The Female Brain (20 page)

Tears in a woman may evoke brain pain in men. The male brain registers helplessness in the face of pain, and such a moment can be extremely difficult for them to tolerate. The first time Jane cried in front of an otherwise very affectionate Evan, she was stunned that she got a perfunctory hug and a few pats on the back followed by “Okay, that’s enough.” This seemingly rejecting behavior became a bone of contention in their relationship. The two came to see me for an urgent couples session. Evan needed to communicate to Jane that seeing her cry was nearly impossible for him to bear because when he saw her in pain he felt powerless to do anything about it. Slowly, they began to work on a compromise, so that Jane could get the comfort she needed and Evan could ease the pain he experienced. When Jane was upset, Evan would sit on the couch with a box of Kleenex on his lap. He would cradle her with one arm and hold a magazine or book with the other in order to distract himself from his own discomfort. After a few years, Evan was able to recognize when Jane needed a good cry, and soon he could simply hold her and take care of her until she was done.

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Being able to “be there” during emotionally difficult times is hardwired into women, which is why they are often baffled by their husbands’ inability to sit with sadness or despair. One study showed that newborn girls, less than twenty-four hours old, respond more to the cries of another baby—and to human faces—than do boys. Girls as young as a year old are more responsive to the distress of other people, especially those who look sad or are hurt. Men pick up the subtle signs of sadness in a female face only 40 percent of the time, whereas women can pick up these signs 90 percent of the time. And while men and women are both comfortable being physically close to a happy person, only women report that they feel equally comfortable being close to someone sad.

Think of your girlfriends who will stick with you when you are hurt or sad. They’ll ask you when it happened, what was said, if you’ve been able to sleep or eat, and “do you need me to come over?” To them, the details are important. I remember when I broke my ankle a few years ago and my girlfriends would just stop by and bring me some little treat they knew I’d like. They did everything they could to keep me from getting cabin fever. They knew how to help. Guy friends, by contrast, offered a quick “I hope you feel better” before jumping off the phone or walking out the door. It’s not that they were being insensitive on purpose. It may be more about ancient wiring. Men are used to avoiding contact with others when they themselves are going through an emotionally rough time. They process their troubles alone and think women would want to do the same. Periscope down; submarine dives twenty fathoms to solve it alone.

The same apparent insensitivity can show up during other emotional exchanges. Jane and Evan moved in together, and after a few pressure-free months, Jane realized she wanted to spend the rest of her life with Evan, too. She decided to let him know. After two months of her dropping hints—about kids, about buying a house together, about what city they’d finally settle in—Evan didn’t do anything. At our next session, Jane reported to me that, panicked, she went for the direct route: “I’m ready to get married,” she told him one afternoon. Evan replied, “Okay, that’s good to know,” then went to watch the basketball playoffs. Jane began to panic. Had he changed his mind? Did he not love her anymore? She chased him around the house for three hours, haranguing him. Out of utter frustration and humiliation, she burst into tears, asking him if he was thinking of leaving her. “What?” Evan exclaimed. “How did you come to that conclusion? This is the first time you’ve given me any indication that you’re ready. I was going to buy a ring and make a nice romantic dinner plan, but I can see you’re not going to let me do that. So okay. Will you marry me?” Jane couldn’t understand how he had missed the signs that she was ready, and Evan couldn’t understand why she was so upset that he didn’t answer right away.

Remember the little girl who wouldn’t rest until she got an expression out of a mime? If she doesn’t get the expected response, she will persist until she begins to conclude that she’s done something wrong or that the person doesn’t like or love her anymore. Something similar was playing out for Jane. When Evan didn’t immediately ask her to marry him, and didn’t respond to her direct approach, she concluded that he didn’t love her anymore. Evan, in fact, was just trying to buy time to do things right.

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It would be interesting to follow Evan and Jane over the years and see how they remember these early days. Most likely, his version, through no fault of his own, will be the movie trailer. Hers will be the full-length motion picture. She will take this as a sign of his waning love. When she expresses this reaction to him, he won’t know what she’s talking about. To understand their differences, we have to look at how emotions get stored as memories in the female brain.

Picture, for a moment, a map showing the areas for emotion in the brains of the two sexes. In the man’s brain, the connecting routes between areas would be country roads; in the woman’s brain, they’d be superhighways. According to researchers at the University of Michigan, women use both sides of the brain to respond to emotional experiences, while men use just one side. They found the connections between the emotion centers are also more active and extensive in women. In another study, at Stanford University, volunteers viewed emotional images while having their brains scanned. Nine different brain areas lit up in women, but only two lit up in men. Research also shows that women typically remember emotional events—such as first dates, vacations, and big arguments—more vividly and retain them longer than men. Women will know what he said, what they both ate, if it was cold outside or it rained on their anniversary, while men may forget everything except whether or not she looked sexy.

For both sexes, the emotional gatekeeper is the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure located deep within the brain. The amygdala is like the brain’s Homeland Security Alerting and Coordinating System, switching on the rest of the body systems—the gut, skin, heart, muscles, eyes, face, ears, and adrenal glands—to look out for incoming emotional stimuli. The first relay station for emotion from the amygdala to the body is the hypothalamus. Like the Joint Chiefs, it’s responsible for coordinating the launch of systems that raise blood pressure, heart rate, and breathing rate, and stimulate the fight-or-flight reaction after receiving reports from the body. The amygdala also alerts the cortex, the brain’s Intelligence Branch, which sizes up the emotional situation, analyzes it, and determines how much attention it deserves. If it senses enough emotional intensity, the cortex cues the amygdala to alert the conscious brain to pay attention. This is the moment when we’re flooded with conscious emotional feeling. Before this point, all this brain processing is happening behind the scenes. The brain’s decision-making center, or Executive Branch—the prefrontal cortex—can now decide how to respond.

