowdon Page A

Brizendine was aware of conclusive studies done around the world showing that women suffer from depression at a ratio of 2:1 compared to men. Going through college at the peak of the feminist movement, along with many others she believed this was the result of the “patriarchal oppression of women.” But it came to her notice that, up until puberty, depression rates between boys and girls are the same. Could the hormonal changes to girls in their early teenage years, she wondered, make them suddenly more prone to getting depressed?
    Later, as a psychiatrist, Brizendine worked with women suffering from the extremes of premenstrual syndrome, and was struck by the extent to which the female brain is shaped by dramatic changes in hormonal chemistry, driving a woman’s behavior and creating her reality. In 1994, Brizendine established the Women’s Mood and Hormone Clinic in San Francisco, one of the first of its type in the world.
The Female Brain
, the culmination of her 20 years of practice as a neuropsychiatrist, pulls together her own research and the latest findings from a range of disciplines. Contrasting the relative stability of male hormonal brain states with those of the female, which involve an often complex cocktail of chemicals and change dramatically from girlhood to adolescence, early adulthood, motherhood, and menopause, the book brilliantly shows why women’s brain states and chemistry merit independent research, and why generalities about human behavior usually relate to
male
behavior.
    The Female Brain
includes fascinating chapters on the female brain in love, the neurobiology of sex, the “mommy brain” (how a woman’s thinking changes according to altered brain chemistry in pregnancy), and the mature female brain, post-menopause. We focus here on some of Brizendine’s insights regarding the infant and pubescent female brain.
Basic differences
    Even taking into account differences in body size, Brizendine notes, the male brain is about 9 percent larger than the female. This fact was once interpreted as meaning that women were not as smart as men. In fact, women and men have the same number of brain cells, but women’s are more tightly packed into their skull.
    In the areas of the brain dealing with language and hearing, women have a full 11 percent more neurons than men, and the part of the brain associated with memory, the hippocampus, is also larger in women. The circuitry forobserving emotion on other people’s faces is again larger compared to the male. In relation to speech, emotional intelligence, and the ability to store rich memory, therefore, women have a natural advantage.
    Men, on the other hand, have more processors in the amygdala, a part of the brain regulating fear and aggression. This perhaps explains why males are more likely to anger quickly and take violent action in response to immediate physical danger. Women’s brains also evolved to deal with possibly life-threatening situations, but in a different way. The female brain experiences greater stress over the same event as a man’s, and this stress is a way of taking account of all possible risks to her children or family unit. This is why, Brizendine suggests, a modern woman can view some unpaid bills as catastrophic, as they seem a threat to the family’s very survival.
    Brain scanning and imaging technologies now allow us to see the workings of the brain in real time. They show the brain lighting up in different places depending on whether we are in love, looking at faces, solving a problem, speaking, or experiencing anxiety, and these hot spots differ between men’s and women’s brains. Women actually use different parts of the brain and different circuits than men to accomplish the same tasks, including solving problems, processing language, and generally experiencing the world.
    One other basic brain difference is noteworthy. Studies have shown that men think about sex on