The Brain in Love: 12 Lessons to Enhance Your Love Life (13 page)

9. “Why don’t men remember dates like birthdays and anniversaries?”

“Men are men. As such they are thinking about providing for their families, competing with other men, and sex. Opposed to women, who are thinking, thinking, thinking about the relationship, men are busy doing. This does not mean they love less, they just love like men. This often causes them to forget important dates, even though they try hard not to.”

Rules for Men on Women and for Women on Men

Given the latest neuroscience research, here are eight rules to help men and women better understand and navigate the brain differences between the sexes.

R
ULES FOR
M
EN ON
W
OMEN

1. Recognize women are very different from you. Ask her what she needs to be happy and listen. Remember they leave the relationship 75 percent of the time.
   

2. Women typically need listening, not solutions (she is already competent).
   

3. Never ask a woman to get to the point.
   

4. She needs time, talking, and nonsexual touch for foreplay. (Her skin is ten times more sensitive. Find out how she likes to be touched. Her reality may be different from yours.)
   

5. Just because she catches you ogling another woman does not mean she is not ogling another guy.
   

6. On a long trip do the night driving; usually your night vision is better than hers.
   

7. She thinks it is sexy if you ask for directions. You win her heart by being willing to ask for help.
   

8. She has a keener sense of smell. Find out the smells she likes. Does she like it if you take a shower before bed, or does she like it if you don’t? Find out.
   

R
ULES FOR
W
OMEN ON
M
EN

1. Recognize men are very different from you. Ask him what he needs to be happy.
   

2. He can do only one thing at a time. When you want to talk to him, wait until the game is over and ask for a specific time to talk.
   

3. Never try to get a man to admit to losing a fight.
   

4. If you want him to really listen, try to use fewer words.
   

5. He is programmed to compete and win. Make him think he wins a lot.
   

6. Just because you catch your guy ogling another woman does not mean you do not do it as well. It does not mean he finds you less attractive.
   

7. On a long trip do the day driving. Let him drive at night. His night vision is usually better. (And while you are sleeping, it won’t bother you as much when he is lost!)
   

8. Many of his senses are not as keen as yours; tell him if odors or tastes bother you.
   

Lesson #4: Understanding the differences between the male and female brain helps prevent misunderstanding and pain and fosters communication and love
.

LOOK CLOSELY

Brain Imaging Secrets to Enhance Your Love Life

“The brain is a tissue … it is a complicated, intricately woven tissue, like nothing else we know of in the universe, but it is composed of cells, as any tissue is … the connections that constitute the brain’s woven feltwork can be mapped. In short, the brain can be studied, just as the kidney can.”

—DAVID H. HUBEL (1981 Nobel Prize winner)

I
n the winter of 2005,
The New York Times Magazine
did a story on my brain-imaging work. In it the writer quoted me as saying if you date one of my daughters for more than four months, you have to get a brain scan. After the article appeared, I received several pieces of angry mail from people around the country saying that I used imaging to discriminate against people with mental illness. One woman wrote that she hoped my daughter married someone with bipolar disorder. Ouch.

It is true that if you date my children for more than four months, you get the opportunity of getting scanned. So far, everyone has taken me up on the offer. Inquisitive people want to know. I never use them to discriminate against people, rather as an opportunity to gather more information, like meeting someone’s parents or taking them on vacation.

Brain imaging teaches us many important lessons regarding sexuality and relationships. In this chapter I will share six secrets I have learned from imaging to enhance your love life.

Secret #1:
There Is More to Love Than Most People Think

Looking at the brain has taught me that there is so much more to love than most people think. Biological brain influences are extremely important to how we feel, think, and act. Over the past sixteen years I have conducted brain-SPECT studies on more than three hundred couples who have had serious marital difficulties. I affectionately refer to this group as “the couples from hell study.” I have been fascinated, saddened, and enlightened by these images. I look at love and relationships in a whole new way (as compatible and incompatible brain patterns). I have come to realize that many relationships work or struggle because of healthy brain activity or brain misfires, and they have less to do with character, free will, or desire than most people think. Many marriages or relationships are sabotaged by factors beyond conscious or even unconscious control. Sometimes targeted brain help can make all the difference between love and hate, staying together or divorce, effective problem solving or prolonged litigation.

Many people, especially some classically trained marital therapists, will see this idea as radical, premature, and even heretical. But how can we keep the brain out of the equation of love, sex, and relationships? Frankly, I know of no marital therapy system or school of thought that seriously looks at the brain function of couples who struggle. But I wonder how you can develop paradigms and “schools of thought” about how couples function (or don’t function) without taking into account the organ that drives their behavior, namely the brain.

Brain-SPECT imaging is a powerful tool to evaluate brain function. It gives a sophisticated look into the function of living tissue. Simply put, the images give three pieces of information, showing
areas of the brain that work well, areas of the brain that work too hard, and areas of the brain that do not work hard enough. This information then allows scientists to evaluate different brain systems.

