“Every Sunday I enjoy MRI-scanning my brain while I’m having a … never mind !.”
Some experimentation on emotions processing differences between man and woman, which I found interesting.
It did not exactly fit pheromone thread, so I posted it here, and also left contacts if you like to google more of same writers.
Anything here we didn’t know before ?, I’ll leave that to you.
Enjoy
Raquel and Ruben Gur are neuroscientists. They are interested in how men and women USE their brains to perform a range of activities. They also happen to be married to each other, so like most couples they have a few leads. In particular, they want to know why men and women react so differently to emotion. To investigate what happens in the brain when processing emotion they invited student volunteers to their MRI scanner.
RUBEN GUR: Why don’t you climb up and sit on the bed.
Narration: They wanted to see which parts of the brain are active when men and women think about emotions. The volunteers are shown photographs of faces which depict various moods. They are then asked questions about the emotions expressed, while their brains are scanned. The initial findings - that women are better at recognising emotions than men.
RUBEN GUR: A woman is able to recognise the emotion on a face, even before she would recognise that it’s a face, rather than something else. A man first has to make sure it’s a face and then starts figuring out what the emotion is.
Narration: But the real breakthrough was the discovery of how little brain power women use to process emotion. The coloured areas show the small amount of female brain area being used; whereas men need to use much more to deal with the same information.
RUBEN GUR: Well as you can see there is much more - in men there is much more activation in the back of the brain. It’s the part that deals with processing the sensory information that is in the fact.
And they also show a lot more activation in the emotion brain. So they have to really look into the detail of the face to figure out the emotion.
Narration: The volunteers were also given a computer test on emotions. Women’s brains have many more neural connections between the two hemispheres. Men’s brains are less well connected, so each hemisphere tends to be more specialised. To express emotions both hemispheres are needed simultaneously. Emotional thought starts in the limbic system and is processed on the right hand side of the brain, while speech is in the left. The poorer information flow between hemispheres in the male brain means that a man must use more of his brain to interpret emotions.
So it really is biologically harder for a man to express emotions - whereas women are better wired to convert feelings into words. This difference in wiring also explains how men and women react to multi-tasking. It’s a source of domestic conflict in most homes - women have no trouble tackling many things at once, whereas men have to focus on one thing at a time.
To demonstrate the point four women and four men were given a list of jobs to complete in four minutes. They had to make tea, answer the phone, pick up messages, receive a package, type a letter, photocopy papers and microwave some food. So how will the two sexes cope?
From the start the difference is obvious. Sheila leaves the copier working while she answers the phone; whereas Mohammed doesn’t. Similarly, Maria leaves the copier going as she answers the door whereas Alex stops what he’s doing. On average men only achieved four of the eight tasks whereas all of the women managed all of the tasks.
GIRL: I knew once I boiled the kettle I could start doing something else, and the photocopier would take a few seconds to do three pages, so I knew I could start something else.
BOY: Really and truly I think it’s better just to do one thing at a time, but I was thinking of everything at the same time and it was confusing me.
Narration: Women can carry out parallel tasks because both sides of the brain act simultaneously, whereas men with their poorly connected brains are doomed to complete one activity before starting the next.
SEBASTIAN KRAEMER: The differences that we are familiar with are sometimes called the spotlight mind of the male and the floodlight mind of the female are probably largely socially determined. Women have to learn multitasking because in general they do multitask. Me…most women become mothers and they also work and even if they don’t work, running a family is the equivalent of running a small business. Most women are by nature businesswomen.
Story Contacts
Dr Helen Fisher Email
Department of Anthropology,
Rutgers University,
131 George Street,
New Brunswick, NJ 08901,
U.S.A.
Tel (732) 932-3346
Prof Michael Lewis Email
Distinguished Professor & Director
Department of Pediatrics
UMDNJ–Robert Wood Johnson Medical School
97 Paterson Street
New Brunswick, NJ 08903
Tel: (732) 235-7700
Sebastian Kraemer Email
Head of Medical Discipline
The Tavistock Clinic
120 Belsize Lane
London NW3 5BA
UK
+44 (020) 7447 3730