Being a woman, says neuropsychiatri...

Being a woman, says neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine, is like having giant, invisible antennae that reach not at home into the world, constantly aware of the emotions and requires of those around you.

although the antennae are metaphorical, the brain circuitry and hormones that make women thus much more attuned to the emotions of others are surpassingly real.

They're the make liable of Brizendine's book The Female Brain (Morgan Road works $24.95). In it, the caster of the University of California-San Francisco Women's and Teen Girls' disposition and Hormone Clinic describes the physical and hormonal differences in the female brain, from fetus to grandmother.

The female brain is a machine built for connection, Brizendine says. It's a rise of eons of evolution that allowed women to sum up what their pre-verbal infants exigencyed and predict what bigger, more aggressive males were going to do.

further she worries that acknowledging differences will lead to women being discriminated against in the workplace.

"There's still the feeling among women who are just hovering below the glass ceiling that the science described in this volume is going to highlight differences [that] will impair their chances of breaking through" Brizendine says.

For example, consider the maelstrom at Harvard University last year, when now-former president Larry Summer created an enormous lawsuit when he said one reason women may not rise as high in the sciences is that they're not as innately gifted in those areas.

Numerous studies display otherwise: They have found that leave out in a very few areas -- physical might physical aggression, incidences of masturbation and attitudes about casual sex -- forward the whole men and women are earnestly more alike than they are different.

"If you make the argument that 'Gosh our brains are totally different and we're totally different and at the same time we want equal access to medical academy and we want equal pay for equal work,' " women will pay a price in advancement, says Janet Hyde a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

A neuroscientist argues otherwise. "There are clear differences in the brain between men and women one as well as the other in the structure and anatomy and the chemistry, which includes hormones and neurotransmitters and what's joined to what," says Sandra Witelson, a neuroscientist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

She cites girls who have a hormone disorder that causes them to have higher testosterone flats in utero. "In these girls, their play patterns, their spatial ability and equal their sexual orientation are frequently closer to the male pattern."

It's the so-called "Mommy brain" that's mostly controversial in some quarters -- and Brizendine's discussion of mothers' hormonal cascades triggered by dint of being pregnant, nursing and being constantly physical with children.

Fathers and adoptive mothers also earn the one-two neurological- hormonal bore but it's strongest in those who give birth and feed at the breast she says.

In a geographical division where women are educated at higher rates than men society has not done a profitable job of figuring out in what way to integrate the child-rearing portion of their lives into the world of work, she says.

"We ne to find a place in our society for working mothers with young children that acknowledges their life stage." And it is solitary a stage -- five to eight years -- not their entire lives, Brizendine says.

FEMALE V MALE BRAINS

We all start abroad with female brains. It's simply when the developing fetus is "marinated" in testosterone at around eight weeks that male and female brains diverge.

The female brain shoot forths connections in areas that control communication and emotion, while in the male brain the small cavitys in the communication centers are prun and more enclosed spaces grow in areas that manage sex and aggression.

In adults:

- She'll use upon average 20,000 words a day. He'll use 7000

- She'll think about sex one time a day. He'll think about it each 58

others

uHer brain will be 9 percent smaller than his, still will have the same number of brain small rooms just more tightly packed.

- Her principle nave for emotion and memory formation, the hippocampus, will be larger.

- His processor at the core of the primitive area of the brain that registers fear and triggers aggression, the amygdala, will be larger.

Source: The Female Brain

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