Why Men Never Remember and Women Never Forget - Hardcover
Men and women ARE different . . . and this book from the founder of gender medicine uncovers the neuroscientific reasons behind age-old disputes between men and women, while providing a groundbreaking, authoritative, and reader-friendly guide to resolving these differences
Why won't he ask for directions? Why does she always want to talk about the relationship? Why can't he see that something is bothering her?* But perhaps the biggest questions Why Men Never Remember and Women Never Forget resolves are: Why is it so hard for men and women to understand each other . . . and what can we do about it?
According to Dr. Marianne Legato, an internationally recognized expert in gender-specific medicine, male and female brains are chemically and structurally different. And scientists are now finding out how these differences cause us to approach problems and experience the world in such dissimilar ways.
So how do we bridge this physiological gap? Dr. Legato provides strategies and tips for learning to "think" like the other sex in order to get past our differences-and offers smart advice for dealing with issues wherever they arise. This trailblazing book will enable readers to understand each other-in both personal and professional relationships-like never before.
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About the Author:
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
MARIANNE J. LEGATO, MD, FACP, is a professor of clinical medicine at Columbia University, where she founded and heads the Partnership for Gender-Specific Medicine. One of the world's foremost experts on gender medicine and winner of many awards for her work, she is the author of The Female Heart, What Women Need to Know, and Eve's Rib.
1 Men and Women Are Different
True or False?
"Math class is hard!"
So exclaimed Teen Barbie, a talking version of the doll on the market in the early nineties--to the widespread outrage of consumers. (In response, the guerilla-activist group the Barbie Liberation Organization bought a number of the dolls, swapped the voice boxes with those from G.I. Joe dolls, and replaced them on the shelves. I don't know which one I'd rather have: a muscle-bound, gun-toting G.I. Joe, giggling, "Let's plan our dream wedding!" or Barbie, with her impossible body and blank stare, growling, "Vengeance is mine!")
Mattel pulled the doll and replaced the offensive messages, but every woman in this culture knows that these stereotypes are alive and well, both on and off the toy store shelves. Indeed, much of the pressure not to investigate innate differences between men and women come from the women who most valiantly fight for and defend the rights of women. They're apprehensive that what is learned will be used against us--dumbed down in the media to sound bites that misrepresent the science, or more seriously, held up as evidence of our inferiority in political and academic contexts.
So it's with some trepidation that I address the following questions: Are men and women really different? Do they really process information differently? If so, can we conclude that we have sex-specific areas of excellence in problem solving? These questions are where this book must, of necessity, begin. I feel compelled to wade in, trepidations or no, for one simple reason: We empower ourselves through knowledge.
This is something I have seen proven over and over again as I have worked in this nascent field of gender-specific medicine. When I began in this field, we assumed that women were, physiologically speaking, simply small men. Unfortunately, what we didn't know about the differences between the sexes was hurting women.
Misunderstandings about the differences in the way the female heart worked meant that doctors sent women home, mid--heart attack, when they complained of pain centered in their stomachs. Medications tested in men continued to be prescribed to women, even though the drugs made their symptoms worse. In short, overlooking the differences caused doctors to make mistakes. Many women suffered, and some died.
We may still be making those mistakes; our journey toward a sex-specific medicine has only just begun. We've merely started to scratch the surface of how women are anatomically and biologically different from men, and what that means for how we prevent and cure disease and promote wellness in both sexes. Every day, we make discoveries of paramount importance, discoveries that indicate we must diagnose and treat women differently from their male counterparts.
The most unexplored area is the brain. There is sufficient scientific evidence to suggest that women's and men's brains are different, but the full extent of these differences--and their implications--is still uncharted territory. There are neurological and hormonal differences between us, but what do they mean?
