The Female Brain
by Louann Brizendine M.D.
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Book Reviews of The Female Brain
Book Review: The "More Likely to Be Killed By A Terrorist Than Marry Retraction" Award to This Nonsensical Book
Summary: 1 Stars
I have created an award, named for the 1986 Newsweek story that told a generation of smart women that they were more likely to be killed by a terrorist than marry after thirty, which Newsweek retracted this year after all the damage had been done."The Female Brain" by Louann Brizendine is the first winner of the award.
Here's why:
In The Female Brain, Brizendine, a San Francisco Bay area psychiatrist, who runs a clinic she started to help women who think their mental problems are caused by their hormones, describes the life cycle of a contemporary American educated, neurotic, urban, privileged professional in a culture in which science is just another option, as if she had discovered Lucy, the mother of all mankind. Behavior familiar to many of us only from the wonderful bad Heather literature is presented as hard-"wired" into the female brain. Brizendine's description of the hard-"wired" cervix and brain-softening, uncontrollable urge to mate with one's newborn baby, which makes wholesale desertion of the work place is as irresistible as the law of gravity, is the closest thing to soft porn I've seen emerging from the San Francisco Medical Center in a long time. For the many women who would find Brizendine's transparently autobiographical description of the stages of a woman's life almost entirely unfamiliar, the possibility that the book is false seems immediately obvious. If it were true, The Female Brain would be a scary book indeed. But of course it's not.
Insecure readers might coubt their own sanity when reading the thing, because the short book is supplemented by mind-numbing pages of citations to scientific journals. But happily as far as I know the articles Brizendine cites bear essentially no relationship to the propositions in the text of the book. As the only real academic to look at it reveals, she might as well have cited to passages in "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." The methodology is the all-too-familiar incredible assertions supported by a Million Little Pieces of unrelated footnotes.
"Science" books with faux citations are a problem. But perhaps a worse problem is that not a single book reviewer in the country took the time to go to the local university library and see whether Brizendine's "sources" actually said what she said they said. Even Robin Marantz Henig, of the staggeringly self-justifying, endlessly publicly edited and allegedly tansparency-seeking New York Times, was content to whimper that the closed sourcing of the scientific journals Brizendine's cites made it impossible for her to check their truthiness. The insurmountable barrier of a (no transfer) subway ride from the Times offices in Times Square to the Columbia University library was apparently too much for this dauntless investigative reporter from the Newspaper of Record.
Blessedly, Mark Liberman, the Trustee Professor of Phonetics, Department of Linguistics and Professor, Department of Computer and Information Science, at the University of Pennsylvania, was intrigued enough by Brizendine's unlikely assertion that "A woman uses about 20,000 words per day while a man uses about 7,000" to try to run down that one building block of her Mars/Venus "neuropsychiatry." He reports on his blog first, that there was absolutely no legitimate source whatsoever for the factoid and speculating that some marriage counselor must have made it up, then, that metasurveys revealed no such thing, and finally, doing his own test found that men use more words than women do!
Alerted to the possibility that Brizendine might have made it all up, and his appetite whetted by the confessed public failure of the avatar of all the news that's fit to print, Liberman rummaged among his books and fired up his online university library system and investigated the citations for Brizendine's assertion that "studies indicate that girls are motivated -- on a molecular and a neurological level -- to ease and even prevent social conflict."
Here's what he found:
"My summaries of these articles, in the context of Brizendine's claims [that studies indicate girls are motivated on a molecular and neurologicallevel to ease and even prevent social conflict]:
1. Jasnow 2006: Nothing here about social conflict avoidance or preserving relationships or humans of any sex.
2. Bertolino 2005: Nothing here about social conflict or preserving relationships or teenagers of any sex.
3. Hamann 2005: Nothing here about social conflict avoidance or preserving relationships or teenagers.
4. Huber 2005: Nothing here about sex differences, about social conflict avoidance, about preserving relationships, or about humans of any age or sex.
5. Pezawas 2005: Nothing here about sex differences, about social conflict avoidance, about preserving relationships, or about teenage girls.