One of the fundamental principles underlying our work at the Amen Clinics is that defined regions and circuits in the brain tend to perform certain tasks, and problems in these areas tend to give specific types of cognitive, behavioral, or emotional difficulties (see Lesson Two for a detailed look at brain systems). Balanced activity across the brain increases the chances for healthy behavior, while overactive or underactive areas of the brain can be involved in trouble.

Secret #2: Whenever There Is Sexual or Relationship Trouble, Think About the Brain

The idea of scanning unhappy couples was born out of frustration and my internal critical voice. Bob and Betsy brought their two children to see me for school problems. As I worked with the kids, I came to believe that one of their major problems was the conflict between the parents. The chronic tension at home was having a negative impact on the children, causing anxiety, stress, and physical symptoms such as headaches, tummy aches, and problems concentrating. I suggested to the parents that they see me for marital counseling. They told me that they had seen four other therapists and it almost always made things worse for them. I was much younger then, more naive, and had the belief that I could help them. Maybe, I thought, they just hadn’t seen anyone really good (through the years I have learned that thoughts like this one are usually a sign of immaturity or narcissism on my part and often a predictor of trouble).

In my office in our Northern California clinic, where I saw them, I have two navy blue leather couches. On Bob and Betsy’s first visit, and every weekly appointment thereafter for the next
nine months, they sat on opposite ends of each couch. That is a bad sign in marital therapy. After seeing this couple for three months, I started to hate them. Nothing I did with them seemed to make any difference. In my psychiatric training, my main supervisor said my biggest flaw was that I wanted patients to get better fast. I needed to be more patient. I dislike feeling ineffective. I thought to myself that Betsy had a PhD in grudge holding. She would go on and on, talk about the same things over and over, and be unable to let go of hurts from the past. Things from fifteen years ago still bothered her. I once thought that she would not only beat things to death, but also beat them into the afterlife as well. Betsy was married to a man I call “the sniper.” He earned that nickname because he rarely seemed to be paying attention. Yet, whenever Betsy would settle down in her complaints, Bob would say things that were so evil, so nasty, just to get her going again. It seemed like he was purposefully revving her up. After six months of seeing this couple, I started to get physical stress symptoms on the day of their appointment. My stomach would hurt and my shoulders would get knotted. With no change in their marriage by the ninth month of therapy, all of us were feeling frustrated.

One day I was taking a shower getting ready to come to work and realized that they were on my schedule that morning. My stomach started to hurt. “Damn,” I thought, “these people are in my shower with me. Today I am going to tell them to get divorced.” I had actually been having that thought for several months. Research shows that it is better for children to be from divorced homes than from homes with chronic conflict. My problem with the thought about divorce, however, was that I grew up very Catholic. Not a little Catholic, but
a lot
! I attended Catholic school and was an altar boy for many years. We prayed the rosary every week on the way home from Grandpa’s house. Even though I was no longer a practicing Catholic, I still lived with the Catholic voice in my head, commenting on my thoughts and actions. After I had the thought “Today I am going to tell them to get divorced,” the internal Catholic voice yelled, “What! Because you are not a good
enough therapist, you are going to tell these people to get divorced and damn their eternal souls to hell!” I just started to stare at the water faucet wondering, “How much therapy does this take to get over?” I got out of the shower, dried off, and reached for the telephone. I called my friend who owned the imaging center and said, “Hey, Jack, will you give me two scans for the price of one?”

He asked why.

I said, “I have this couple I have been seeing and have no idea how to help them. I am hoping to get some clues from their scans.”

“Couple? You want to scan a couple,” he said at first with disbelief and then curiosity. “How interesting! You know I have been married twice and I cannot figure it out. Maybe we could even start an Internet dating service and call it brainmatch.com.”

When I presented the idea of the brain imaging, the couple was very interested. They were obviously aware that things were not getting better. Plus they would not have gotten divorced if I had suggested it. They wanted to be married. After all, I was the fifth marital therapist they saw.

Their scans literally changed their lives and mine as well. The woman’s scan showed marked increased activity in a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate gyrus, which is the brain’s gear shifter, allowing the brain to go from idea to idea and task to task. When it is overactive, people tend to get stuck on negative thoughts and behaviors, such as worrying or holding grudges. Just by random chance, if you believe in random chance, the night before her scan I had read an article in the
American Journal of Psychiatry
that reported increased activity in the anterior cingulate gyrus is calmed by Prozac. I put Betsy on Prozac. Bob’s scan showed low activity in his prefrontal cortex when he performed a concentration task, a finding very consistent with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). At the time, in 1991, I was considered one of the experts in ADHD. I was very irritated that I had missed it in Bob. I put Bob on Ritalin. I told the couple to take a month off therapy to allow time for the medications to work (and for my stomach and the Catholic voices to settle down). When they came back a month
later, for the first time they sat on the same couch. Betsy had her hand on Bob’s leg, which is a good sign in marital therapy. Now, fifteen years later, they are still married, have another child, and get along better than ever. I call this better marriage through biochemistry.