"One of my patients gave her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter many unisex toys, including a bright red fire truck instead of a doll. She walked into her daughter's room one afternoon to find her cuddling the truck in a baby blanket, rocking it back and forth saying, 'Don't worry, little truckie, everything will be all right'.
"This isn't socialization. This little girl didn't cuddle her 'truckie' because her environment moulded her unisex brain. There is no unisex brain. She was born with a female brain, which came complete with its own impulses. Girls arrive already wired as girls, and boys arrive already wired as boys. Their brains are different by the time they're born, and their brains are what drive their impulses, values and their very reality."
Brizendine told CIO the default gender setting in nature is female. A brain becomes male when the tiny testicles develop in the foetus eight weeks after conception and testosterone makes physical changes in the brain. And what are these changes? Testosterone shrinks the communications centre, makes the hearing cortex smaller and makes the part of the brain that processes sex twice as large.
Brizendine's book contains other gems, like:
• Why Women Can Read Emotions in Faces and Voices and Why Men Are Always Surprised By Tears At one hour old, female infants spend much more time studying the faces that appear in front of them than male infants 24 hours old. Because of this, the typical female can read emotions from faces, mirror them and predict behaviour two to three times more accurately than the male. Females read signs of subtle sadness in a female face 90 percent of the time. Males, on the other hand, read subtle sadness in a female face only 40 percent of the time. So when a woman cries, it seems to come out of the blue to a man.
• The Neurological Reason Women Talk More Than Men The hearing and communication cortex is much larger in females and so women do talk more. Men use an average of 7000 communication "words" per day while women use 20,000 communication "words". And, women get a dopamine rush from talking to each other - the same kind of rush a heroin addict gets. Men do not get a response from their pleasure centres from talking to each other, so don't blame your man if he is less social than you are.
In fact women's brains, Brizendine says, have a thicker corpus callosum, the cable of nerves that channels communication between the brain's two hemispheres.
All of this, as the growing number of social researchers, women's special interest groups and others know, matters deeply because cyberspace is affecting the way we live, our environment and our culture.
"The products of computer science influence how we do business, our work-life balance and how we spend our leisure hours," Margolis says. "It matters if boys make things and girls use things that boys make. Our culture reflects the desires and sensibilities of males, to the exclusion and often denigration of females."
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