Certainly, this has relevance to those who practice medicine in the field. Perhaps what we discover will change the way we treat neurological disorders like Parkinson's disease, developmental disorders like autism, and cognitive dysfunctions like dementia. It is certainly true that we cannot arrive at a complete understanding of any disease state, developmental disturbance, or neurological imbalance without understanding why it affects both sexes differently; and many of these diseases really do affect the sexes differently.
Take schizophrenia, for instance, a disease that some physicians and public health workers think is the most devastating disease in the world--and one from which an estimated 2 million Americans suffer. Why do female schizophrenics have a later onset, longer periods of remission, and better outcomes than men with the disease? Why do female schizophrenics experience an intensification in their symptoms in the days before their menstrual periods? Why do male schizophrenics have a more difficult time recognizing odors than female schizophrenics do? Perhaps these differences between the sexes can provide us with clues to the cause and treatment of this disease in both. Given how important recognizing these differences has been in other fields, I feel that we have no choice but to forge ahead with the research.
But the brain is so strongly associated with behavior that there are inevitable (and in my opinion, very interesting) sociological implications to this research as well. How do the hormonal and neurological differences between us affect the way we live--and live together? If we knew more about what makes our brains different from our male colleagues, sons, and lovers, wouldn't it be easier to live in harmony with them? My investigations in this chapter, and in this book as a whole, are based on that premise.
A Work in Progress--Forever!
I say over and over in this text that men and women have a great deal to learn from one another, and I believe that this is true. I myself have learned a tremendous amount from men: from my father, who was my first teacher, to the predominantly male class I studied with in medical school (I was one of 13 women in a class of 144), to the professors under whom I studied, most of them men.
But some stunning new research shows that learning happens at a much deeper and more fundamental level than we'd thought, and I believe this has fantastically important implications for the way that men and women can learn from one another. The brain is never really completely "done"; our experiences continue to have a profound effect on the structure of this miraculous organ. New research shows that the brain continues to develop past infancy and puberty--indeed, for as long as we live and continue to provide it with stimulation.
Many scientists have contributed to our understanding of how what we experience as we interact with the world affects our brain, but none with such impact as Dr. Eric Kandel, a professor at Columbia University in New York City, where I also teach. Dr. Kandel has shown--through his research on the lowly sea slug, no less!--that learning depends on creating specific circuits of communication in the brain and that these communication circuits are tailored by what we experience.
Learning is the process of acquiring information. Memory is the form in which that information is stored so that you can retrieve it at a later date. Dr. Kandel's Nobel-prize winning work showed that the act of learning and remembering causes physical changes in the brain. We remember things and events by making specific groups of neurons communicate more intensely with one another--by increasing the strength of existing connections and/or by making new ones. Dr. Kandel showed that our experiences actually modify the structure and function of our brains to create memories of those experiences, and we use these memories to modify our behavior accordingly.
The nervous system in Dr. Kandel's snail learned because its experience caused an actual change in the physical connections between the nerve cells. Ours does too. The intensity of the communication between the cells of our brains changes because of actual changes within those cells. The neurons involved in creating the memory have a new structure and function as a result of their response to the experience. Your brain lays down a new physical circuit, and you retain that physical circuit--that memory-- forever. Simply put: The act of creating a memory changes your brain.
We exercise quite a bit of control over this shaping of our brains. For instance, practicing a kind of activity or behavior strengthens the effectiveness of connections, reinforcing the circuit of the memory, and the brain's structure is altered. A gymnast's cerebellum, the area of the brain that has to do with balance and the fine control of movement, enlarges the more she practices.
Of course, the way we respond to stimulation from the outside world depends on a host of factors, including our own individual genetic makeup, hormonal levels, our sensory apparatus, and previous experiences. But we can actually change our brains. So even if we are different, we must tease out those differences, because we can learn from one another at the most fundamental level possible.
What We Know--And What We Don't
To begin this book, I'd like to present you with an overview of the science as we currently understand it, via true-or-false statements that come from questions I've been asked at lectures and by my patients. As you read, I'd like to remind you that while there do seem to be gender-specific ways of thinking, remembering, and experiencing emotion, those differences do not necessarily connote superiority. Dr. Kandel's groundbreaking research assures us that our brains aren't set in stone, even if our sex is. If we learn from each other, then these differences become opportunities, not divisions.