6. Sabatinelli 2005: Nothing here about sex differences or social conflict avoidance or preserving relationships.
7. Viau 2005: Nothing here about social conflict avoidance or about preserving relationships.
8. Wilson 2005: Because Penn lacks a subscription to this journal, and I was unwilling to pay $30 for a 7-page article, I'm not sure about the details. Unlike the other articles cited, it does have something to do with social interaction, but there's apparently no direct relevance to social conflict avoidance or preserving relationships.
9. Phelps 2004: Nothing here about social conflict avoidance or preserving relationships."
Inspired by Liberman, I did a little snooping into the vita of the self-proclaimed UCSF Professor and found that she is in fact not an academic professor, but a clinical professor, running a clinic she herself founded treating women's psychiatric problems from a hormonal standpoint, at $180 a session.
Now clinical professors do good and important work in many institutions, but this does mean that she has not had to undertake and meet the rigorous competition for an academic position at a leading medical school. Just as well. During her fourteen years as a "Professor," prior to the 2006 Terrorist Retraction Prize winning "Female Brain," Brizendine was an author on exactly seven papers, the most recent one published four years ago in 2002. According to PubMed, a service of the National Library of Medicine and National Institutes of Health, which is cited on Brizendine's own academic bio webpage, she was not even the first named researcher on any of the seven. Just to put her accomplishments in context, her colleague in the psychiatry department at UCSF, Associate Professor Steven P. Hamilton, has published twenty-four papers since 1994, first listed author on eleven.
I guess it depends on what "pioneering neuropsychiatrist" is . . . is.
A quick web search for other Brizendine contributions to medical science turned up report that she told the audience at a fund-raiser that "the World Health Organization has projected that by 2003, depression will be the number one disease in the world, surpassing diabetes, heart disease and others." I guess it depends on what "number one disease" is, but I would be surprised if the WHO thought depression was a worse threat to human well-being than, say, malaria or AIDS.
The book stores are full of loony books that look at first glance like science, so it is probably too much to ask that the publisher withdraw its endorsement of The Female Brain, as publishers did in the cases of the fake memoir "A Thousand Little Pieces" and the plagiarized "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life." But I venture to guess that if a book about anything except why women should behave in old-fashioned and traditional ways contained this staggering percentage of misrepresentation and error, someone beside a blogging linguistics professor would have picked it up long ago.
And so, to Louann Brizendine, that self-described pioneering neuropsychiatrist of no apparently significant academic publications and false or unrelated data points, the First, Annual "More Likely To Be Killed By a Terrorist Retraction Award" for 2006.
Book Review: Scientific Truth vs. Political Correctness
Summary: 4 Stars
Dr. Brizendine admits, "In writing this book I have struggled with two voices in my head - one is the scientific truth, the other is political correctness. I have chosen to emphasize scientific truth over political correctness even though scientific truths may not always be welcome." It is rare that anyone who is in favor of political correctness openly admits that it conflicts with scientific truth. It is also interesting that she says she has "chosen" scientific truth; this statement implies that it was a choice she had to consider.
At no point in the book does Dr. Brizendine draw politically incorrect conclusions from the scientific data, even when they seem inevitable. She verifies at length that the moodiness and changeability men notice in women is not only real, but neurochemically based. She tap-dances around the inevitable mention of Lawrence Summers' being forced to resign from the presidency of Harvard for mentioning that men more frequently show scientific ability than women do by explaining that it isn't that women can't do math and science, it's just that those things require working alone, and women's hormones make working on their own without constant feedback and guidance from others intolerable for them. (Personally, I'm a woman and a loner, and the idea of working with other people makes me want to jump off a building.) Also, in discussing how women choose men who will be good providers as mates, she says, "Though single motherhood has become fashionable among some sets of modern women, it remains to be seen how well this model will succeed." This is disingenuous; a few minutes of research would have shown her that it has already been seen how well this model will succeed, and that is not very well at all. Children with absent fathers have a far higher incidence of delinquency, behavioral problems, mood disorders, and academic trouble.
