The Female Brain (19 page)

My patient Sarah was positive that her husband, Nick, was seeing another woman. Over several days she silently chewed on the idea. First, she felt unsure of what she suspected. Then, as her mind worked over her anger at the possibility that he was cheating, her
gut sense
of betrayal became overwhelming. She stopped smiling. How could he do this to her and their baby daughter? She moped around the house. She couldn’t understand why her husband never tried to cheer her up. Couldn’t he see how miserable she was?

Nick had always been larger than life to her—so talented and smart—Sarah felt honored to be his wife. When he turned his beam of brilliance on her to tell her his deepest thoughts, she felt she was eliciting greatness from him. She lived for the moments he shined on her. But when it came to an emotional interaction, it was a different story. He was a little hard to reach. So one night, when she burst into tears over dinner, Nick was stunned. Sarah couldn’t figure out why he was so surprised. She’d been showing a cold face to him for days. She went back over all of those moments when he shined on her with such intensity and how wonderful this always made her feel—that he really loved her and cared about her. Was she wrong about that—or didn’t she please him anymore? How could he be so insensitive to her emotional state?

Imagine for a moment that we had an MRI scanner. This is what it might look like inside Sarah’s brain and body as she processed her conversation with Nick: As she asks him if he is seeing someone else, her visual system begins scanning Nick’s face intently for signs of his emotional response to her question. Does he tighten his face or relax it? Does he clench around the mouth, or keep it neutral? Whatever the expression on his face, her eyes and facial muscles will automatically mimic it. The rate and depth of her breathing start to match his. Her posture and muscle tension conform to his. Her body and brain receive his emotional signals. This information is sent through her brain circuits to search her emotional memory banks for a match. This process is called “mirroring,” and not all people can do it equally well. Although most of the studies on this topic have been done on primates, scientists speculate that there may be more mirror neurons in the human female brain than in the human male brain.

Sarah’s brain will begin stimulating its own circuits as if her husband’s body sensations and emotions were hers. In this way, she can identify and anticipate what he is feeling—often before he is conscious of it himself. Matching breathing, matching posture, she is becoming a human emotion detector. She is feeling his tension in her gut, his jaw clenching in the strain of her neck. Her brain registers the emotional match: anxiety, fear, and controlled panic. As he starts to speak, her brain carefully searches to see if what he says is congruent with his tone of voice. If the tone and meaning do not match, her brain will activate wildly. Her cortex, the place for analytical thinking, would try to make sense of this mismatch. She detects a subtle incongruence in his tone of voice—it is a little too over-the-top for his protestations of innocence and devotion. His eyes are darting a bit too much for her to believe what he is saying. The meaning of his words, the tone of his voice, and the expression in his eyes do not match. She knows: he is lying. She is now using her brain’s entire emotion network as well as her cognitive and emotional suppression circuits to keep from crying. But the dam breaks. Tears roll down her cheeks. Nick’s face looks puzzled. He has not been following Sarah’s emotional nuances—otherwise he would have known she was losing it.

Sarah was right. When Nick came to see me as part of couples counseling, he revealed that he had been spending lots of time with a female co-worker. The relationship hadn’t been consummated, but he had crossed the line in his flirtations and was becoming emotionally involved. Sarah knew it, literally, in every cell in her body, but since he hadn’t technically cheated, Nick figured he was in the clear. When he realized that Sarah had correctly identified what he was feeling and thinking, he once again thought he was married to a psychic, but she was just doing what the female brain is expert at: reading faces, interpreting tone of voice, and assessing emotional nuance.

Maneuvering like an F-15, Sarah’s female brain is a high-performance emotion machine—geared to tracking, moment by moment, the nonverbal signals of the innermost feelings of others. By contrast, Nick, like most males, according to scientists, is not as adept at reading facial expressions and emotional nuance—especially signs of despair and distress. It’s only when men actually see tears that they realize, viscerally, that something’s wrong. Perhaps that’s why women evolved to cry four times more easily than men—displaying an unmistakable sign of sadness and suffering that men can’t ignore. Couples like Nick and Sarah come to see me all the time for counseling. She complains about his lack of emotional sensitivity—because hers is so finely tuned—and he complains about the fact that she doesn’t seem to realize he loves her. These are the different realities of the male and female brains at work.

