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Summary
Summary
From the author of the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller The Female Brain, here is the eagerly awaited follow-up book that demystifies the puzzling male brain.
Dr. Louann Brizendine, the founder of the first clinic in the country to study gender differences in brain, behavior, and hormones, turns her attention to the male brain, showing how, through every phase of life, the "male reality" is fundamentally different from the female one. Exploring the latest breakthroughs in male psychology and neurology with her trademark accessibility and candor, she reveals that the male brain:
-is a lean, mean, problem-solving machine. Faced with a personal problem, a man will use his analytical brain structures, not his emotional ones, to find a solution.-thrives under competition, instinctively plays rough and is obsessed with rank and hierarchy.
-has an area for sexual pursuit that is 2.5 times larger than the female brain, consuming him with sexual fantasies about female body parts.
-experiences such a massive increase in testosterone at puberty that he perceive others' faces to be more aggressive.
The Male Brain finally overturns the stereotypes. Impeccably researched and at the cutting edge of scientific knowledge, this is a book that every man, and especially every woman bedeviled by a man, will need to own.
Author Notes
Louann Brizendine, M.D. received a degree in Neurobiology at the University of California at Berkeley, graduated from Yale University School of Medicine and did her internship and residency at Harvard Medical School. She is currently a neuropsychiatrist at the University of California at San Francisco who specializes in the relationship dynamics that result from the neurobiology of male and female brains. She founded the Women's Mood and Hormone Clinic in 1994 and serves as the clinic's director. She has written two books: The Female Brain and The Male Brain.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this utterly fascinating follow-up to her bestselling The Female Brain, Harvard neuropsychiatrist Brizendine leads readers through the lifespan of a man's brain, using lively prose and personable anecdotes to turn complex scientific research into a highly accessible romp. Among other salient info, readers will learn why it is what young boys seem unable to stay still (they are learning through "embodied cognition"); why behaviors may change so suddenly during puberty (among other changes, testosterone increases 20-fold); the nature of irritability in teens ("boys' hormones prime them for aggressive and territorial behaviors"); and the ways in which chemicals, physical touch, and play bond fathers with their children. With clearly detailed scientific explanations for how characteristics like anger expression, analysis of facial expression, and spatial manipulation differ between the sexes, Brizendine's review of brain and behavioral research should net a broad audience, from parents of boys to psychology students to fans of her first volume. Brizendine also includes an appendix regarding the brain and sexual orientation, as well as lengthy endnotes and an exhaustive reference list. (Mar.) Copyright 2010 Reed Business Information.
New York Review of Books Review
MANY scientists are cautious to a fault when it comes to telling us what they're unsure of, playing down any novel finding that hasn't been verified by another scientist. Not so Louann Brizendine. She is a neuropsychiatrist (the prefix makes any title sound smarter) who has put her professional training behind a breezy, incautious account of how the brain, urged on by hormones, makes men and women act completely differently. You'd never know from reading Brizendine that beneath the sea she blithely sails are depths that researchers have only just begun to chart. Brizendine nods to the fact that the brains of men and women are mostly alike. But her emphasis is entirely on the "profound differences" between them. This is clearly the best-seller strategy, neatly bisected into two books. "The Female Brain," published in 2006, drove reviewers in publications like Nature mad but lit up the talk show circuit and the Amazon rankings. "The Male Brain" is positioned for a similar second round. Would Brizendine have gotten this kind of pop for a single book called "The Male and Female Brain: Mostly One and the Same"? Not a chance. Each chapter of "The Male Brain" covers patients at various stages of the life cycle. At every step - the Dennis the Menace child, the oversexed teenager, the middle-aged man who falls for a younger woman - Brizendine gives a theory for how her patient's behavior is caused by his male brain patterns, egged on by hormones like testosterone (nicknamed "Zeus") and vasopressin ("the White Knight"). The publicity materials claim that Brizendine "overturns the stereotypes about men and boys." In fact, Brizendine chooses patients who typify a familiar stereotype and then explains their actions as the inevitable-seeming work of Zeus and his henchmen. Take David, who at age 3 turns a blow dryer on his friend's stream of pee as it hits the toilet. Brizendine traces the causes of this mischief-making back to the first day of his life: "David was only 24 hours old, and without encouragement or instruction from anyone, he stared at the rotating triangles and squares on the mobile and seemed to find them