It’s 9:30 a.m. and Mauri, a girlfriend, and I are laughing, as we do most mornings, over the minutiae of our lives. Funny, but not fascinating – until we hit the topic of irritating things men do.
It’s a big subject to tackle before a second coffee, but Mauri is fearless. “We’re going on a trip,” she starts off. “We have 50 million things to cover: laundry, emptying the dishwasher, watering the plants, getting snacks for the car. And where is my husband while I’m running around, turning off the lights and locking the door?” she demands triumphantly. “In the car! Honking the horn, shouting, ‘What the hell are you doing? Hurry up!’”
Why are we so different? I laugh out loud – it has happened so often to so many friends, it’s like a communal memory. But it made me wonder: Why do men and women think so differently?
The answer is in our head, says Dr. Louann Brizendine, a neuropsychiatrist at the University of California in San Francisco and author of The Female Brain (Morgan Road Books, 2006). Locked away in the skulls of both sexes are organs that, despite having the same structures and general functionality, are nevertheless unique.
Brain scans from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) reveal that this diversity is “complex and widespread,” says Brizendine. (MRI uses radio waves and a magnetic field to provide detailed pictures of internal organs and tissues; fMRI uses MRI to measure quick, tiny metabolic changes in active parts of the brain.) “The principle hub of both emotion and memory formation – the hippocampus – is larger in the female brain, as is brain circuitry for language and observing emotions in others,” says Brizendine. She adds that women have 11 per cent more neurons governing language and hearing than men do.
Embracing the differences These observations go a long way toward explaining why no two humans – male or female – are alike, says Jennifer Burkitt Hiebert, a psychology researcher at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. “It’s important to remember that intelligence is the same between the sexes.” However, she says, there are sex-related variations, and “Our differences need to be embraced so we can benefit from each other.” To do that, we first need to educate ourselves.
