Customer Reviews

The Male Brain

5 star:		(39)
4 star:		(23)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

There've been plenty of books reexamining female physiology, and it seems fitting that it's men's turn. And sure, I'm curious the crazy things some men do. Why is Michel Gondry driven to make such lyrical, eccentric movies? Why did Bach think it was interesting to weave distinct melodies together in a fugue? Why did male physicists go to such lengths to find replicable ways of describing matter? Why was James Joyce so interested in the English language, its roots, its capacity for double meanings, its use and misuse? And what made Kant so sure that we possess "a priori" knowledge?

Sadly, relying on a posteriori knowledge, Dr. Louann Brizendine restricts herself to familiar obsessions about men's attitudes toward sex and women. She sees men as potentially quite impulsive when it comes to sex. However, she chides, men can and should learn to control their impulses. She certainly agrees with pop psychologists that men are less empathic than women.

Sure, it resembles cheesy self-help, but it's science. After all, men have a larger "sexual pursuit area" than women. Due to this and the effects of testosterone, men can go into a "man trance." Popular science writers draw these kinds of conclusions from the kind of fMRI studies Brizendine cites. These studies show brain activity under various conditions. Unfortunately, MRI studies are often not reliably replicable - results vary from time to time. Further, no one is really sure what brain activity in varying conditions means or what conclusions you can draw from it. Most good neurologists would be pretty cautious about making assertions based on such studies. Anyway, there is no such thing as a "sexual pursuit area" in men or anyone else. Oh - and "man trance" is an expression Dr. Brizendine made up. A search of medline or other databases will not find any research using this expression.

It's fine to make up your own catchy phrases. That's what writers do, and many of the reviews here have praised Dr. Brizendine for her "clear" and "unpretentious" writing. The "man trance" idea also relies on research seeking to establish a connection between visual circuitry and testosterone. There are a couple studies on this with birds and goldfish. They were not conclusive. Even if they were, they may not apply to human behavior.

The "man trance" is not the only clear, unpretentious passage in this book based on irrelevant research. Dr. Brizendine's use of evidence is often just plain baffling. In the section "Tuning Out," she writes, "The teen male ... begins to perceive voices and other sounds differently than he did before adolescence." This refers to Krystyna Rymarczyk and Anna Grabowska, "Sex differences in brain control of prosody", Neuropsychologia 45(5):921-930, 2007.

There are two really weird things about her use of this study. First, it's got nothing to do with changes in teens, male or otherwise -- the subjects in this study were all in their late 50s to mid 60s; two thirds had suffered serious strokes of various sorts:

(from Rymarczyk): "Fifty-two individuals (28 men and 24 women) with unilateral infarction involving the right cerebral hemisphere and 26 (11 men and 15 women) neurologically intact controls (C) participated in this study."

The second weird thing: the study found no sex differences of any kind in the intact control subjects. The only differences had to do with interactions between sex and various areas of brain injury.

On to Brizendine's next point: "In Portugal, researchers found that during puberty, estrogen surges in females and testosterone surges in males increase the hearing differences between girls' and boys' brains."

Her footnote reveals that this comes from the same study of stroke victims: "Rymarczyk 2007 found a sex difference in the brain's processing of tone of voice."

None of the notes relating to these paragraphs seem to reference any work done in Portugal. (But let's put that aside.) The important thing is that the research (Rymarczyk 2007) contains nothing about hormone surges in teens. Its conclusion, again, is that (in 60-ish subjects): "We examined the possibility that the effectiveness of prosody processing may differ between the sexes. Contrary to our expectations, we did not find any significant differences in the ability of healthy men and women to comprehend emotional intonation."

And what does any of this have to do with the common idea that men "tune out" or "don't listen"? Nothing, but Brizendine does refer to at least one study having to do with listening. She confidently asserts that in a study in the Netherlands: "female brains intensely activated to both the white noise and the music. The male brains, too, activated to the music, but they deactivated to the white noise. It was as if they didn't even hear it. The screening system in their male brains was automatically turning off white noise."

Let's leave aside the question of whether "tuning out" white noise is good or bad. Brizendine refers to Ruytjens 2007. She says: "Ruytjens found the male brain screened out white noise better than the female brain."

This time the study is relevant, because it does say something about listening. But she sadly misreads it. Ruytjens et. al. studied male and female responses to different types of sound. Here are their conclusions: "The male group showed a deactivation in the right prefrontal cortex when comparing noise to the baseline, which was not present in the female group. Interestingly, the auditory and prefrontal regions are anatomically and functionally linked and the prefrontal cortex is known to be engaged in auditory tasks that involve sustained or selective auditory attention. Thus we hypothesize that differences in attention result in a different deactivation of the right prefrontal cortex, which in turn modulates the activation of the PAC and thus explains the sex differences found in the activation of the PAC." This is a study with 10 men and 10 women, and it showed male "deactivation" when listening to noise in a select part of the brain, the right prefontal cortex.