fascinating." The image comes from one much-discussed lab experiment. Other scientists have tried and failed to replicate the finding that dayold boy babies look at objects while newborn girls look at faces. But neither Brizendine's text nor her cursory endnotes give any hint of this uncertainty. The idea, however sketchy, seems to be that boys are hard-wired to break the rules because from birth they are less interested in human emotions than in objects, and so don't respond to parental disapproval the way girls do. In her introduction, Brizendine promises to answer questions about how much "gendered behavior is innate and how much is learned." But she throws nurture overboard in favor of nature every chance she gets. "The Male Brain" is filled with sentences like "Boys are programmed to move" and, about the older man drawn to the younger woman, "He was being biologically bewitched to bond with her." With all those powerful hormones, does personal psychology or experience stand a chance? Yet Brizendine's description of how men and boys act isn't in itself off base. While there is a far wider spectrum of behavior than she ever acknowledges - apparently her patients include no timid boys or unassuming men - many boys do act more turbocharged than many girls. If you try to wish away gender differences by giving your son a doll to play with, you may find, as Brizendine did, that he's using it as a sword. The toy preferences of preschoolers are one of the greatest sex differences that psychologists have found, and Brizendine is on far safer ground when she turns to them. The problem is that she never tells you so. There's no way to know from her heedless tour which sex differences are well established and which are not, which research is in its infancy and which solid and mature. BRIZENDINE has been here before. Her first book got particular attention for the claim that women speak faster than men (250 versus 125 words per minute) and use more words throughout the day, an average of 20,000 compared with 7,000. This was a conversation starter that lined up perfectly with stereotype - Chatty Cathy, quantified! Except that it turned out there were no studies backing up the words-per-minute claim, which Brizendine later removed from the paperback edition. Her claim that women use more words than men fell apart, too, when a paper published in Science found that the average man and woman use the same number of words (about 16,000 during the course of a day). But Brizendine has stuck with that claim, which she says was based on her own "observation," and on a paper that referred to the vocabularies of 20-month-old girls, whose author disavows the leap Brizendine makes. In "The Male Brain," Brizendine devotes a chapter to a "classic complaint: Men accuse women of being too emotional, and women accuse men of not being emotional enough." She rides to the rescue with the confident assertion that "we now know that the emotional processing in the male and female brain is different." We do? Brizendine introduces two "emotional systems that work simultaneously: the mirror-neuron system, or MNS, and the temporal-parietal junction system, or TPJ." Men use the TPJ more, she claims, and it turns them into problem solvers rather than emotional empathizers. When her client Danielle wailed, "You don't understand!" at Her husband, Neil, his brain "would entirely miss the desperate tone of her voice, since his TPJ would be busy working out the solution, and his MNS would no longer be activating." Danielle, for her part, could not appreciate Neil's analytic response because "she was trapped in her female brain circuit loops." What's the evidence for all this? Brizendine cites a single 2008 brain-scan study, of 14 women and 12 men, which found a gender difference in part of a lab experiment that tried to simulate empathy. The paper itself declares that "functional neuroimaging data on gender differences in empathy remain scarce." When I asked a couple of scientists to weigh in, one said he wouldn't base any substantive conclusion on this paper, since initial findings of sex differences in the brain often don't amount to much. The other pointed out that if men and women really processed emotions differently, you'd expect to see far greater variation in fMRI data. Yet one of Brizendine's more believable claims is that when she weaves theories like the one about TPJ for her patients, they smile with recognition. Maybe this is because the science will one day catch up with Brizendine's ideas. Or maybe as a species we're predisposed to be preoccupied by difference, as the Harvard psychologist Elizabeth Spelke argues. Or maybe we are still in recovery from that brief time in the 1970s when boys really were expected to play with dolls and some New Age man somewhere hung his house with crystals. But isn't it time to acknowledge that any rigid insistence that men and women are exactly the same has long since given way to common sense? Brizendine's trick, after all, is to give a scientific veneer to "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus." Which dates to 1992. At this point, it's hardly daring to say that there are momentous innate sex differences in the brain. It's just dubious. Brizendine argues that the brain, urged on by hormones, makes men and women act completely differently. Emily Bazelon is a senior editor at Slate and the Truman Capote law and media fellow at Yale Law School.