Another example comes in the discussion of mothers of infants. Dr. Brizendine reveals that the feelings of withdrawal new mothers feel when they are separated from their babies are hormonally based, and admits that when she herself went back to work when her son was only five months old, she "was a wreck on most days". That is, not only are working mothers of infants not being very good mothers, they're also not being very good workers. Naturally she doesn't suggest that maybe, just maybe mothers should at least wait until their children are past babyhood before skipping back to the office, not even when she goes on to detail the deleterious physical effect on the "trust and security circuits" in the brains of children whose mothers are inattentive, an effect that lasts for a lifetime, nor when she details the behavioral troubles exhibited by the children of mothers who work full-time. Instead, she tries to claim that having someone else take care of your children is okay because female monkeys sometimes leave their babies with other monkeys. What she glosses over is that these other monkeys are the babies' aunts or grandmothers - relatives with a genetic motivation to take good care of the babies. So yes, if there's a grandmother or aunt or other close relative to babysit your baby while you work, that will work well. But many of us don't live that near relatives who are willing to babysit, and dumping your toddlers off at daycare to be raised by strangers making minimum wage isn't remotely the same thing.
However, for Dr. Brizendine, simply admitting that the differences between men and women are biologically based and not social constructs was probably going frighteningly far, and for that, she deserves credit.
The book verifies that boys are not only larger, but also more aggressive, more disruptive, and less mentally mature than girls of the same age, but doesn't follow through to the obvious politically incorrect conclusion that maybe co-education isn't such a great idea. Hey, why not lock up a bunch of helpless little girls with unsocialized children who are larger, stronger, more aggressive, less mature and less self-controlled than they are? Even when she explains that teenage girls spend hours in the bathroom together because "It's the only private place at school we can go to *talk*!", the author does not seem to notice that she is building a case against co-education.
One of the most intriguing passages in this book was when the author explained that the proverbial "fight or flight" response is actually the male response to danger; females, prevented by their smaller size or by the need to protect their young from fighting or flying, are more apt to respond with "tend or befriend". She cites the example of a teenage girl she knew, Elana, whose best friend started insulting another girl who Elana had once been friends with. Even though Elana didn't like this behavior, she meekly let it pass without a word of protest because she was too frightened of losing the friendship. According to Dr. Brizendine, a great deal of female behavior is motivated by this fear of loss of a relationship. This doesn't speak well for women's ability to stand up for their friends or fight for a principle in the face of opposition, but, well, that's why we have men.
For the most part, the science in this book is pretty solid, but there are a couple of areas where Dr. Brizendine accepted common wisdom rather than examining it. For example, there is a chapter detailing the hormonal changes that allegedly explain turbulent adolescent behavior, an idea that has gained widespread acceptance in the media and in water-cooler conversations. The problem is, the entire concept of adolescence, as well as the notion that this is a time of inevitable stormy emotion and behavior, didn't exist until the 20th century and is peculiar to the industrialized West. The turbulence is caused by the artificial prolonging of childhood into the years when humans should be working and starting a family, not by hormones. Try expecting someone in his or her thirties to follow rules made for children and see if the result isn't some storminess.
Another problem area was when Dr. Brizendine tried to prove that men are virtually incapable of noticing changes in other peoples' expression. According to her, their brains just don't register it, whereas women's do, and this is where we get the idea of women's intuition. Unfortunately for her, I just read a book (Everyday Mind Reading: Understanding What Other People Think and Feel) that thoroughly debunks the idea of women's superior intuition. In fact, men are just as adept as reading people's faces as women. Which didn't surprise me; if men were really as inept at this as Dr. Brizendine claimed, novels written by men would be devoid of mention of characters' expressions, and no male spy would last for more than a day before getting himself killed.
There is a regrettably short appendix about sexual orientation, which verifies the common belief that Lesbians are more likely to display masculine characteristics than straight women. According to the book, prenatal exposure to testosterone is one of the causes of both homosexuality and unconventional gender behavior in women.
The blurb claims that men who read this book will "develop a serious case of brain envy". I doubt that; I'm a woman, and this book made me devoutly wish I could get a retroactive sex change operation.
Book Review: Excellent, highly readable with particularly good sections on sexual behavior and bonding
Summary: 5 Stars
When I first picked up this book I was a bit put off because there were some comments that weren't particularly complimentary to men that seemed unfair and biased. However, the overall tone of the book was good and I was able to overlook the occasional comment that seemed a bit "off" with respect to holding a balanced position on the genders. Other reviewers have also commented on this from their perspectives, so I won't elaborate any further. You can read these reviews for yourself.
