50 Psychology Classics (12 page)

With all types, it is as well to remember never to focus on the people involved, but to attack the problem. If we are aware of each type's contributions, there will be less conflict, less chance of loss of face, and a greater opportunity for a perfect solution to emerge.

Isabel Briggs Myers' lack of formal psychology qualifications ensured that she was never fully accepted by the psychological establishment. Some have questioned whether she interpreted Jung correctly, and therefore whether the whole methodology for identifying personality types is unsound. Jung himself was wary of applying his general principles to particular individuals, and skeptics also claim that the type explanations are too vague and could apply to anyone. Judge for yourself. You may find, if you take the test or a variant of it, that the description given of you is remarkably accurate.

On her own scale, Briggs Myers came out as an INFP (Introverted–Intuitive–Feeling–Perceiving). She noted that introverts often gain the most from doing the test. As three out of every four people are extraverted, and for every intuitive there are three sensing types, we therefore live in an “extravert's world.” As a less common type, introverts may, not surprisingly, feel some pressure to be something they are not, and the MBTI allows them, perhaps for the first time, to feel it is OK to be who they are.

One of the fascinating insights in
Gifts Differing
is that recognition and development of our type may be more important to success in life than IQ. Isabel Briggs Myers' view was that personality type is as innate as left- or right-handedness; anyone who tries to be a right hander when they are really a leftie is asking for stress and misery, whereas going with our strengths massively increases our chances of fulfillment, happiness, and productivity.

Born in 1897, Briggs was schooled at home by her mother in Washington DC. Her father, Lynam Briggs, was a physicist and for over a decade was the director of the National Bureau of Standards. Isabel married Clarence Myers in 1918 and the following year graduated from Swarthmore College with a BA in political science
.

Her tests of over 5,000 medical students were conducted at the George Washington School of Medicine. She followed up the study 12 years later, finding that the students had generally followed paths (i.e. research, general practice, surgery, administration) that might be expected of their type. The nursing study involved more than 10,000 students. The MBTI was first published in 1957 by the Educational Testing Service
.

Isabel Briggs Myers died in 1980. Her work is continued today through the Myers & Briggs Foundation
.

Peter Briggs Myers
, born in 1926, was a Rhodes Scholar in physics. A scientific researcher and administrator, he was a staff director at the National Academy of Science. Involved in the development of the MBTI since his teens, he is now Chair of the Myers & Briggs Foundation and a Trustee of the Myers-Briggs Trust
.

“More than ninety-nine percent of male and female genetic coding is exactly the same. Out of the 30,000 genes in the human genome, the variation between the sexes is small. But those few differences influence every single cell in our bodies—from the nerves that register pleasure and pain to the neurons that transmit perception, thoughts, feelings and emotions.”

“Just as women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion while men have a small country road, men have Chicago's O'Hare Airport as a hub for processing thoughts about sex whereas women have the airfield nearby that lands small and private planes. That probably explains why eighty-five percent of twenty- to thirty-year-old males think about sex every fifty two seconds and women think about it once a day—or up to every three or four hours on their most fertile days. This makes for interesting interactions between the sexes.”

In a nutshell

Men and women experience the world differently thanks to each gender's vastly different exposure to sex hormones.

In a similar vein
Alfred Kinsey
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
(p 174)
Anne Moir & David Jessel
Brainsex
(p 204)
Steven Pinker
The Blank Slate
(p 228)
Gail Sheehy
Passages
(p 260)
Robert E. Thayer
The Origin of Everyday Moods
(p 284)

As a medical student, Louann Brizendine was aware of conclusive studies done around the world showing that women suffer from depression at a ratio of 2:1 compared to men. Going through college at the peak of the feminist movement, along with many others she believed this was the result of the “patriarchal oppression of women.” But it came to her notice that, up until puberty, depression rates between boys and girls are the same. Could the hormonal changes to girls in their early teenage years, she wondered, make them suddenly more prone to getting depressed?

Later, as a psychiatrist, Brizendine worked with women suffering from the extremes of premenstrual syndrome, and was struck by the extent to which the female brain is shaped by dramatic changes in hormonal chemistry, driving a woman's behavior and creating her reality. In 1994, Brizendine established the Women's Mood and Hormone Clinic in San Francisco, one of the first of its type in the world.
The Female Brain
, the culmination of her 20 years of practice as a neuropsychiatrist, pulls together her own research and the latest findings from a range of disciplines. Contrasting the relative stability of male hormonal brain states with those of the female, which involve an often complex cocktail of chemicals and change dramatically from girlhood to adolescence, early adulthood, motherhood, and menopause, the book brilliantly shows why women's brain states and chemistry merit independent research, and why generalities about human behavior usually relate to
male
behavior.

The Female Brain
includes fascinating chapters on the female brain in love, the neurobiology of sex, the “mommy brain” (how a woman's thinking changes according to altered brain chemistry in pregnancy), and the mature female brain, post-menopause. We focus here on some of Brizendine's insights regarding the infant and pubescent female brain.

Even taking into account differences in body size, Brizendine notes, the male brain is about 9 percent larger than the female. This fact was once interpreted as meaning that women were not as smart as men. In fact, women and men have the same number of brain cells, but women's are more tightly packed into their skull.

In the areas of the brain dealing with language and hearing, women have a full 11 percent more neurons than men, and the part of the brain associated with memory, the hippocampus, is also larger in women. The circuitry for
observing emotion on other people's faces is again larger compared to the male. In relation to speech, emotional intelligence, and the ability to store rich memory, therefore, women have a natural advantage.