Three huge problems: i) you can't conclude anything from a study of 10 men and 10 women; a different 20 persons may give different results; ii) this study in any case didn't conclude anything about listening in general - only about brain activity in a specific part of the brain. No one can say what this means about men listening to women or to white noise - almost certainly nothing.

Research on sex differences in general finds only minor differences between men and women in matters of communication and language; one cannot generalize from these differences. Differences between individuals of whatever sex, however, are striking - and should be researched.

This is junk science. Even for junk science, it's bad.

When I told my wife I was reading The Male Brain, she laughed, "That's a short book." Others have joked about the anatomical location of the male brain. But in the companion volume to The Female Brain, Dr. Louann Brizendine demonstrates that the male brain is not simple, even if its thinking processes are closely tied to sex. The book is a real eye-opener into the current scientific understanding of how the male brain works, how it is tied to specific behaviors, and how it is different from women's brains. The study is not limited to the male brain, however. It also examines "neuro-hormone characters" such as testosterone, vasopressin, Mullerian inhibiting substance, and oxytocin, among others.

Interestingly, the brain and its neuro-hormones are not a static entity; they act and react dynamically as a man grows and develops from infancy to old age. At different stages of life, the brain and hormones play different roles in a man's life. And the influence of brain/hormonal activity is not one way. They influence male behavior, but they are also influenced by male behavior.

Apple has made the phrase, "There's an app for that," a byword. Regarding male behavior, we might say, "There's a complex brain/hormonal process for that." Whether it's sexual drive, territoriality, the protective instinct, or the problem-solving mode, what men do exists in a symbiotic relationship with what's going on in their brain.

As the parent of a male toddler, I read this book with keen interest, for it helped explain what is happening in my son's development as well as what will happen as he ages.

As a man with a philosophical bent, the book took me back to college discussion of the relationship between the mind and the brain as well as the possibility of free will. If a man's actions can be explained neuro-chemically, is he free or morally responsible for his actions?

Brizendine doesn't reflect on these more philosophical questions, but in an appendix on the male brain and sexual orientation, she notes that one study found that "about 35 percent of sexual orientation is attributable to genetic influences, whereas the rest is due to as yet unidentified factors." We are, to a significant degree, shaped by our biology, brain structure, and hormones. Shaped, but not determined. Somewhere in that other 65% is what makes uniquely human.

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"[This book] draws on my twenty-five years of clinical experience as a neuropsychiatrist. It presents research findings from the advances over the past decade in our understanding of developmental neuroendocrinology, genetics, and molecular neuroscience. It offers samplings from neropsychlogy, cognitive neuroscience, child development, brain imaging, and psychoneuroendocrinology. It explores primatology, animal studies, and observation of infants, children, and teens, seeking insights into how particular behaviours are programmed into the male brain by a combination of NATURE and NURTURE."

The above comes from the author of 2006's "The Female Brain," Louann Brizendine, MD. She is a diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and is an endowed professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco [UCSF]. She's also founder and director of the Women's Mood and Hormone Clinic and co-director of the UCSF Program in Sexual Medicine.

Each chapter of this book covers some of her male patients at various stages in the life cycle. At every stage such as the mischievous child, the oversexed teen, the middle-aged man who falls for a younger woman, Brizendine gives a theory for how her patient's behaviour is caused by male brain patterns, aided considerably by hormones like testosterone (which she nicknames "Zeus") and vasopressin (the "White Knight").

Brizendine chooses patients who conform to a familiar stereotype and then explains their actions as the work of Zeus and his friends. The result is that her theory is very rigid (just as is the theory she presents in her 2006 book).

In the above quotation from the book, Brizendine promises to look into "NATURE and NURTURE." But she favours nature (behaviour that stems from innate biology) in favour of nurture (behaviour that's learned, personal psychology, and experience) every chance she gets. Thus there are sentences like "Boys are programmed to move" and "He was being biologically bewitched to bond with her." With all the powerful hormones like "Zeus" and the "White Knight," does nurture even stand a chance? From reading this book, the answer seems to be no.

As well, there is no way to tell which differences between males and females are well-established and which are not.

I looked through all the notes and references. (A task that's similar to watching paint dry since the notes and references make up about half of this book.) There is no indication which research is in its infancy and which is solid.

This does not seem to bother Brizendine. She takes weak correlations and turns them into impressive, scientific-sounding "facts."

For example, many of the research studies that the author cites are based on functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) results. There is a problem when doing this since fMRI produces different results under the same testing conditions. (No one is exactly sure as to why.)

