The male brain and the female brain

Why do most men use the phone to exchange information and not to chat? Why do many women like to talk about their feelings and relationships so much? These differences between the sexes and many others that are familiar to all of us from everyday life, receive a new and surprising explanation in the book by the renowned psychologist and autism researcher, Simon Barron-Cohen *The book was published by Am Oved

Why do most men use the phone to exchange information and not to chat? Why do many women like to talk about their feelings and relationships so much? These differences between the sexes and many others that are familiar to all of us from everyday life, receive a new and surprising explanation in the book of the well-known psychologist and researcher of autism, Simon Barron-Cohen.

Barron-Cohen claims that about 95 percent of the population has one of these three brains: a female brain, a male brain and a balanced brain.

The female brain is built first and foremost for empathy - a natural and spontaneous connection to the thoughts and feelings of another person. Whereas the male brain is built first and foremost for understanding systems and building them - an intuitive understanding of the basic rules that govern the behavior of a system, in order to predict its operation or to invent a new system.

In the balanced brain, empathy and systemicity are equally strong.

The remaining 5 percent have an extreme female brain or an extreme male brain.

Barron-Cohen confirms his theory with a large number of examples and studies from many and varied fields, starting with personality tests and ending with the physiology of the brain, and especially in his own studies, which show that the essential difference between the male brain and the female brain already appears in newborn babies.

Towards the end of the book, Barron-Cohen presents a fascinating and revolutionary theory about mild autism, known as Asperger's syndrome. According to him, those with this syndrome have an extreme male brain, which explains why many of them excel at analyzing highly complex systems but are unable to form emotional bonds with those close to them.

Understanding the essential difference between the sexes, according to Barron-Cohen, helps us not only to understand the weaknesses of our partners, but also to solve one of the great scientific puzzles of our time.

Simon Baron-Cohen is Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge and Head of the Cambridge Autism Research Institute.

The Essential Difference by Simon Barron-Cohen, published by Am Oved series 'Efkim Mada', edited by Atalia Zilber, translation: Yossi Milo, 271 pages.

From the book The Opening Chapter, Chapter 1:

The male brain and the female brain

The essential mental differences between the two sexes are an obviously complex and delicate issue. I could tiptoe around it, but it seems to me that you would like me to present the theory of this book in plain and simple words. So here she is:

The female brain is built first and foremost for empathy
The male brain is built first and foremost for understanding systems and building them.

In the remaining pages of this book I hope to convince you
that this theory has growing evidence.

However, I can assume that even on this first page there are some readers who are horrified. Will this theory provide ammunition for reactionaries seeking to defend the inequality in the opportunities given to men and women? These readers may not rest until they are convinced that this theory can be put to progressive uses. To the extent that I can assume that some readers will be willing to go a long way with me and examine the idea, which was previously considered taboo, that there are mental differences between men and women.

But as the underlying reasons for these gender differences become clear, these readers may find things they would rather not see. Some of them may hope that these differences are due to life experience alone; But what if they also reflect innate biological factors? Furthermore, if there are indeed fundamental mental differences between the sexes, can they be changed? And perhaps it is appropriate to welcome the differences between the sexes and not to fear them?

In the following chapters I will discuss such and similar issues. But first I would like to expand on the two main claims of the theory.

The Female Brain: Empaths

Empathizing is the urge to stand up for another person's feelings and thoughts and respond to them with an appropriate emotion. Empathy does not only involve a cold consideration of what another person thinks and feels (what is sometimes called "mind reading"). Even psychopaths are capable of this. Empathy occurs when we feel an appropriate emotional response, an emotion evoked by the other person's emotion, and it is done to understand another person, predict their behavior and create an emotional connection and resonance with them.

Let's say you understand that Jane is in pain, but you are indifferent or detached or happy or self-absorbed. This is not empathy. Now imagine that not only do you notice Jane's pain, but you also immediately feel worried, and you cry out and feel a desire to rush to her and help ease her pain. This is empaths. And it includes distinguishing and responding to every emotion and every state of mind, not just obvious emotions such as pain. Empathy arises from a natural desire to care for others. The question of where this desire comes from is controversial, and I defer dealing with it to chapters 7 and 8.

