Читать книгу Brain Fitness for Women - Sondra Kornblatt - Страница 17

On the one hand, [men will] never experience childbirth. On the other hand, we can open all our own jars.

Bruce Willis, actor

When women are depressed, they eat or go shopping. Men invade another country. It's a whole different way of thinking.

Elayne Boosler, comedian

Have you ever worked on those find-the-difference photo puzzles? On one side, you see a picture of a celebrity like Beyoncé getting out of her limo. Next to it is the same picture, but with a few changes: the rearview mirror may be backwards, a fan in the background is missing, or there's an extra gold button on her jacket.

Male and female brains are kind of like those side-by-side pictures—mostly the same at birth but with a few differences.

Now imagine that the left picture of Beyoncé was swished in blue tint and the right one in red. The pictures look different right away, even before you look for the changed details.

Think of those colors as hormones. Hormones “tint” the parts of the brain, changing some behavior, emotional responses, and even vulnerability to illnesses. Certain parts of the brain readily absorb the color and other parts don't.

Is everything colored by hormones? Yes and no. No matter how much men and women differ from each other, the individual variations within the same sex are much wider. So while men as a group tend to be more aggressive than women, you’ll find extremely aggressive women and extremely timid men.

“Gender roles are flexible, reversible, and not all-or-none,” says Donald Pfaff, PhD, author of Man and Woman: An Inside Story. “[B]iological influences on sex differences in brain and behavior operate at so many different levels, and they interact with environmental influences in so many different ways, that rigid, stereotyped ideas about what is and is not typical male or typical female behavior have become impossible to sustain.”²⁰

When you understand that you're swimming in different hormonal waters than men, you can have more compassion for yourself. You’ll be open to the value of your brain's perspective on the world and be more relaxed with how wide the range of women's behaviors can be.

This chapter looks at hormones, both sexual and nonsexual, as well as other differences between men and women, including different responses and susceptibility to pain and illnesses.