True or False: Sex is determined by our biology.
True and false. Although our sex is determined at the moment of our conception, and we stay that sex for the rest of our lives, we actually become more or less female or male over the course of our lives. Let's take a look at how this happens.
The sex chromosome contributed by our fathers pushes us to form male or female sex organs. Those organs, in turn, release hormones that cause dramatic and sex-specific changes to every organ and tissue in our bodies-- including the brain--and program them to respond in sex-specific ways down the line. Varying levels of hormones over the course of our lives continue the process of sexing us.
In other words, our genes set us up for the sex we'll be, and our hormones salt the stew. The complex interaction between these two factors-- especially during specific windows when their levels drop or surge as they do during puberty and menopause--make the two sexes different and each of us different from one another as well.
Nature is only part of the explanation for the differences between us. In fact, one of the thorniest challenges faced by those of us who study gender differences is teasing out which differences are due to the genetic and hormonal components of our biology and which are the result of "nurture," or how we're conditioned and shaped by our environment.
Society certainly believes men and women are different and expects sex- specific behavior from us. Even when children are young, parents encourage sons and daughters to do quite different kinds of activities, and in fact, boys and girls seem to enjoy quite different things.
These very disparate paradigms of what it means to be male or female provoke important questions about the difference between the sexes. How many of the differences between us are the result of the gender roles that the society of the time imposes? Are our sex-specific talents, temperament, and world view inescapably hardwired into our central nervous system? Or is our sexually stereotyped behavior choreographed by our culture's expectations of us?
Some of the differences between men and women are hardwired. But as soon as we're born, the environment works in powerful ways to interact with, and even change, our hardwiring to shape the way we act and interface with others. The idea that our experiences can change our brains means that the strands of conditioning and biology are more closely intertwined than we'd even thought. Treating your daughter like she's a girl may make her more so. The brain is never "done," but continues to grow and change as long as we provide it with inspiration.
True or False: There are significant differences between the brains of men and women.
True. It seems self-evident that men and women would have different brains-- after all, what could be more fundamental about us than whether we're male or female? And yet, for most of medical history, doctors and scientists assumed that all the organs of men and women were the same, except for those directly involved in reproduction. Research suggesting otherwise is very new: Scientists first made the observation that there were differences in the physical structure of the brains of female and male rats a little more than three decades ago. It has now been confirmed that this is true not only in other species with two sexes, like songbirds and monkeys, but in our own as well: The anatomy of the brain and how it works are different in men and women.
True or False: The brain has a sex at birth.
True. Our sex is fixed and immutable--and not just at birth, but from the very moment of conception. That sex has implications for all the systems in our bodies, including our brains.
But in a sense, this is a trick question, because while we are undeniably and indelibly male or female from the very beginning, there are a variety of factors that contribute to the process by which we acquire our sex over the course of our lives. So, although you're always male or female, other factors are working on you at specific stages throughout your life to make you more or less that way.
What are those factors? Our genes are the unique cellular blueprint that makes us who we are, including our sex: The sex chromosome we get from our fathers at conception determines which sex organs we'll develop. An X chromosome from Dad means the baby will have two Xs and develop into a female. A Y chromosome means that there will be an XY complement, creating a boy. The sex organs we develop, in turn, release sex-specific hormones, which continue the process not only in the uterus but also during certain windows of time throughout life--puberty and menopause, for example--when hormone levels change precipitously. Those hormones also turn certain genes on or off, which further influences the sex-specific functions of our tissues, which is why more than one teenage girl has cursed her mother for the size (large or small) of her new breasts.
These genes are also why hormone levels vary from person to person. Those hormone levels affect our behavior. Individuals with high testosterone levels, for instance, are bolder, more aggressive, and more focused on a single goal. They smile less, have a higher libido, and are more likely to engage in extramarital sex.
