Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School (25 page)

You have probably heard the term left brain vs. right brain. You may have heard that this underscores creative vs. analytical people. That’s a folk tale, the equivalent of saying the left side of a luxury liner is responsible for keeping the ship afloat, and the right is responsible for making it move through the water. Both sides are involved in both processes. That doesn’t mean the hemispheres are equal, however. The right side of the brain tends to remember the gist of an experience, and the left brain tends to remember the details.

Researcher Larry Cahill eavesdropped on men’s and women’s brains under acute stress (he showed them slasher films), and what he found is this: Men handled the experience by firing up the amygdala in their brain’s right hemisphere. Their left was comparatively silent. Women handled the experience with the opposite hemisphere. They lit up their left amygdala, their right comparatively silent. If males are firing up the right hemisphere (the “gist dictator”), does that mean males remember more gist than detail of a given emotional experience related to stress? Do females remember more detail than gist of an emotional experience related to stress? Cahill decided to find out.

That magic elixir of forgetting, a drug called propranolol, normally is used to regulate blood pressure. As a beta-blocker, it also inhibits the biochemistry that usually would activate the amygdala during emotional experiences. The drug is being investigated as a potential treatment for combat-related disorders. But Cahill gave it to his subjects before they watched a traumatic film. One week later, he tested their memories of it. Sure enough, the men lost the ability to recall the gist of the story, compared with men who didn’t take the drug. Women lost the ability to recall the details. One must be careful not to overinterpret these data. The results clearly define only emotional responses to stressful situations, not objective details and summaries. This is not a battle between the accountants and the visionaries.

Cahill’s results come on the heels of similar findings around the world. Other labs have extended his work, finding that women recall more emotional autobiographical events, more rapidly and with greater intensity, than men do. Women consistently report more vivid memories for emotionally important events such as a recent argument, a first date, or a vacation. Other studies show that, under stress, women tend to focus on nurturing their offspring, while men tend to withdraw. This tendency in females has sometimes been called “tend and befriend.” Its origins are unknown, and the reason comes straight from the mouth of Stephen Jay Gould: “It is logically, mathematically, and scientifically impossible to pull them apart.”

This quote reminds me of my two sons in a fight, but Gould is actually talking about the age-old nature vs. nurture argument.

verbal communication

Behaviorist Deborah Tannen has done some fascinating work in this area, studying gender differences in verbal capacity. The Cliff Notes version of Tannen’s and others’ findings over the past 30 years: “Women are better at it.” Though the specifics are often controversial, much of the empirical support comes from unusual quarters, including brain pathologies. We have known for years that language and reading disorders occur approximately twice as often in little boys as in little girls. Women also recover from stroke-induced verbal impairment better than men. Many researchers suspect that risk disparities like these hint at underlying differences in normal cognition. They often point to neuroanatomical data to explain the difference: Women tend to use both hemispheres when speaking and processing verbal information. Men primarily use one. Women tend to have thick cables connecting their two hemispheres. Men’s are thinner. It’s as though females have a backup system that is absent in males.

These clinical data have been used to support findings first noticed by educators. Girls seem verbally more sophisticated than little boys as they go through the school system. They are better at verbal memory tasks, verbal fluency tasks, and speed of articulation. When these little girls grow up, they are still champions at processing verbal information. Real as these data seem, however, almost none of them can be divorced from a social context. That’s why Gould’s comment is so helpful.

Tannen spent a long time observing and videotaping how little girls and little boys interact with each other. Her original question was to find out how boys and girls of different ages talked to their best friends, and if any detectable patterns emerged. If she found some, she wanted to know how stable they were. Would the patterns detected in childhood also show up in college students? The patterns she found were predictable and stable, independent of age and geography. The conversational styles we’ve developed as adults come directly from the same-sex interactions we solidified as children. Tannen’s findings center on three areas.

cementing relationships

When girl best friends communicate with each other, they lean in, maintain eye contact, and do a lot of talking. They use their sophisticated verbal talents to cement their relationships. Boys never do this. They rarely face each other directly, preferring either parallel or oblique angles. They make little eye contact, their gaze always casting about the room. They do not use verbal information to cement their relationships. Instead, commotion seems to be the central currency of a little boy’s social economy. Doing things physically together is the glue that holds their relationships intact.

My sons, Josh and Noah, have been playing a one-upmanship game since they were toddlers. A typical version might involve ball throwing. Josh would say, “I can throw this up to the ceiling,” and would promptly do so. Then they would laugh. Noah would respond by grabbing the ball, saying, “Oh yeah? I can throw this up to the sky,” and throwing the ball higher. This ratcheting, with laughter, would continue until they reached the “galaxy” or the big prize, “God.”

Tannen saw this consistent style everywhere she looked—except when observing little girls. The female version goes something like this. One sister says, “I can take this ball and throw it to the ceiling,” and she promptly does. She and her sibling both laugh. The other sister grabs the ball, throws it up to the ceiling, and says, “I can, too!” Then they talk about how cool it is that they can both throw the ball at the same height. This style persists into adulthood for both sexes. Tannen’s data, unfortunately, have been misinterpreted as “Boys always compete, and girls always cooperate.” As this example shows, however, boys are being extremely cooperative. They are simply doing it through competition, deploying their favorite strategy of physical activity.

negotiating status

By elementary school, boys finally start using their verbal skills for something: to negotiate their status in a large group. Tannen found that high-status males give orders to the rest of the group, verbally or even physically pushing the low-status boys around. The “leaders” maintain their fiefdoms not only by issuing orders but by making sure the orders are carried out. Other strong members try to challenge them, so the guys at the top learn quickly to deflect challenges. This is often done with words as well. The upshot is that the hierarchy is very evident with boys. And hard. The life of a low-status male is often miserable. Independent behavior, which is a characteristic of control at the top, tends to be highly prized.