Men, on the other hand, have more processors in the amygdala, a part of the brain regulating fear and aggression. This perhaps explains why males are more likely to anger quickly and take violent action in response to immediate physical danger. Women's brains also evolved to deal with possibly life-threatening situations, but in a different way. The female brain experiences greater stress over the same event as a man's, and this stress is a way of taking account of all possible risks to her children or family unit. This is why, Brizendine suggests, a modern woman can view some unpaid bills as catastrophic, as they seem a threat to the family's very survival.

Brain scanning and imaging technologies now allow us to see the workings of the brain in real time. They show the brain lighting up in different places depending on whether we are in love, looking at faces, solving a problem, speaking, or experiencing anxiety, and these hot spots differ between men's and women's brains. Women actually use different parts of the brain and different circuits than men to accomplish the same tasks, including solving problems, processing language, and generally experiencing the world.

One other basic brain difference is noteworthy. Studies have shown that men think about sex on average every 52 seconds, while for women it is once a day. As the part of the brain where sexual thought and behavior is generated is two and a half times larger in the male, this is not surprising.

Until they are eight weeks old, the brains of male and female foetuses look the same—“female is nature's default setting,” Brizendine observes. At about eight weeks, a male foetus's brain is flooded with testosterone, which kills off the cells relating to communication and helps to grow cells relating to sex and aggression. Biochemically, the male brain is then significantly different from a female one, and by the time the first half of the pregnancy is over, the differences between male and female brains are mostly set.

A female baby comes into the world wired to notice faces and hear vocal tones better. In the first three months of her life a baby girl's abilities at “mutual gazing” and eye contact grow by 400 percent. In the same period, these abilities do not grow at all in boys.

It is well known that girls usually begin speaking some time before boys, thanks to the better-developed language circuitry of their brains. This continues into adulthood, with women speaking on average 20,000 words a day and men averaging only around 7,000. (As Brizendine remarks, this higher ability “wasn't always appreciated,” with some cultures locking up a woman or putting a clamp on her tongue to stop the chatter.)

One other important difference in infancy is that baby girls are more sensitive to the state of their mother's nervous system. It is important that infant girls do not have mothers who are stressed out, as when the girl grows up to have children of her own her ability to be nurturing will be reduced. However, armed with this knowledge, it is possible to break the cycle of mother–infant stress.

At puberty, a girl's thinking and behavior change according to the fluctuating levels of estrogen (one of the “feel-good” hormones), progesterone (“the brain's valium”), and cortisol (the stress hormone) in her brain. Other important hormones produced are oxytocin (which makes us want to bond, love, and connect with others) and dopamine (which stimulates the brain's pleasure centers).

The effect of these chemicals is to give a teenage girl a great need for and pleasure in gossiping, shopping, exchanging secrets, and experimenting with clothing and hair styles—anything that involves connecting and communicating. Teenage girls are always on the phone because they actually
need
to communicate to reduce their stress levels. Their squeals of delight at seeing friends, and the corresponding panic at being grounded, are also part of these changes. The dopamine and oxytocin rush that girls experience is “the biggest, fattest neurological reward you can get outside of an orgasm,” Brizendine remarks.

Why exactly does the loss of a friendship feel so catastrophic to a teen girl, and why is her social group so important to her? Physiologically she is reaching the optimum age for child rearing, and in evolutionary terms she knows that a close-knit group is good protection, since if she has a small child with her she is not able to attack or run away as a man can. (The concept of “flight or flight” in response to danger is an observation of men rather than women.) Close social bonds actually alter the female brain in a highly positive way, so that any loss of those relationships triggers a hormonal change that strengthens the feelings of abandonment or loss. The intensity of female pubescent friendships therefore also has a biochemical basis.

The teenage girl's confidence and ability to deal with stress also change according to the time of the month, and Brizendine has treated many “problem” girls who experience higher than average hormonal changes. The most brash and aggressive girls often have high levels of androgens, the hormones associated with aggression. At normal levels, fluctuations in androgens can cause a girl to be more focused on power, whether within the peer group or over boys.

Incidentally, why do teenage boys often become brooding and monosyllabic? The testosterone that marinates their brains not only drives
them to “compelling masturbatory frenzies,” but also reduces their wish to talk or socialize if it does not involve girls or sport.

Overall, in the teen years the differing hormonal effects on the brain cause males and females to go off in different directions—boys gain self-esteem through independence from others, while females gain it through the closeness of their social bonds.

Brizendine began her career in psychiatric work and later moved to neurology. This perspective has made her less willing to speculate on psychological or sociological ideas that have little to do with how the brain actually works; though clearly a feminist, she warns that political correctness has no role in understanding behavior. Yes, we may be able to alter our cultural attitudes or policies to make a better world, but first we must understand the facts about how brain biology—so different between men and women—shapes behavior.

Brizendine weighs into the debate sparked by Harvard University president Lawrence Summers, who said that the differences in achievement between men and women in mathematics and the sciences was due to natural brain differences between the sexes. She notes that until puberty, boys and girls are exactly the same in mathematical or scientific achievement. However, the testosterone that floods the male brain makes boys extremely competitive but also more willing to spend many hours studying alone or working on their computers. With the teenage girl's flood of estrogen, in contrast, a female becomes a lot more interested in social bonding and her emotional life, and as a consequence is unlikely to sit for hours alone pondering mathematical puzzles or battling to top the class. Even as adults women are compelled by their brain chemistry to want to communicate and connect, and this favors them less for the sort of solitary work often required by mathematical, scientific, or engineering careers. Brizendine's theory in a nutshell: It is not lack of aptitude that makes women stay out of these fields, but brain-driven attitudes to the work involved.