T
HE
B
IOLOGY OF
G
UT
F
EELINGS

Women know things about the people around them—they feel a teenage child’s distress, a husband’s flickering thoughts about his career, a friend’s happiness in achieving a goal, or a spouse’s infidelity at a gut level.

Gut feelings are not just free-floating emotional states but actual physical sensations that convey meaning to certain areas in the brain. Some of this increased gut feeling may have to do with the number of cells available in a woman’s brain to track body sensations. After puberty, they increase. The estrogen increase means that girls feel gut sensations and physical pain more than boys do. Some scientists speculate that this greater body sensation in women punches up the brain’s ability to track and feel painful emotions, too, as they register in the body. The areas of the brain that track gut feelings are larger and more sensitive in the female brain, according to brain scan studies. Therefore, the relationship between a woman’s gut feelings and her intuitive hunches is grounded in biology.

When a woman begins receiving emotional data through butterflies in her stomach or a clench in the gut—as Sarah did when she finally asked Nick if he was seeing someone else—her body sends a message back to the insula and anterior cingulate cortex. The insula is an area in an old part of the brain where gut feelings are first processed. The anterior cingulate cortex, which is larger and more easily activated in females, is a critical area for anticipating, judging, controlling, and integrating negative emotions. A woman’s pulse rate jumps, a knot forms in her stomach—and the brain interprets it as an intense emotion.

Being able to guess what another person is thinking or feeling is, essentially, mind reading. And overall, the female brain is gifted at quickly assessing the thoughts, beliefs, and intentions of others, based on the smallest hints. One morning at breakfast, my patient Jane looked up to see that her husband, Evan, was smiling. He held the newspaper, but his gaze was lifted and his eyes darted back and forth, though he wasn’t looking at her. She had seen this behavior many times before in her lawyer husband and asked, “What are you thinking about? Who are you beating in court right now?” Evan responded, “I’m not thinking about anything.” But in fact he was unconsciously rehearsing an exchange with counsel he might be having later that day—he had a great argument and was looking forward to mopping up the courtroom with his opponent. Jane knew it before he did.

Jane’s observations were so minute that to Evan she appeared to be reading his mind. This often unnerved him. Jane had watched Evan’s eyes and facial expression and correctly inferred what was going on in his brain. And later, when he seemed to display hesitancy—a slight pause before speaking, tightness in his mouth, a low and flat tone of voice—when talking about going to the office, she sensed that a big career shift was coming. She mentioned this, but Evan said he hadn’t been thinking about anything like that. A few days later, he announced he wanted to leave his firm and become a judge. Jane’s observations were being made subconsciously, so these thoughts didn’t register as anything but gut feelings.

Men don’t seem to have the same innate ability to read faces and tone of voice for emotional nuance. This difference was in abundant display during the first few weeks after Jane and Evan met. She told me he was going way too fast for her, but he was unaware of her discomfort. A female friend of Evan’s took one look at Jane, spotted her uneasiness, and warned Evan to back off. He didn’t listen, and the results were nearly disastrous.

In that moment, Evan’s female friend established emotional congruence with Jane, something that women seem to do naturally and that has been found to be crucial for successful psychotherapy. A study at California State University, Sacramento, of psychotherapists’ success with their clients showed that therapists who got the best results had the most emotional congruence with their patients at meaningful junctures in the therapy. These mirroring behaviors showed up simultaneously as the therapists comfortably settled into the climate of the clients’ worlds by establishing good rapport. All of the therapists who showed these responses happened to be women. Girls are years ahead of boys in their ability to judge how they might avoid hurting someone else’s feelings or how a character in a story might be feeling. This ability might be the result of the mirror neurons firing away, allowing girls not only to observe but also to imitate or mirror the hand gestures, body postures, breathing rates, gazes, and facial expressions of other people as a way of intuiting what they are feeling.