Of course, this does not invalidate the results, but it does stop researchers from claiming that the results are conclusive. In addition, how to interpret fMRI results is an ongoing debate.

Finally, on the cover of this book, we are told that this information is "a breakthrough understanding of how men and boys think." How so? Brizendine concludes that the male brain is "built for pursuit, competition, and aggression." There's no "breakthrough" here. All she's done is confirm a stereotype (in addition to simplifying and categorizing).

In conclusion, non-critical thinking readers will thoroughly enjoy this book since it's extremely easy to read. However, critical thinking readers will see its many problems.

{first published 2010; acknowledgments; the male brain (labelled diagram of a brain); cast of neurohormone characters (a list of hormones and how they affect a man's brain); phases of a male's life (chart); introduction; 7 chapters; epilogue; main narrative 130 pages; appendix; notes; references; index}

<<Stephen Pletko, London, Ontario, Canada>>

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While the information here is interesting, it reads like an article in a ladies magazine. One third of the book is unnecessary academic bibliography, which doesn't mesh with the casual tone of the writing. When you take the bibliography and long list of acknowledgements away, there's not much here other than an essay. I received the book as an unsolicited mailing from the publisher. I think a lot of the reviews here are inflated.

the author's first book, "The Female Brain", received horrible reviews by scientists who actually know something about the brain but nevertheless sold many copies, which is why there is now a sequel. The second book is even worse than the first one.

There's a song in My Fair Lady that asks why a woman can't be more like a man. If only Professor Higgins had met Louann Brizendine!

I've always been happy to be female. As a kid, I always wanted to wear dresses and play with Barbies. The boy across the street wanted to play superheroes and I wanted to play house on the front porch. Most of us, thankfully, have the right brain development and chemistry to match our bodies. Of course, this leads us almost inevitably to look at friends or parters of the opposite sex and think they're being irrational or too logical or just completely and utterly wrong-headed. Then books come along to say "No, they're being just what they're wired to be and if you understood that and they understood the same of you, maybe some progress could be made." This is, indeed, another one of those books.

I liked it!

The author does a nice job of neither dumbing it down or making it to technical while presenting the male brain from infancy to the senior years. The presentation is very respectful and the attempt is clearly real understanding of how behavior, in this case male, that might seem strange or even cruel to the opposite sex makes complete sense and seems normal to the owner of that brain. Truthfully, all the stories of the boys and men meld into a touching story of a life -- a boys is born and likes a lot of moving things, give him a Barbie and he'll pretend it's a gun, he learns how to fit in, his hormones make him a walking woody, he falls in love, learns to commit, becomes a dad and another love story begins, tries to solve everyone's problems, and -- as his hormone levels drop -- he finally wants to cuddle. The End. ::wink::

Only the author tells it better, I promise!

There's not much science (or anything else of substance) in this book. To slightly oversimplify, the book can be summed up into one sentence: Men are much more into sex than women. Not exactly world-shattering news.This about as surprising as the recent Dana Milbank columns where he discovers (shockingly) that Fox News has a Republican bias. The obvious is treated as revelation in The Male Brain. Most of us have heard of performance anxiety, Dr.B. I rarely give one-star reviews, but this book just didn't have anything in it to recommend reading it, let alone buying it. There's a 100 better books on neuroscience out there.

About 1/2 way through the hardcover I turned the page and expected the next chapter only to find the references. The actual book ends at pg 137 but the references go on till pg 271 !! Half the book is references which could have been put in fine print instead of being used to pad out this book which just is not deep or detailed enough in the topics it covers.

ok for a light read but i'll be taking it back tomorrow and swapping it with something else.

I have not read The Female Brain so I can't compare them, but this book manages to be trite, boring and insulting all at the same time. The author, who has initials behind her name so one assumes she is an educated woman, bypasses any science in favor of silly parables about men in falling in love. She doesn't deal with anything actually interesting ... why men cheat, why they behave so much like reactive pack animals around other men, the meaning of sports, the effect of physical exercise (quite different for men than women). The book reads like an article for Good Housekeeping. I'd like to recommend other books for understanding the puzzling animal that is Man but if they are out there I haven't stumbled upon them. Skip this one.

Or almost. At least the male-bashing that infused "The Female Brain" is missing from this silly novella. At 135 pages of text, there's little real science (and the 40 page Notes section is no help here; few of the voluminous scientific citations actually support the claims that reference them.) Just more "psychoneuroendoctrinology," as a Nature review dubbed The Female Brain. Testosterone explains everything--and social learning, nothing--about male behavior, according to the learned doctor, who seems never to have heard of neural plasticity. Save your money.