The Female Brain

Science News,  August 12, 2006  

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THE FEMALE BRAIN

LOUANN BRIZENDINE

While men and women share more than 99 percent of their genetic coding, the remaining 1 percent makes the two sexes' perceptions of the world profoundly different. Scientists are becoming more aware of how hormones and other biological chemicals affect both the structure and function of a woman's brain over her life span. Brizendine, a neuropsychiarist at the University of California, San Francisco, writes that while male brains remain relatively stable day-to-day, female brains are subjected to fluctuating concentrations of estrogen, progesterone, and other hormones that subject women to a range of emotional experiences. The author explains how these changes are adaptive, helping women protect themselves against threatening situations, develop relationships, find mates, and rear children. She describes why women are, on average, better communicators than men, using more than twice the number of words that men do daily; how women remember minute details of emotion-laden events that men forget ever happened; and why women are more than twice as likely to suffer from depression as men are. Broadway, 2006, 279 p., hardcover, $24.95.

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