Brain science reveals what men are really thinking
The male brain secretes less of the powerful primary bonding chemical oxytocin and less of the calming chemical serotonin than the female brain.
So while women find emotional conversations a good way to chill out at the end of the day, the tired male brain needs to zone out all that touchy-feely chatter in order to relax — which is why he wants the remote control to zap through “mindless” sport or action movies.
His brain takes in less sensory detail than a woman’s, so he doesn’t see or even feel the dust and household mess in the same way. Anyhow, the male brain attaches less personal identity to the inside of a home and more to the workplace or the yard — which is why he doesn’t get worked up about housework.
Male hormones such as testosterone and vasopressin set the male brain up to seek competitive, hierarchical groups in its constant quest to prove self-worth and identity. That is why men, paradoxically (from a hormonally altered new mother’s point of view), become even more workaholic once they have kids, to whom they must also prove their worth.
These concepts seem obvious to this product of X and Y chromosomes. Maybe this article (which refers to a book) will help some women understand the men in their life. Maybe it won’t.
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4 Responses to No surprise to me
Therese
October 3rd, 2003 at 11:18 am
I’m not buying this book, because I don’t support such generalisations.
However, in the article, I don’t see anything about the number of scans made.
If it’s more than a thousand, I might believe it. If those men are chosen across sexualities, occupations, ages and ethnic origins (and not just hetero white med students), I might believe it. (And, of course, comparable research on women of all kinds must have been done.
R.G. Lacsamana
October 3rd, 2003 at 11:49 am
I have learned sometime ago that extraordinary conclusions require extraordinary evidence. Is this the case here?
I’m not sure, and I’m not sure either what Michael Gurion must be thinking about how we men think, at least based on the evidence he presented. I know I need more grains of salt at this point.
To draw conclusion purely on a neurochemical basis on how men think, as opposed to women, is at most tenuous. Men, as a class, cannot be stereotyped, as it would be for women. I have seen men behave like women, and women behave like men. How can Michael Gurion explain that?
As a man, as I assume it must be for a woman, I prefer the cold comfort of dwelling inside mysteries of how men and women think and behave rather than in flimsy, simplistic,and perhaps outlandish explanations of things that we can never understand.
And if Gurion, remotely, were right, what difference would it make? That would take the fun out of the games that men and women play. The last thing we need is another dose of psychobabble.
Bernie Simon
October 3rd, 2003 at 7:36 pm
Post hoc explanations of behavior are not science, merely rationalization of societal roles. We’ll never know how much of the difference between the sexes is biology and how much is acculturation because you can’t do a proper experiment to determine it.
John Schedler
October 4th, 2003 at 8:55 pm
My Mom, who had an MS (not MA) in child psychology & raised 6 kids, would have said something along the lines of “Duhhhh.”