There's one more factor influencing our sex--our experiences. A striking example of this is the conduct of some of the female soldiers at Abu Ghraib, the American-run prison in Iraq. Many of us were shocked--not just by the brutalities these women meted out, but at the discovery that women were just as capable of acts of humiliation and savagery as men. Clearly, experience is an important factor in modifying behavior.
True or False: Men's brains are bigger.
True. Whenever I lecture on this subject, nothing gets a more outraged response than this simple biological truth: Men's brains are bigger than those of women and weigh 10 percent more.
True or False?
"Math class is hard!"
So exclaimed Teen Barbie, a talking version of the doll on the market in the early nineties--to the widespread outrage of consumers. (In response, the guerilla-activist group the Barbie Liberation Organization bought a number of the dolls, swapped the voice boxes with those from G.I. Joe dolls, and replaced them on the shelves. I don't know which one I'd rather have: a muscle-bound, gun-toting G.I. Joe, giggling, "Let's plan our dream wedding!" or Barbie, with her impossible body and blank stare, growling, "Vengeance is mine!")
Mattel pulled the doll and replaced the offensive messages, but every woman in this culture knows that these stereotypes are alive and well, both on and off the toy store shelves. Indeed, much of the pressure not to investigate innate differences between men and women come from the women who most valiantly fight for and defend the rights of women. They're apprehensive that what is learned will be used against us--dumbed down in the media to sound bites that misrepresent the science, or more seriously, held up as evidence of our inferiority in political and academic contexts.
So it's with some trepidation that I address the following questions: Are men and women really different? Do they really process information differently? If so, can we conclude that we have sex-specific areas of excellence in problem solving? These questions are where this book must, of necessity, begin. I feel compelled to wade in, trepidations or no, for one simple reason: We empower ourselves through knowledge.
This is something I have seen proven over and over again as I have worked in this nascent field of gender-specific medicine. When I began in this field, we assumed that women were, physiologically speaking, simply small men. Unfortunately, what we didn't know about the differences between the sexes was hurting women.
Misunderstandings about the differences in the way the female heart worked meant that doctors sent women home, mid--heart attack, when they complained of pain centered in their stomachs. Medications tested in men continued to be prescribed to women, even though the drugs made their symptoms worse. In short, overlooking the differences caused doctors to make mistakes. Many women suffered, and some died.
We may still be making those mistakes; our journey toward a sex-specific medicine has only just begun. We've merely started to scratch the surface of how women are anatomically and biologically different from men, and what that means for how we prevent and cure disease and promote wellness in both sexes. Every day, we make discoveries of paramount importance, discoveries that indicate we must diagnose and treat women differently from their male counterparts.
The most unexplored area is the brain. There is sufficient scientific evidence to suggest that women's and men's brains are different, but the full extent of these differences--and their implications--is still uncharted territory. There are neurological and hormonal differences between us, but what do they mean?
Certainly, this has relevance to those who practice medicine in the field. Perhaps what we discover will change the way we treat neurological disorders like Parkinson's disease, developmental disorders like autism, and cognitive dysfunctions like dementia. It is certainly true that we cannot arrive at a complete understanding of any disease state, developmental disturbance, or neurological imbalance without understanding why it affects both sexes differently; and many of these diseases really do affect the sexes differently.
Take schizophrenia, for instance, a disease that some physicians and public health workers think is the most devastating disease in the world--and one from which an estimated 2 million Americans suffer. Why do female schizophrenics have a later onset, longer periods of remission, and better outcomes than men with the disease? Why do female schizophrenics experience an intensification in their symptoms in the days before their menstrual periods? Why do male schizophrenics have a more difficult time recognizing odors than female schizophrenics do? Perhaps these differences between the sexes can provide us with clues to the cause and treatment of this disease in both. Given how important recognizing these differences has been in other fields, I feel that we have no choice but to forge ahead with the research.
