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849 of 919 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing for many reasons, September 3, 2006
I really, really wanted to like this book. I've studied cognitive, perceptual and developmental neuroscience for 25+ years, and I'm also a clinical psychologist. I've been interested in gender differences for just as long. I teach undergrad and grad courses on neuroscience, cognition, emotion, behavior, learning, and sensation and perception. I make a point of covering what is known about sex differences. I think the issues are really important and I've found that it is very important to get facts right because this controversial issue is a lightning rod for anger, frustration, tension and malevolent personal biases. My strong belief, shared by many, is that competent clinical psychologists and other clinicians must work hard to understand and manage their gender biases in order to manage "counter-transference" and help their clients. I know what good science is, including good neuroscience, good cognitive science, and good clinical psychology. There are plenty of women who conduct high-quality research on mind and brain, and make huge contributions. I've witnessed this personally, repeatedly. Over the years, I've worked for and with a large number of women, and I've trained a fair number too. Among first rate scientists and scientific thinkers there are plenty of women. I imagine that they will be just as disappointed in this book as I am.
Some observations:
1) The author begins the book by emphasizing her credentials and her influences in the acknowledgements section. The academic pedigree is impressive: UC Berkeley, UCSF, Harvard Med School, Yale Med School, University College, London. She thanks a long list of great scientists, teachers and students who have influenced her thinking. It is an impressive collection of names and places. By implication, the author would seem to be a rare expert who has learned from the greats. So please note: Many of the great scientists listed here are alive. But how many of these people have endorsed the book? Unless I'm mistaken, none of them have endorsed the book. I read a mostly positive review of the book by Deborah Tannen, but it seemed a bit guarded. I didn't find an endorsement from the renowned gender researcher, Eleanor Maccoby, who reportedly critiqued drafts of the book. It appears that researchers who have dedicated their lives to science and the science of gender have remained silent about this book.
2) The author consistently confuses neural structure (brain) with psychological function (mind, mental performance, emotions, behavior). This is a huge error. The author is extraordinarily fond of citing functional gender differences. She'll talk about differences in verbal output, memory, eye contact, thoughts about sex, emotions, divorce initiation, aggression, chilhood behaviors, etc. She'll say these functional effects are in the brain, repeatedly. Good scientific thinking doesn't confuse these things. Part of the work is to measure sex differences in the brain (e.g., anatomy, physiology, chemistry). A completely separate part of the work is to measure psychological variables (e.g., behaviors, cognitions, emotions, perceptions). The third, most essential part, is to discover true correlations between structure and function. Many of the most egregious and elementary errors of cognitive neuroscience occur when researchers attempt to localize psychological functions inside brain regions or chemicals. All good neuroscientists understand this, but it is a tricky issue. One of my mentors, Davida Teller, spent years contemplating the issues surrounding "linking" hypotheses, while many great neuroscientists have struggled with this third part (Robert Efron, Steve Kosslyn, Georg von Bekesy, Gustav Fechner, and on and on and on). The author's disregard for this elementary issue is an obvious felony in my book.
3) There are PLENTY of good popular and scientific books and articles on gender differences. Take a look at the work of the eminent cognitive psychologist, Carol Tavris. She has written a scientifically-informed classic, "The Mismeasure of Woman", along with numerous other excellent articles and books. Or familiarize yourself with scientist Janet Hyde, who has recently authored a college text on gender differences. Tavris, Hyde and others aren't impressed by data suggesting massive biological differences in most mental functions, especially if the claim is that these differences are innate. Among the people who DO believe in significant gender differences, take a look at authors like Judith Hall and Leslie Brody. Scientists have studied these issues carefully since Maccoby's heyday. Compared to other sources, "The Female Brain" so simplistic and biased that it seems like a step backward. The current treatment seems dumbed-down and distorted to me.
4) The book felt like an advertisement for certain drug treatments, including controversial hormone therapies and the anti-depressant drug Zoloft. There's no doubt that the author has expertise in these areas, and most of her scholarly work is in these areas. And she spells out clinical issues and controversies in informative ways. One gets the impression that she's worked with many women clinically, and added value and comfort to their lives. I can believe these things. But I'm also aware of the rewards for towing the drug company line. Scientists and clinicians get perks for doing this. Beatrice Golomb, one of the most brilliant and courageous scientists on the planet, has discussed how these conflicts of interest compromise the quality of medical care and research. My radar went up when I kept reading about Zoloft. Zoloft is a popular antidepressant but just one brand out of many SSRIs (e.g., Prozac, Celexa, Paxil, Lexapro). Why emphasize Zoloft?
5) The book indulges in male bashing. That becomes immediately evident on the book flap: "Women will come away from this book knowing that they have a lean, mean communicating machine. Men will develop a serious case of brain envy." Oh really? The negative comments toward men are especially evident in the first third of the book. It seems like the author wants to take men down a few notches to make women feel good, if I'm not mistaken. I felt especially sad as the author discussed infants' facial gazing. She cited and over-interpreted research on facial gazing, projecting her issues onto her own son, who didn't gaze much at her face. I can say, having spent many years observing infants' looking behaviors, that infant boys are generally intrigued by faces, especially mothers' faces. If there are sex differences, they do not jump out. And if there are measurable differences, how does the author know that these things are innate? (on to the next felony).
6) The author is happy to attribute gender differences to inherent, inborn brain differences. Making that leap so quickly is another "felony." This is big, complicated issue that has attracted much attention from philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists. There's a whole field of behavioral genetics that struggles with the nature-nurture issue in sophisticated ways. The author claims to be aware of these things, but doesn't communicate this in a convincing way. She seems to have missed key points regarding environment and socialization. In doing so, she also seems to miss the enormous pioneering contributions of neuroscientist Marian Diamond. Diamond did much to demonstrate the relationship between brain and environment.
7) The author says a minimum amount about the large individual differences that characterize people. She acknowleges within-group variability, but always "finds ways around" these things. She prefers to focus on average differences, and this adds to the dangerous reinforcement of stereotypes. Many human abilities are distributed along a continuum, independent of gender, but the author emphasizes dichotomies. It is dangerous to pidgeonhole people into "the" female mind and "the" male mind.
8) Why is this book called "The Female Brain"? Just 2 years ago, Darlington published a book with the same title. And it really did cover structural and functional brain issues.
So that's my less than positive take on this book. The value of the book comes from its discussion of some specific clinical issues. But in a nutshell, it offended too many of my sensibilities regarding cognition, neuroscience, and the psychology of women.
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195 of 229 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
The "More Likely to Be Killed By A Terrorist Than Marry Retraction" Award to This Nonsensical Book, September 26, 2006
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.
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49 of 56 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Readers who are not critical thinkers will enjoy this book, June 14, 2007
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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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