Choice Review
Brizendine (Univ. of California, San Francisco) follows her The Female Brain (CH, Jan'07, 44-2683) with another homage to gender differences. She traces the neuroanatomical and physiological development of the male brain and explains how "... male biology produces distinctly male behaviors." The writing style is lively and accessible, and the book simplifies complex biological and neurological concepts; however, The Male Brain cannot overcome serious limitations. First, Brizendine makes cause and effect attributions that are not substantiated by current scientific research. Second, while acknowledging that male behaviors could be explained by such factors as cultural influences, social learning theory, and parenting practices, Brizendine inevitably applies an essentialist gloss to her explanations (e.g., fathers who don't have daily hands-on interaction with their infants may fail to form "strong daddy brain circuits"). Finally, the author generalizes results of animal-model research and anecdotes from her neuropsychiatric practice to the behaviors of human males and females. Although a consideration of how social isolation affects "grumpy old men" and "grumpy old mice" is amusing, noncritical readers may be led to inferences or conclusions that are invalid or inaccurate. Readers who believe that men can be explained by their neuroanatomy and physiology will find much to like in The Male Brain. Summing Up: Optional. General readers. P. Lefler Bluegrass Community & Technical College
Excerpts
Excerpts
C O N T E N T S INTRODUCTION: What Makes a Man ONE: The Boy Brain TWO: The Teen Boy Brain THREE: The Mating Brain: Love and Lust FOUR: The Brain Below the Belt FIVE: The Daddy Brain SIX: Manhood: The Emotional Lives of Men SEVEN: The Mature Male Brain EPILOGUE: The Future of the Male Brain APPENDIX: The Male Brain and Sexual Orientation Excerpt from Chapter Two: The Teen Boy Brain "TURN OFF your computer now, Jake! No gaming until that homework is done!" shrieked Jake's mother as she pounded on his bedroom door. Opening the door a crack, Jake gave her a blank stare and grumbled something under his breath before shutting the door in her face. Kate knew he'd probably turn the computer back on without the volume. But what she didn't know was that free porn sites were beginning to be more enticing to him than the war games he played online with his buddies. Kate was a patient of mine, and up until this past year, she'd described her relationship with Jake as close and rewarding. But when her formerly happy and cooperative son turned fourteen, he became sullen and irritable. Struggle, struggle, struggle is all they seemed to do these days. When Kate and her husband, Dan, found out that Jake hadn't turned in a single English assignment in weeks, they worried that he might be drinking or experimenting with drugs. That's when they scheduled a family appointment with me. During our session, Jake stared out the window and Dan listened politely as Kate wrenchingly complained that their son had suddenly become unreachable and secretive. Not only had Jake gotten into a fight with another freshman, named Dylan, but he also had a new group of friends, including a girl named Zoe whom Kate described as "fast." Dan spoke up in disagreement, saying, "I'm not too worried about the fight or Jake's new friends. But I do expect Jake to keep his grades up." Meanwhile, Jake, with his curly brown hair and long, lanky limbs, see med dazed and oblivious to his parents' worries about him. When I turned and asked him, "What do you think of your parents' concerns?" he merely shrugged. It was clear that Jake, like most teens, wasn't going to say much of anything in front of his parents, so I suggested that he come in for a private session the following week. Since my own teen son had recently left for college after four long years of high school, I had a pretty good idea what Jake and his parents were going through. No matter how harmonious a boy's childhood has been, puberty can change everything. This stage of child development requires that delicate parental maneuver of becoming disengaged without disengaging. Kate said she felt as if the Jake she knew had disappeared, and in some ways he had. Scientists have discovered that the teen brain in both sexes is distinctly different from the preadolescent brain. The changes that were becoming obvious in Jake were set in motion by his genes and hormones while he was still in utero. Now, with the end of the juvenile pause, it was time for Jake to ramp up his skills for surviving in a man's world. And he was ready and eager, even if his mother wasn't. At this stage, the millions of little androgen switches, or receptors, in his brain are hungrily awaiting the