But the brain is so strongly associated with behavior that there are inevitable (and in my opinion, very interesting) sociological implications to this research as well. How do the hormonal and neurological differences between us affect the way we live--and live together? If we knew more about what makes our brains different from our male colleagues, sons, and lovers, wouldn't it be easier to live in harmony with them? My investigations in this chapter, and in this book as a whole, are based on that premise.
A Work in Progress--Forever!
I say over and over in this text that men and women have a great deal to learn from one another, and I believe that this is true. I myself have learned a tremendous amount from men: from my father, who was my first teacher, to the predominantly male class I studied with in medical school (I was one of 13 women in a class of 144), to the professors under whom I studied, most of them men.
But some stunning new research shows that learning happens at a much deeper and more fundamental level than we'd thought, and I believe this has fantastically important implications for the way that men and women can learn from one another. The brain is never really completely "done"; our experiences continue to have a profound effect on the structure of this miraculous organ. New research shows that the brain continues to develop past infancy and puberty--indeed, for as long as we live and continue to provide it with stimulation.
Many scientists have contributed to our understanding of how what we experience as we interact with the world affects our brain, but none with such impact as Dr. Eric Kandel, a professor at Columbia University in New York City, where I also teach. Dr. Kandel has shown--through his research on the lowly sea slug, no less!--that learning depends on creating specific circuits of communication in the brain and that these communication circuits are tailored by what we experience.
Learning is the process of acquiring information. Memory is the form in which that information is stored so that you can retrieve it at a later date. Dr. Kandel's Nobel-prize winning work showed that the act of learning and remembering causes physical changes in the brain. We remember things and events by making specific groups of neurons communicate more intensely with one another--by increasing the strength of existing connections and/or by making new ones. Dr. Kandel showed that our experiences actually modify the structure and function of our brains to create memories of those experiences, and we use these memories to modify our behavior accordingly.
The nervous system in Dr. Kandel's snail learned because its experience caused an actual change in the physical connections between the nerve cells. Ours does too. The intensity of the communication between the cells of our brains changes because of actual changes within those cells. The neurons involved in creating the memory have a new structure and function as a result of their response to the experience. Your brain lays down a new physical circuit, and you retain that physical circuit--that memory-- forever. Simply put: The act of creating a memory changes your brain.
We exercise quite a bit of control over this shaping of our brains. For instance, practicing a kind of activity or behavior strengthens the effectiveness of connections, reinforcing the circuit of the memory, and the brain's structure is altered. A gymnast's cerebellum, the area of the brain that has to do with balance and the fine control of movement, enlarges the more she practices.
Of course, the way we respond to stimulation from the outside world depends on a host of factors, including our own individual genetic makeup, hormonal levels, our sensory apparatus, and previous experiences. But we can actually change our brains. So even if we are different, we must tease out those differences, because we can learn from one another at the most fundamental level possible.
What We Know--And What We Don't
To begin this book, I'd like to present you with an overview of the science as we currently understand it, via true-or-false statements that come from questions I've been asked at lectures and by my patients. As you read, I'd like to remind you that while there do seem to be gender-specific ways of thinking, remembering, and experiencing emotion, those differences do not necessarily connote superiority. Dr. Kandel's groundbreaking research assures us that our brains aren't set in stone, even if our sex is. If we learn from each other, then these differences become opportunities, not divisions.
True or False: Sex is determined by our biology.
True and false. Although our sex is determined at the moment of our conception, and we stay that sex for the rest of our lives, we actually become more or less female or male over the course of our lives. Let's take a look at how this happens.
The sex chromosome contributed by our fathers pushes us to form male or female sex organs. Those organs, in turn, release hormones that cause dramatic and sex-specific changes to every organ and tissue in our bodies-- including the brain--and program them to respond in sex-specific ways down the line. Varying levels of hormones over the course of our lives continue the process of sexing us.
