Anytime a scientist suggests there are biologic brain differences between races, or between male and female- that go beyond social circumstance- there’s bound to be tons of publicity and controversy.

Louann Brizendine, MD- a neuropsychiatrist at the University of California San Francisco- recently published a book called The Female Brain that contends there are indeed inborn biologic differences between male and female brain architecture. Some of these differences include:

• women tend to have faster and better fine-motor skills than men
• women tend to have faster and broader verbal skills
• women tend to have higher emotional IQs:
• In a recent interview, she notes: “Women have these extra “antenna” almost sticking out the sides of their cheeks and ears for emotional details and emotional nuance, and their brains are always feeling for emotional information at a level that men can’t even perceive. Therefore, things she may think are very important, he misses completely”
• “Women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion, while men have a small country road,” she writes.
  

“Although we were taught that sex differences mostly came from how your parents raised you as a boy or girl — we now know that’s not completely true,” she writes. “There is no unisex brain. Girls arrive already wired as girls, and boys arrive already wired as boys.”

Although this line of thinking tends to be politcaly incorrect, to me it seems fairly obvious. As my organic chemistry teacher used to repeat over and over again: “Structure determines function”. The brain is just another structure of the body, and it is obvious that males and females tend to have body parts that both look and function differently.

Tags: louann-Brizendine