This was a difficult book to put down because it used stories to illustrate the different stages of a woman's life and the physical correlations to her behavior. At the same time, it painlessly introduced important information about the brain, hormones and how these are connected to behavioral changes in a woman's life. While this exploration was not comprehensive, it was useful, concise, understandable and well-suited to a non-professional audience.
This title also contained a lot of similar information on men and I found this information to be more than a superficial smattering. I wouldn't say the book is titled incorrectly, but don't be misled that it only includes information about the female brain. It contains lots of good content on the male brain as well.
The chapters that most grabbed by attention were on the teenage years, developing trust and sexual behavior. These sections brought in a lot of good references from a variety of sources including evolutionary biology, anthropology and neurobiology. Since the author was presenting her own unique perspective as a clinician, she did not bring in a lot of other significant research. This is a legitimate criticism. However, this is a very complex area and I found that the information was an excellent introduction to a vast body of research.
For the average layperson, the mixture of science, story and the implications of these facts to everyday life is perfect. For the scientist or other technical audiences, it may not have enough meat from an information standpoint, but the story and interweaving of different threads of research makes the book very engaging for anyone including a professional.
By education, I was trained early in my career as a biologist and biochemist. Later, I went on to study psychology. I had difficulty putting the book down and it flowed like a good novel in terms of the writing. The organization of this book was well thought out, particularly the way that different research findings were presented to support the author's argument without interrupting the flow of the story.
For many people who haven't read David Buss or anthropology, the insights on short and long term mating strategies will be an eye opener. I also liked the cross cultural references to support her arguments that certain behaviors appear to be due to shared neural architecture rather than cultural influences. There is a lot of controversial content here that is good food for thought.
The author tells the story of the human brain concisely with the impact of a good novel. This book is worth owning for anyone who wants to understand women better, how they change over the years and how female psychology correlates to development and physiology. As you go deeper, however, you will find that this book may not be comprehensive enough.
I didn't find this book to be overly reductionistic. It looked at the impact of physiology on behavior, but it didn't reduce behavior to physiology. The only bias that was sometimes annoying is the implication that men were somehow "less than" rather than "complimentary to" women. This bias wasn't usually glaring, but I felt it was often present.
This book has become somewhat controversial, but that doesn't change the fact that it includes a lot of great information and puts it in the hands of the average person. If you are really serious about this area, I would pick up additional books to compliment this author's unique perspective. While I didn't necessarily agree with everything that Dr. Brizendine said, I certainly benefited from engaging with this book and sparked my curiosity to know more about certain areas of interest.
If you are considering buying this book, I think it's important to remember it was written by a clinician and not a research scientist. The value of the material is based on ONE physician's experience over her career. She is presenting a mixture of research material and her own opinion. If you are clear about this, I think you will enjoy it.
This is clearly a book for a GENERAL AUDIENCE. I believe this author wrote from a sincere place and I don't fault her for writing from a first person perspective. Like a good historical novel, this book captures the essence of the subject, but does sacrifice some accuracy in the process. If you are looking for more hard science, you may find something else more to your liking.
Some books on related topics that I enjoyed were the Developing Mind by Daniel Siegel (general book on how the mind develops apart from gender differences), Emotional Intelligence (Goleman) and various gender-related titles by Carol Tavris. (The book by Carol Tavris on Anger is not directly related to this topic, but it is excellent as well.)
I also like the work of Antonio Demasio on the mind-body relationship, role of emotions and the development of consciousness. There is some speculation and a fair amount of first-person perspective in his books too, but they are quite good overall and he is a neurologist with good credentials. THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS is the most dense title and LOOKING FOR SPINOZA is probably the most accessible.
If you want a more controversial and provocative read, PHILOSOPHY IN THE FLESH talks in-depth about the embodied mind from a cognitive perspective. There are also many good books out there on gender differences and they are referred to in other reviews including the spotlight review above. In short, if this is an area of interest, you need to read a broad array of material because I don't think any one author has a monopoly on the truth. The differences between men and women are mysterious and with over a quadrillion synaptic brain connections to consider, I doubt the full picture of brain gender differences will emerge anytime soon.
Book Review: Readers who are not critical thinkers will enjoy this book
Summary: 3 Stars
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I bet you didn't know these facts:
(1) "Men use about seven thousand words per day. Women use about twenty-thousand."
