The Male Brain (5 page)

A study on an Irish kindergarten playground may shed even more light on the girls' and boys' interactions with each other. The researchers noted that the boys monopolized the tricycles and bicycles and played ramming games, while girls--on the few occasions they got a turn to ride--were very careful not to hit other kids' bikes or anything else. The boys even became territorial and possessive of their bikes, showing a willingness to fight for them that
the girls did not show
.

Jessica said she couldn't understand it when David's teacher wrote on his report card that he was always fighting to be the first in line for recess and lunch. Since Grace never seemed to mind waiting her turn in line, the importance David placed on being first took Jessica by surprise.

The pecking order clearly matters more to boys. Studies show that by age two, a boy's brain is driving him to
establish physical and social dominance
. And by the age of six, boys tell researchers that
real fighting
is the "
most important thing to be
learned that boys are
good at
." Scientists have also remarkably fast at establishing

In a study conducted with boys and girls at a nursery school, the boys demonstrated a clear hierarchy by the end of their first play session. Among the girls, some dominance hierarchy was established too, but it was more fluid. In the boy groups, however, by the end of just the second play session, the boys unanimously agreed about the ranking position of each boy, and these rankings remained stable for the remainder
of the six-month study
.

How do boys know so quickly who's tough and who's not? While bigger boys typically rank higher in status, researchers found that the leaders weren't always the biggest. In the study, the alpha boys were the ones who refused to back down during a conflict. These boys aggressively demonstrated their strength by picking on, intimidating, or roughing up boys who challenged them. In the hormone tests taken on all the boys in the group, it turned out that alpha boys had higher testosterone
levels than did the other boys
. And to the researchers' surprise, the rank a boy had attained in the group by the age of six predicted where he'd be in
the hierarchy at age fifteen
.

Of course, only one boy can be the top dog, so the rest must find other ways to succeed and avoid being picked on in the boy pack. One strategy is to form an alliance with the alpha boy by giving him things he wants and doing him favors. When my son was in elementary school, he casually asked me to buy him the biggest bags of Chex Mix to send to school with him for snack time. I thought he wanted to share them with his friends, so I didn't question it. It wasn't until I inadvertently bought him the smaller size that I discovered why he'd wanted the big bag. It turned out that he'd been using Chex Mix at recess "to hire everyone he could hire," as he put it or, as I saw it, to buy off the top dogs and appease the bullies. When he saw the smaller bag on the counter by his backpack, he shouted, "Now I'm done for! And all because of you!"

Boys can usually work things out within the checks and balances of the boy pack, but this cruel
Lord of the Flies
system still strikes horror in most mothers' hearts--including mine. Regardless of how mothers feel about it, though, boys instinctively know they must learn how to succeed within the male hierarchy. And that's not the only type
of learning boys do differently
.

Tightly clutching the remotes in their fists, David and Craig punched, jabbed, and dodged, occasionally throwing an insult along with a punch. As with many boys their age,
Wii had become their favorite toy
. To use this active video-game system, the boys mimicked the action they wanted to see displayed on the screen. When David threw a punch, his video character mirrored him. When Craig dodged the punch, his character did the same.

Research from Stanford University showed that playing Wii activates parts of the male
brain linked to dopamine production
. Boys get rewarded by this feel-good brain chemical, just as they do when they're roughhousing. The more opponents they conquer, the more stimulated their male brain becomes, and the more dopamine their brains release. It's a thrill a minute.

Even in a conventional video game, when a boy is not actually moving, watching every move of the athlete or video character still gives him a thrill. Moreover, the signal gets sent from his brain through the neurons and into the muscles in his body
even if he isn't moving
. If we were to watch David's body and brain with an fMRI camera when he plays a game like Super Mario Brothers, every time he makes Mario jump, we'd see David's brain activate the neurons that
control his own jumping muscles
. He would embody the movement he sees even though he's not really jumping. Boys react more physically to their environment than
girls do in this way
. Their muscles are practically twitching in response to everything they see going on around them. And that difference may mean that boys use their muscles and nervous systems more than girls to think
and express themselves as well
.

For instance, when a boy first learns to read the word
run
, his brain fires messages to his leg muscles and makes them twitch: He's rehearsing the action of running in order to learn the word. And to read and understand the meaning of the word
slug
, David's sensation area in the brain for slimy and squishy is activated. Then the movement area of his brain for slow and slithering is engaged, and even the emotional area of his brain for disgust gets into the action. These brain areas are needed for him to completely embody, learn, and remember the meaning of
slug
. Scientists refer to this process as embodied cognition, because the muscles and body parts he uses to learn a word will stay connected to
the meaning of that word
. This is true for all our brains but seems particularly significant for boys. It may annoy their teachers, but boys who squirm can learn better than boys who sit still.

Boys like David are twisting and turning all the time, and scientists believe this may also give them
their advantage at spatial manipulation
. By age five, according to researchers in Germany, boys are using different brain areas than girls to visually rotate an
object in their mind's eyes
. The boys mentally rotated the pictures of the objects by using both sides of their brain's spatial-movement area in the parietal lobe. Girls used only one side to do the task. While that in itself is revealing, what I found most intriguing is that this spatial-movement area in the male brain is locked in the "on" position. That means it's always working in the background on autopilot. But in the female brain, this parietal area is "off," waiting in standby mode, and not turned on until it's needed.