arrival of testosterone-- king of the male hormones. As the floodgates are flung wide open, the juice of manhood saturates his body and his brain. When my own son turned fourteen and became moody and irritable, I remember thinking, "Oh my God, soon the testosterone will take him over mind, body, and soul." TESTOSTERONE TSUNAMI Although Kate worried that Jake's behavior was extreme, I assured her that he was no different from many other boys his age. At fourteen, Jake's brain would have already been under reconstruction for a few years. Between the ages of nine and fifteen, his male brain circuitry, with its billions of neurons and trillions of connections, was "going live" as his testosterone level soared twenty fold. If testosterone were beer, a nine-year-old boy would get the equivalent of about one cup a day. But by age fifteen, it would be equal to two gallons a day. Jake wasn't into drugs or alcohol. He was loaded on testosterone. From then on, testosterone would biologically masculinize all the thoughts and behaviors that emerge from his brain. It would stimulate the rapid growth of male brain circuits that were formed before he was born. It also would enlarge his testicles, activate the growth of his muscles and bones, make his beard and pubic hair grow, deepen his voice, and lengthen and thicken his penis. But just as dramatically, it would make his brain's sexual- pursuit circuits, in his hypothalamus, grow more than twice as large as those in girls' brains. The male brain is now structured to push sexual pursuit to the forefront of his mind. Early in puberty, when images of breasts and other female body parts naturally take over their brain's visual cortex, some boys wonder if they're turning into "pervs." It takes a little while for them to get used to their new preoccupation with girls, which runs on autopilot. This sexual preoccupation is like a large-screen TV in a sports bar-- always on in the background. When I share this information with teen boys in high-school classrooms, I can see recognition flash across many of their faces, if only for an instant, before they go back to looking bored. But sex is not the only thing on a teen boy's mind. As the testosterone surged through Jake's brain cells, it was stimulating a companion hormone called vasopressin. Together, testosterone and vasopressin were making Jake's brain territorial about his room and sensitive to his peer's putdowns-- perceived or real. And when these hormones got mixed with the stress hormone cortisol, they supercharged his body and brain, preparing him for the male fight-or-flight response in reaction to challenges to his status or turf. Our brains have bee n shaped for hundreds of thousands of years by living in status-conscious hierarchical groups. And while not all tee n boys want to be king of the hill, they do want to be close to the top of the pecking order, staying as far from the bottom as possible. And that can mean taking risks that get them into trouble. Like most of us moms, Kate couldn't fully appreciate or relate to all the changes in her teen son's brain. When Dan and Kate came into my office the next week, I said to Kate, "Don't worry. It takes about eight to nine years for the teen brain to complete the remodeling it began when he entered puberty. Jake's hormonally enhanced brain circuits will stabilize when he's in his late teens or early twenties." Kate's face fell. "I'm not sure I'll live that long. This boy's killing me." I could see that she was only half joking. Dan turned to me and said, "Look, Jake's just like every other teenage boy that ever walked the planet Earth. He's gonna look at some porn. He's gonna blow off his homework, get in some fights, and drool over girls. Once he's grounded for a while, he'll come around." Excerpted from THE MALE BRAIN by Louann Brizendine, M.D. Copyright (c) 2010 by Louann Brizendine, M.D. Excerpted by permission of Broadway, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpted from The Male Brain: A Breakthrough Understanding of How Men and Boys Think by Louann Brizendine All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgments | p. xi |
| The Male Brain (diagram) | p. xv |
| The Cast of Neurohormone Characters | p. xvii |
| Phases of a Male's Life | p. xxi |
| Introduction What Makes a Man | p. 1 |
| 1 The Boy Brain | p. 9 |
| 2 The Teen Boy Brain | p. 30 |
| 3 The Mating Brain: Love and Lust | p. 51 |
| 4 The Brain Below the Belt | p. 67 |
| 5 The Daddy Brain | p. 79 |
| 6 Manhood: The Emotional Lives of Men | p. 95 |
| 7 The Mature Male Brain | p. 112 |
| Epilogue: The Future of the Male Brain | p. 131 |
| Appendix: The Male Brain and Sexual Orientation | p. 133 |
| Notes | p. 137 |
| References | p. 179 |
| Index | p. 263 |