In other words, our genes set us up for the sex we'll be, and our hormones salt the stew. The complex interaction between these two factors-- especially during specific windows when their levels drop or surge as they do during puberty and menopause--make the two sexes different and each of us different from one another as well.
Nature is only part of the explanation for the differences between us. In fact, one of the thorniest challenges faced by those of us who study gender differences is teasing out which differences are due to the genetic and hormonal components of our biology and which are the result of "nurture," or how we're conditioned and shaped by our environment.
Society certainly believes men and women are different and expects sex- specific behavior from us. Even when children are young, parents encourage sons and daughters to do quite different kinds of activities, and in fact, boys and girls seem to enjoy quite different things.
These very disparate paradigms of what it means to be male or female provoke important questions about the difference between the sexes. How many of the differences between us are the result of the gender roles that the society of the time imposes? Are our sex-specific talents, temperament, and world view inescapably hardwired into our central nervous system? Or is our sexually stereotyped behavior choreographed by our culture's expectations of us?
Some of the differences between men and women are hardwired. But as soon as we're born, the environment works in powerful ways to interact with, and even change, our hardwiring to shape the way we act and interface with others. The idea that our experiences can change our brains means that the strands of conditioning and biology are more closely intertwined than we'd even thought. Treating your daughter like she's a girl may make her more so. The brain is never "done," but continues to grow and change as long as we provide it with inspiration.
True or False: There are significant differences between the brains of men and women.
True. It seems self-evident that men and women would have different brains-- after all, what could be more fundamental about us than whether we're male or female? And yet, for most of medical history, doctors and scientists assumed that all the organs of men and women were the same, except for those directly involved in reproduction. Research suggesting otherwise is very new: Scientists first made the observation that there were differences in the physical structure of the brains of female and male rats a little more than three decades ago. It has now been confirmed that this is true not only in other species with two sexes, like songbirds and monkeys, but in our own as well: The anatomy of the brain and how it works are different in men and women.
True or False: The brain has a sex at birth.
True. Our sex is fixed and immutable--and not just at birth, but from the very moment of conception. That sex has implications for all the systems in our bodies, including our brains.
But in a sense, this is a trick question, because while we are undeniably and indelibly male or female from the very beginning, there are a variety of factors that contribute to the process by which we acquire our sex over the course of our lives. So, although you're always male or female, other factors are working on you at specific stages throughout your life to make you more or less that way.
What are those factors? Our genes are the unique cellular blueprint that makes us who we are, including our sex: The sex chromosome we get from our fathers at conception determines which sex organs we'll develop. An X chromosome from Dad means the baby will have two Xs and develop into a female. A Y chromosome means that there will be an XY complement, creating a boy. The sex organs we develop, in turn, release sex-specific hormones, which continue the process not only in the uterus but also during certain windows of time throughout life--puberty and menopause, for example--when hormone levels change precipitously. Those hormones also turn certain genes on or off, which further influences the sex-specific functions of our tissues, which is why more than one teenage girl has cursed her mother for the size (large or small) of her new breasts.
These genes are also why hormone levels vary from person to person. Those hormone levels affect our behavior. Individuals with high testosterone levels, for instance, are bolder, more aggressive, and more focused on a single goal. They smile less, have a higher libido, and are more likely to engage in extramarital sex.
There's one more factor influencing our sex--our experiences. A striking example of this is the conduct of some of the female soldiers at Abu Ghraib, the American-run prison in Iraq. Many of us were shocked--not just by the brutalities these women meted out, but at the discovery that women were just as capable of acts of humiliation and savagery as men. Clearly, experience is an important factor in modifying behavior.
True or False: Men's brains are bigger.
True. Whenever I lecture on this subject, nothing gets a more outraged response than this simple biological truth: Men's brains are bigger than those of women and weigh 10 percent more.
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- PublisherRodale Books
- Publication date2005
- ISBN 10 1579548970
- ISBN 13 9781579548971
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