The cat is out of the bag now. This is the secret of intuition, the bottom line of a woman’s ability to mind-read. Nothing mystical at all. In fact, brain-imaging studies show that the mere act of observing or imagining another person in a particular emotional state can automatically activate similar brain patterns in the observer—and females are especially good at this kind of emotional mirroring. Through this kind of approximation, Jane figured out how Evan felt because she could feel through her body sensations.

Sometimes, other people’s feelings can overwhelm a woman. My patient Roxy, for example, gasped every time she saw a loved one hurt him-or herself—even when they did something as minor as stub a toe—as if she were feeling their pain. Her mirror neurons were overreacting, but she was demonstrating an extreme form of what the female brain does naturally from childhood and even more in adulthood—experience the pain of another person. At the Institute of Neurology at University College, London, researchers placed women in an MRI machine while they delivered brief electric shocks, some weak and some strong, to their hands. Next, the hands of the women’s romantic partners were hooked up for the same treatment. The women were signaled as to whether the electric shock to their beloveds’ hands were weak or strong. The female subjects couldn’t see their lovers’ faces or bodies, but even so, the same pain areas of their brains that had activated when they themselves were shocked lit up when they learned their partners were being strongly shocked. The women were feeling their partners’ pain. Like walking in another’s brain, not just his shoes. Researchers have been unable to elicit similar brain responses from men.

Many evolutionary psychologists have speculated that this ability to feel another’s pain and quickly read emotional nuance gave Stone Age women a heads-up to sense potential dangerous or aggressive behavior and thus avoid the consequences to themselves and protect their children. This talent also primes women for anticipating the physical needs of nonverbal infants.

Being this emotionally sensitive has its pros and cons. Jane, a normally brash and courageous person, told me that she could not get to sleep for hours after seeing an intense action flick. In a study on the aftereffects of frightening films, women were more likely to lose sleep than men. Studies show that, from childhood, females startle more easily and react more fearfully as measured through electrical conductivity in the skin. Evan had to readjust his movie-watching habits if he wanted to include Jane. So when he suggested that they watch
The Godfather
, he made sure it was in the middle of the day.

G
ETTING
T
HROUGH TO THE
M
ALE
B
RAIN

In the male brain, most emotions trigger less gut sensation and more rational thought. The typical male brain reaction to an emotion is to avoid it at all costs. To get a male brain’s emotional attention, a woman needs to do the equivalent of yelling, “Periscope up! Emotion coming. All hands on deck!”

It took a lot for Jane to get the message to Evan that he was moving too fast when they met. Jane explained to me that she had been burned in relationships before and was seriously gun-shy when she started dating Evan. He paid no attention to the signals she was sending that she was a bona fide commitment phobe. On the third date, he told her he thought she was the one. By the second week, he wanted them to move in together and plan for the future. When Jane came in for her session that week, she looked as scared as a deer caught in headlights. Then, over pizza during the third week, Evan let her know he wanted to get married and start a family, and he was sure she was the one he wanted to do it with. Jane promptly turned green and ran to the bathroom. It wasn’t until she showed obvious signs of distress that Evan realized he was moving too fast. He hadn’t heeded the earlier warning from his female friend and now he was in deep trouble.

Bursting into tears often grabs the male brain’s attention, but the tears nearly always come as a complete surprise—and extreme discomfort—to a man. A woman, because of her expert ability to read faces, will recognize the pursed lips, the squeezing around the eyes, and the quivering corners of the mouth as preludes to crying. A man will not have seen this buildup, so his response is usually “Why are you crying? Please don’t make such a big deal out of nothing. Being upset is a waste of time.” Researchers conclude that this typical scenario means the male brain must go through a longer process to interpret emotional meaning. Most men just don’t want to take the time to figure out the emotion, and they become impatient because it takes longer for them. Simon Baron-Cohen at the University of Cambridge believes this is what happens in men with the extreme male brain that is characteristic of Asperger’s disorder. These men become unable to look at a face, let alone read it. The amount of emotional input from another person’s face registers on their brains as unbearable pain.