His Brain, Her Brain

I just came inside from having a great conversation with my wonderful next door neighbor, Brooke. We sometimes chat out in front of her house when we are both out front bringing in the trash cans or picking up the mail. We have great conversations about all kinds of things. Today, as our conversation progressed, I was able to tell her a funny story about what I had heard on the radio a number of years ago regarding the development of male fetuses.

I was driving to work one day when I was living in LA. Being stuck on the 405 for 45 minutes on the way to work gave me a lot of time to listen to the radio. I was listening to Dr. Dobson on Focus on the Family and he had a guest on who talked about the "testosterone wash" that happens during the development of a male fetus. The testosterone wash causes the corpus callosum (the pipeline that allows the two hemispheres of the brain to talk to each other) to be "damaged." Therefore, women think different then men. Men tend to be more logical and sequential. Women usually see the world in a more "holistic" way, seeing the interconnections between things than perhaps men don't. As we are fond of saying around here, "Women think with both sides of their brains at the same time."

Back to LA. I thought this was really interesting and was telling what I had heard to a group of people at lunch that day, several women and one man. At the end of my telling the story, all of the women nodded their heads and said, "Yeah, that makes sense." The one man at the table said, "Wait. Start and the beginning and tell me all of this again." We all laughed as I said, "Thank you for making my point!"

Brooke was really interested in this. I thought it would be interesting to see what the literature is out there on this. I found this great .pdf article by Walter L. Larimore, M.D. called His Brain, Her Brain (this .pdf is actually excerpted from his and Barb Larimore's book by the same name). Right off the bat it talks about the testosterone wash. It also talks about an estrogen wash (which I didn't know about) and how these washes affect the way men and women interact, think and see the world. Although this article is written for health care providers and how to better understand and relate to their male and female patients, I think reading this whole article is a great resource for understanding your mate and why he or she acts the way they do. It just might give you some tools to have effective communication.