(2) "Girls arrive already wired as girls, and boys arrive already wired as boys."
(3) "Men are on average twenty times more aggressive than women."
(4) "Girls are motivated--on a molecular and neurological level--to ease and prevent social conflict."
(5) "85% of twenty- to thirty-year-old males think about sex every fifty-two seconds and women think about it once a day--up to three or four times on fertile days."
(6) "Men pick up the subtle signs of sadness in a female face only 40 percent of the time, whereas women can pick up these signs 90 percent of the time."
(7) "65 percent of divorces after the age of fifty are initiated by women."
These seven facts are some of the interesting information that you'll learn in this book by Louann Brizendine M.D., a neuropsychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and founder of the Women's and Teen Girls' Mood and Hormone Clinic.
The thesis of this book is that the female brain sees the world differently and reacts differently than the male brain in every stage of life from newborn to old age. A women's behavior is radically different from that of a man due to mainly hormonal differences. This book is quite easy to read and, in fact, reads like a novel.
However, I found the book to have minimal neuroscience (as suggested by the book's title). It was comprised mainly of anecdotes (some autobiographical) that exaggerate the differences between women and men thus reinforcing gender stereotypes. As well, I found many contradictions throughout. In places of her book, Brizendine is also surprisingly naïve.
When I was reading this book, what struck me was the exactness of some of the facts the author presents (such as the seven presented above). So I decided to search on the Internet for other reviews of this book from mainly scholarly sources. The avalanche of negative information I found was astounding!!
A major problem concerned her extensive endnotes.
From reading this mass of negative information, it seems to me that Brizendine is attempting to present an authoritative voice to impress despite what the authors say in her numerous endnotes. That is, her supporting citations don't support her claims. If you couple this with Brizendine's impressive academic credentials (highlighted especially in the book's acknowledgements section and inside back flap), then most people, unfortunately, accept everything she says at face value. (By the way, the seven "facts" above are not supported by Brizendine's citations.)
I was intrigued by this so I checked out Brizendine's brief biography on the book's inside back flap. A piece of information that intrigued me states that "She has written in professional texts and journals." What I wanted to know was how many professional research papers she has written in. Again from searching on the Internet I found she had written exactly 7 research papers in collaboration with others and she's not the first named author in any of the seven. (To put this in context, her colleague in the Psychiatry Department at UCSF, Associate Professor Steven P. Hamilton has published 24 papers since 1994 and is first listed author on 11.)
For a "pioneering neuropsychiatrist," (honest, this is what it says on the book's inside front flap) she has a poor research paper publication rate.
At the beginning of her endnotes and references section, she states in a preamble the following:
"I have gathered the work of many scientists in various disciplines in order to arrive at this understanding of the female brain."
From my understanding of this quotation, she used only the work of only scientists to establish her claims. However, in her references are works authored by Allen Pease and Allan Garner. These people are not scientists!!
Also, in this preamble she calls everything she has written in her book a "theory" (a collection of general principles that is put forward as an explanation for a set of known facts and empirical findings). I found her theory to be quite rigid since she doesn't allow for or explain any exceptions (there are many) and this undermines her entire theory. Yes, men and woman's brains are different but within each gender, you'll find a wide range of behavior. To ignore this fact as Brizendine does is to present a very narrow view of human experience.
I have to agree with an October 2006 article in the publication "Nature" that was entitled "Psychoneuroindoctrinology" (a pun on the word pyschoneuroendrocrinology) which states that this book "fails to meet even the most basic standards of accuracy and balance," "is riddled with scientific errors," and "is misleading about the processes of brain development, the neuroendocrine system, and the nature of sex differences in general."
Finally, I should explain my rating for this book. The majority of those who are not critical thinkers will probably give this book 5 stars. The majority of those who ARE critical thinkers will probably give this book 1 star. My rating is the average of these two extremes.
In conclusion, those readers who are not critical thinkers will probably thoroughly enjoy this book. Critical thinking readers will probably have the opposite response!!
{first published 2006; acknowledgements; the female brain (a human brain diagram with captions); cast of neuro-hormone characters (list of hormones with descriptions that affect a woman's brain); phases of a female's life (chart); introduction; seven chapters; epilogue; main narrative 165 pages; 3 appendices; notes; references; index}
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Book Review: As interesting a read for women or men.