Tannen found very different behaviors when observing little girls. There were both high-status and low-status females, as with the boys. But they used strikingly different strategies to generate and maintain their hierarchies. The girls spend a lot of time talking. This communication is so important that the type of talk determines the status of the relationship. To whom you tell your secrets determines “best friend” status. The more secrets revealed, the more likely the girls identify each other as close. Girls tend to de-emphasize the status between them in these situations. Using their sophisticated verbal ability, the girls tend not to give top-down imperial orders. If one of the girls tries issuing commands, the style is usually rejected: The girl is tagged as “bossy” and isolated socially. Not that decisions aren’t made. Various members of the group give suggestions, then discuss alternatives. Eventually, a consensus emerges.

The difference between the genders could be described as the addition of a single powerful word. Boys might say, “Do this.” Girls would say, “
Let’s
do this.”

into adulthood

Tannen found that over time, these ways of using language became increasingly reinforced, which incited different social sensitivities in the two groups. Any boy who gave orders was a leader. Any girl who gave orders was bossy. By college age, most of these styles were deeply entrenched. And that’s when the problems became most noticeable, showing up at work and in marriage.

A 20-something newlywed was on a drive with her girlfriend, Emily. She became thirsty. “Emily, are you thirsty?” she asked. With lifelong experience at verbal negotiation, Emily knew what her friend wanted. “I don’t know. Are
you
thirsty?” she responded. There then ensued a small discussion about whether they were both thirsty enough to stop the car and get water.

A few days later, the woman was driving with her husband. “Are you thirsty?” she asked. “No, I’m not,” he replied. They actually got into an argument that day. She was annoyed because she had wanted to stop; he was annoyed because she wasn’t direct. This type of conflict would become increasingly familiar as their marriage aged.

Such scenarios can play out in the work force just as easily. Women who exert “male” leadership styles are in danger of being perceived as bossy. Men who do the same thing are often praised as decisive. Tannen’s great contribution was to show that these stereotypes form very early in our social development, perhaps assisted by asymmetric verbal development. They transcend geography, age, and even time. Tannen, who was an English literature major, sees these tendencies in manuscripts that go back centuries.

nature or nurture?

Tannen’s findings are statistical patterns, not an all-or-none phenomenon. She has found that many factors affect our language patterns. Regional background, individual personality, profession, social class, age, ethnicity, and birth order all affect how we use language to negotiate our social ecologies. Boys and girls are treated differently socially the moment they are born, and they are often reared in societies filled with centuries of entrenched prejudice. It would be a miracle if we somehow transcended our experience and behaved in an egalitarian fashion.

Given the influence of culture on behavior, it is overly simplistic to invoke a purely biological explanation for Tannen’s observations. And, given the great influence of brain biology on behavior, it is also simplistic to invoke a purely social explanation. The real answer to the nature-or-nurture question is “We don’t know.” That can be frustrating to hear. Everybody wants to build bridges between these islands. Cahill, Tannen, and countless others are doing their best to provide us with the boards and nails. That’s not the same thing as saying the connections exist, however. Believing that there are strong associations between genes and cells and behaviors when there are none is not only wrong but dangerous. Just ask Larry Summers.

ideas

How can we use these data in the real world?

Get the facts straight on emotions

Dealing with the emotional lives of men and women is a big part of the job for teachers and business professionals. They need to know:

1) Emotions are useful. They make the brain pay attention.
2) Men and women process certain emotions differently.
3) The differences are a product of complex interactions between nature and nurture.

Try different gender arrangements in the classroom

My son’s third-grade teacher began seeing a stereotype that worsened as the year progressed. The girls were excelling in the language arts, and the boys were pulling ahead in math and science. This was only the
third grade!
The language-arts differences made some sense to her. But she knew there was no statistical support for the contention that men have a better aptitude for math and science than women. Why, for heaven’s sake, was she presiding over a stereotype?

The teacher guessed that part of the answer lay in the students’ social participation during class. When the teacher asked a question of the class, who answered first turned out to be unbelievably important. In the language arts, the girls invariably answered first. Other girls reacted with that participatory, “me too” instinct. The reaction on the part of the boys was hierarchical. The girls usually knew the answers, the boys usually did not, and the males responded by doing what low-status males tend to do: They withdrew. A performance gap quickly emerged. In math and science, boys and girls were equally likely to answer a question first. But the boys used their familiar “top each other” conversational styles when they participated, attempting to establish a hierarchy based on knowledge aptitude. This included drubbing anyone who didn’t make the top, including the girls. Bewildered, the girls began withdrawing from participating in the subjects. Once again, a performance gap emerged.

The teacher called a meeting of the girls and verified her observations. Then she asked for a consensus about what they should do. The girls decided that they wanted to learn math and science separately from the boys. Previously a strong advocate for mixed-gender classes, the teacher wondered aloud if that made any sense. Yet if the girls started losing the math-and-science battle in the third grade, the teacher reasoned they were not likely to excel in the coming years. She obliged. It took only two weeks to close the performance gap.