Part of the reason that her memory is better for emotional details is that a woman’s amygdala is more easily activated by emotional nuance. The stronger the amygdala response to a stressful situation, such as an accident or threat, or a pleasant event, such as a romantic dinner, the more details the hippocampus will tag for memory storage about the experience. Scientists believe that because women have a relatively larger hippocampus, they have better memories for the details of both pleasant and unpleasant emotional experiences—when they happened, who was there, what the weather was like, how the restaurant smelled—in a detailed, three-dimensional, sensory snapshot.

Thirteen years later, Jane remembers every minute of the day she and Evan decided to get married, but as time wore on, Evan began to forget how it happened. They used to laugh about it all the time, but now he looks at her blankly when she recounts the details. He remembers that she got sick the first time he mentioned marriage, but he doesn’t remember how he eventually asked her. He didn’t store in memory any of these precious details. This is not because Evan doesn’t love Jane; it’s because his brain circuits are incapable of retaining the information, so it doesn’t encode in his long-term memory. If she had activated his amygdala with a threat to the relationship or a physical danger, the memory would have been burned into his circuits just as it is into hers.

There are two exceptions in which men register emotions and thus detailed memories. If the person he is interacting with is blatantly angry and threatening, a man will be able to read that emotion as quickly as a woman can. His response to an aggressive threat will be as quick as hers, and will trigger an almost instant muscular reaction. Threatening to leave or threatening him physically will get his attention in an instant. Jane told me that, though she didn’t mean it, she had told Evan during an argument that she couldn’t take his stubbornness anymore and she was leaving. Evan was so traumatized that he asked her never to threaten to leave unless she really meant it. That was an argument he never forgot.

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Another major difference between the male and female brains is in how they process anger. Although men and women report feeling the same amount of anger, the expression of anger and aggression is clearly greater in men. The amygdala is the brain center for fear, anger, and aggression, and it’s physically larger in men than in women, whereas the anger, fear, and aggression control center—the prefrontal cortex—is relatively larger in women. As a result, it’s easier to push a man’s anger button. The male amygdala also has many testosterone receptors, which stimulate and heighten its response to anger, especially after the testosterone surges at puberty. That’s why men whose testosterone levels are high, which includes younger men, have short anger fuses. Many women who start taking testosterone also notice that their anger response is suddenly quicker. As men age, their testosterone naturally declines, the amygdala becomes less responsive, the prefrontal cortex gains more control, and they don’t get angry as fast.

Women have a much less direct relationship to anger. I grew up hearing from my mother that the quality and longevity of a marriage could be measured by the number of bite marks on a woman’s tongue. When a woman “bites her tongue” to avoid expressing anger, it’s not all socialization. A lot of it is brain circuitry. Even if a woman wanted to express her anger right away, often her brain circuits would attempt to hijack this response, to reflect on it first out of fear and anticipation of retaliation. Also, the female brain has a tremendous aversion to conflict, which is set up by fear of angering the other person and losing the relationship. This may be accompanied by a sudden change in some brain neurochemicals, such as serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine—causing an unbearable activation in the brain on almost the same spectrum as a seizure—when anger or feelings of conflict arise in a relationship.

Perhaps in response to this extreme discomfort, the female brain developed an additional step in processing and avoiding conflict and anger, a series of circuits that hijack the emotion and chew on it, the same way a cow has an extra stomach that rechews its food before it is digested. These extralarge areas in the female brain are the prefrontal cortex, and the anterior cingulate cortex. They are the female brain’s version of the extra stomach for chewing on anger. As we saw earlier, women activate these areas more than men at the fear of loss or pain. In the wild, the loss of a relationship with a protective male provider could have spelled doom. Cautiously holding her anger back may also have saved a female and her offspring from retaliation from men—if she didn’t fly off the handle, she was less likely to evoke an extreme response from a trigger-tempered male.

Studies show that when a conflict or argument breaks out in a game, girls typically decide to stop playing to avoid any angry exchange, while boys generally continue to play intensely—jockeying for position, competing, and arguing hour after hour about who’ll be the boss or who will get access to the coveted toy. If a woman is pushed over the edge by finding out that her husband is having an affair, or if her child is in danger, her anger will blast right through and she will go to the mat. Otherwise, she will avoid anger or confrontation the same way a man will avoid an emotion.

Girls and women may not always feel the initial intense blast of anger directly from the amygdala that men feel. I can remember one time when a colleague did something unfair to me and I came home to tell my husband. He immediately became furious at the person and couldn’t understand why I wasn’t really mad. Instead of triggering a quick action response in the brain, as it does in males, anger in girls and women moves through the brain’s gut feeling, conflict-pain anticipation, and verbal circuits. I had to chew on the incident for a while before responding. Women talk to others first when they are angry at a third person. But scientists speculate that though a woman is slower to act out of anger, once her faster verbal circuits get going, they can cause her to unleash a barrage of angry words that a man can’t match. Typical men speak fewer words and have less verbal fluency than women, so they may be handicapped in angry exchanges with women. Men’s brain circuits and bodies may readily revert to a physical expression of anger fueled by the frustration of not being able to match women’s words.