How men and women’s brains are different
February 22, 2011 Leave a comment
Of course it’s a good idea to reach deep and try to access our feelings, but when we have trouble doing that, it’s not necessarily because we don’t want to or because we’re too stubborn to try. We often struggle with this part of our psyche because we’re not hard-wired to do this easily-blame it on the limbic system, the amygdala, and the hippocampus:
The Limbic System
Current research has found that females often have a larger deep-limbic system than males. The male brain possesses fewer neural pathways to and from the emotion centers in the limbic system. Bingo! Reason number 1 that females may indeed be more in touch with their feelings than males.4
The Amygdala
This section of the brain handles aggression and the emotional connection to events. Interesting studies of the amygdala have found that when men and women are exposed to pictures of sad or frightened people and asked to imagine what they are thinking, their amygdalas light up. But then the researchers note that the men’s amygdalas shut down in a few minutes, and higher cortical functions light up; men simply don’t hold on to emotional responses very long before searching for a rational response to process the emotion. The female brain lingers longer on the negative feelings.5 Let’s say, for example, that your Aunt Josie dies unexpectedly. You and your wife will both feel the emotions typically associated with grief, but you may be quicker to move to the practical side of things: “When will the wake and funeral be? I have that important meeting on Tuesday.” Your wife will probably say hateful things about your insensitivity and wonder how you can be so cold. But the fact is, after processing the feelings of grief, your brain shifted your thoughts into the rational realm. That’s not wrong-it’s just different from the way your wife will deal with Aunt Josie’s death.
The Hippocampus
When an emotional event passes, females tend to hold on to the memory, whereas males tend to let it go. That particular difference can be traced to the brain’s hippocampus (the memory center). It is larger in women and has more neural pathways from it to emotive centers. That’s why women remember emotional events more than men. How many times has your wife asked in exasperation something along the lines of, “How can you not remember how upset you were when your foreman made you rebuild that deck last summer? I had to console you for days!” Well, here’s your answer. A man will remember less of his emotional experiences than a woman will. He can remember the dimensions of the deck he rebuilt, but unless the conflict with his boss was a major issue with him (like something that led to being fired), he hasn’t held on to the emotional meaning of the event. That’s also why it’s so hard for husbands to follow a therapist’s dictate to dig deep and recover those feelings. Sometimes they’re just not there to remember!