From age five on, mental rotation of objects is one of the biggest cognitive
differences between boys and girls
. In the boy brain, solving problems that require spatial rotation begins in the visual cortex and goes straight to the already "on" parietal spatial-movement area in both hemispheres. It then fires signals to the muscles that cause them to mimic the shape and position of the object. The researchers concluded that most boys, and also some girls, get a holistic, visceral sense of how an object occupies space--they embody its reality, making it easier for
them to grasp its three-dimensionality
.

Curious to find out how this applies practically in the classroom setting, researchers studied students in a grade-school math class to see how girls and boys solved conceptual math problems and how long it took them. The boys solved the problems faster than the girls. But what was most surprising to the researchers was that most of the boys, when asked to explain how they got the answer, gave an
explanation without using any words
.

Instead, they squirmed, twisted, turned, and gestured with their hands and arms to explain how they got the answer. The boys' body movements
were
their explanations. Words, in this instance, were a hindrance.

What also got my attention about this study was what the researchers did next with the girls. In the following six weeks of the experiment, they taught the girls to explain their answers with the same muscle movements the boys had made without using words. At the end of the six weeks, once the girls stopped talking and started twisting and turning, they solved the problems as quickly as the boys. The male and female brains have access to the same circuits but,
without intervention, use them differently
.

Around age eleven, the juvenile-pause stage of a boy's life begins winding down. One of the most pungent signs that he is entering the next stage is the new scent he starts to exude. It's not BO yet; it's more like sweaty socks. When my son was this age, we mothers referred to it as "that boy smell": not quite the musk of manhood but no longer the sweet smell of childhood. What we smelled was the male sweat glands under the influence of testosterone giving off small
amounts of the pheromone called androstenedione
. This increase in testosterone signaled the dawn of puberty.

A rise in testosterone sparks a new interest in girls--or at least in their female body parts. That curiosity is what got David into trouble at school in fifth grade. David's fourteen-year-old cousin texted him a photo of a bare-breasted woman, and the boys in his class were huddling around to sneak a peek. Earlier that day, they'd all been disappointed in their sex-ed class's lack of detailed information. This was more like it. Even though sex-hormone levels are quite low during most of the juvenile pause, once boys approach puberty, they begin to relentlessly pursue every scrap of sexual information they can get their hands on.

When David's teacher called, Jessica was upset, but when she told Paul what happened, he felt a little surge of "that's my boy" pride and couldn't help cracking a smile. While Jessica thought this was a big deal, Paul knew that looking at naked photos was tame compared with what David would soon be doing. When his male hormones turned back on and the juvenile pause ended, Paul and Jessica would have more to worry about than David's sexual curiosity. Soon, his action, exploration, and risk-taking brain circuits would be running at high speed, urging him to prove himself again and again. The anger and aggression circuits that were formed before he was born and strengthened during boyhood were about to be hormonally fuel-injected.

When that happens, every trait and tendency set up in his male brain during childhood--action, strength, desire for dominance, exploring, and taking risks--will be magnified. His brain circuitry and rising hormone levels will cause him to question and disobey his parents, seek sexual partners, strike out on his own, fight for his place in the male hierarchy, find a mate, and come into his own by entering manhood. With testosterone driving his reality, he will soon feel strong, brave, and invincible. Feeling cocksure, he will be blind to consequences and deaf to his parents' warnings.

TURN OFF your computer
now
, Jake! No gaming until that homework is done!" shrieked Jake's mother as she pounded on his bedroom door. Opening the door a crack, Jake gave her a blank stare and grumbled something under his breath before shutting the door in her face. Kate knew he'd probably turn the computer back on without the volume. But what she didn't know was that free porn sites were beginning to be more enticing to him than the war games he played online with his buddies.

Kate was a patient of mine, and up until this past year, she'd described her relationship with Jake as close and rewarding. But when her formerly happy and cooperative son turned fourteen, he became sullen and irritable. Struggle, struggle, struggle is all they seemed to do these days. When Kate and her husband, Dan, found out that Jake hadn't turned in a single English assignment in weeks, they worried that he might be drinking or experimenting with drugs. That's when they scheduled a family appointment with me. During our session, Jake stared out the window and Dan listened politely as Kate wrenchingly complained that their son had suddenly become unreachable and secretive. Not only had Jake gotten into a fight with another freshman, named Dylan, but he also had a new group of friends, including a girl named Zoe whom Kate described as "fast." Dan spoke up in disagreement, saying, "I'm not too worried about the fight or Jake's new friends. But I
do
expect Jake to keep his grades up."

Meanwhile, Jake, with his curly brown hair and long, lanky limbs, seemed dazed and oblivious to his parents' worries about him. When I turned and asked him, "What do you think of your parents' concerns?" he merely shrugged. It was clear that Jake, like most teens, wasn't going to say much of anything in front of his parents, so I suggested that he come in for a private session the following week. Since my own teen son had recently left for college after four long years of high school, I had a pretty good idea what Jake and his parents were going through. No matter how harmonious a boy's childhood has been, puberty can change everything. This stage of child development requires that delicate parental maneuver of becoming disengaged without disengaging. Kate said she felt as if the Jake she knew had disappeared, and in some ways he had.