Summary: 5 Stars
This is an excellent book with many insights about both the female and male brain. The writing makes for easy reading that is equally enjoyable for either women or men. The author approaches this subject at the hormonal and brain function level. She shares how a few hormones (estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, oxytocin), neurotransmitters (dopamine, serotonin) and their regulators within the brain (prefrontal cortex, hypothalamus, amygdale) dictate our social behavior. Hormonal levels and their regulators are radically different between men and women. Thus, the genders behave differently. These hormones have a life cycle of their own defining specific passages in a women's life including, puberty, and the various menopause stages (peri-, -, and post-).
The female brain is different on several counts. It has larger resources dedicated to communication, language, emotions, and memory related to such emotions. This is manifested by a larger hippocampus and 11% more neurons dedicated to language capabilities. On the other hand, women's brain resources dedicated to sex is barely more than a third as large as men's. Testosterone level is a key differentiator between male and female as it is so much lower in women. As a result, women are more cooperative, less competitive, less aggressive, more concerned with emotion of others, and more focused on the group than the self alone. Men are 20 times more aggressive. The population of the prison system reflects that. Men think about sex far more often and their sex drive is far higher. That's why men rape women and not the reverse.
The chapter on the teen girl brain is excellent. It explains a great deal about the emotional roller coaster associated with a surge in hormonal levels. The differentiation between the female and male brain at that age is in full swing. Girls speak faster and two to three times as much as boys. Girls need social connection and ongoing communication opportunities. When those are lacking, a girl after puberty is twice as vulnerable as a boy to depression. On the other hand, because of lesser developed communication skills boys are a lot more at risk for autism.
The chapter on motherhood is also fascinating. It describes how a woman's brain is altered forever after motherhood to enhance the survival of her children. The author analyses the related metamorphosis of the women's brain in technical detail at the hormonal level. In plain English, whatever nature wants you to do (reproduce and mother) it does by generating plenty of natural feel good drugs (dopamine and oxytocin).
The author addresses at length love and sex. Her findings based on neuroscience confirm some the clichés we have that women look for economic stability and loyalty in men. While men look for, well the obvious: Scarlett Johansson. Women's focus is nesting. Men's is fertility. However, Brizendine indicates things get more complex. Women do want long-term relationship with loyal and caring providers. However, they occasionally don't mind reproducing with a philanderer that appears to have superior genes. Brizendine states that 10% of children are fathered by such philanderers without the husband knowledge. Superior genes are characteristics of males who have greater symmetry in their body and face. In plain English, this means men who are more handsome. Apparently, this has been confirmed by countless studies. Yet, this statement is perplexing. Is Brad Pitt really more symmetric than Danni de Vito? From a geometric standpoint, this could be a close call. So, what does symmetry really has to do with handsomeness? Also, interestingly enough the loyalty of a male seems incredibly predetermined by the length of a certain gene (vasopressin) the longer the more loyal.
The chapter on menopause and the mature women is also interesting. The changing hormonal balance, including the drop off in estrogen, triggers a marked reduction in nurturing behavior. Nurturing children and husband becomes really tasking. The frustration with this situation engenders a need for self-actualization. This is especially pronounced if the kids are out to college and the husband is retired and expects three meals a day. The terms of the marriage need to be renegotiated if the marriage is to survive. Counter to the public's perception it is women who initiate divorce 65% of the time among couples over 50.
Early in the book Brizendine addresses Lawrence Summers remark that women are underrepresented in mathematics and scientific fields because when comparing men vs women, even though their average ability may be the same, women's variability (or standard deviation) was lower. Thus, few women reached the top echelons of those fields. Brizendine rebuts Summers by indicating that girls and boys' ability and variability are the same through their teen years. Brizendine states that fewer women reach the top echelon in the mentioned fields because their brain wiring makes them more social and they do not seek lonesome (scientific) pursuits. However, a review of the 2006 College Board SAT results contradicts Brizendine as it shows that boys have both a higher average and higher standard deviation on math score vs girls. As a result, twice as many boys than girls score greater than 750 on the SAT math section. Thus, in this one case Brizendine's arguments are not convincing. This does not detract from the overall excellent intellectual quality of this book.