In this book I will examine the evidence that women, on average, feel spontaneous empathy to a greater extent than men. Note that I'm not talking about all women: just the average woman compared to the average man. Empathy is a skill (or set of skills). And like any other skill, such as athleticism or mathematical or musical ability, we all have it to varying degrees. And just as we wonder why a particular person is gifted, average, or even deficient in one of these other areas, so we can imagine individual differences in empathy. Empathy can even be seen as a trait, like height, because it is also something in which we differ from each other. And just as you can measure a person's height, so you can measure differences between people in empathy. In Chapter 4 I will examine some methods for measuring these differences.

Figure 1 shows this concept in a visual representation. Most people belong to the center of the field, but the edge of this bell curve shows that there are people who fall in empathy to a greater extent than others (those on the left edge of the curve), while those on the right edge have been blessed with a high ability in this area. When we delve deeper into the matter we will find out if indeed women are blessed with a type A brain (from the language of empathy).

The male brain: systemic

Systemizing is the urge to analyze, research and build a system. The system intuitively understands how things work, or reveals the basic rules that govern the behavior of the system. He does this to understand the system and predict its operation, or to invent a new system.

There are systems of all kinds; A blessing, a vehicle, a plant, a library catalog, a piece of music, a cricket stadium and even a military unit - these are all systems. All of them operate on inputs and produce outputs and use "if-then" type affinity rules. A simple example of a system is a light dimmer. Imagine the light as an input. If you turn the dimmer dial slightly clockwise (action) [then] the ceiling bulb will be more alert (output 1). If you turn the dial further, [then] the bulb will be even more careful (output 2). The correlation rules of the "if-then" type allow us to predict the way most non-living systems work. By monitoring the input, operation and output it is possible to find out what allows the system to operate more or less efficiently and what is the range of things it is capable of doing. Just as empathy is strong enough to handle the hundreds of emotions that exist, so systems is a process that can handle a huge number of systems.

I argue that, on average, men spontaneously engage in systematics to a greater extent than women. And again, notice that I did not say "all men". I only mean statistical averages, and you can learn about the rule from the exceptions as well. But for the time being we will call the male brain a type M brain (from the language of systems).

And similar to the idea that within the population we all differ from each other in our degree of empathy, so there are individual differences in our degree of systematicity. Most of us fall in the center of the graph in Figure 2, but a lucky few fall on the right edge. For others, systems (such as car engines, computers, science, mathematics and engineering) are a puzzle, and their place is at the other end of the distribution - on the left margin. Later we will see if indeed the men (on average) stand at a higher level in the system skills scale.

Systemicity vs. Empathy

Is it possible to take a systemic approach towards a person? Systemicity works well when trying to understand a system within a person, such as the ovaries in a woman's body. One can discover, for example, that among twenty-year-old pregnant women, one out of ten will abort her child, while among thirty-five-year-old pregnant women, the abortion rate will rise to one in five. At the age of forty one out of three women will miscarry, and at the age of only two years older, forty-two, nine women out of ten will miscarry. In this example, I applied a systemic approach to female fertility. In other words, I treated it as a rule-bound system. The input to the system is the woman's ovaries, the action is the increase in the woman's age and the output is the risk of miscarrying the child.

Systematicity can also be useful when trying to understand a group of people as a system, for example, the pattern of traffic accidents on a certain highway or voting patterns in elections; Hence the concept of "movement" system or "election" system. These systems, like any other system, can be subject to laws, finite and deterministic.

But systematicity hardly advances us at all in most daily social interactions. Some philosophers claim that our understanding of human beings in everyday life (our "folk psychology") is based on rules, and it contains "if-then" rules or generalizations such as "If a person has had a hard day [then] he will be grumpy." And yet our behavior and feelings are not controlled by laws that are useful. How can you explain the fact that there are people who feel wonderful after a hard day? Furthermore, the types of rules that can be derived from our behavior and emotions are hardly helpful to those who are trying to understand, or predict, the moment-to-moment changes in a person's behavior. Give your opinion on the rule "If people get what they want, [then] they will be happy." Suppose we follow this rule and give Julia what she said she wanted for her birthday; Why is she still not happy? Systematism cannot buy it a grip on matters such as a person's changing emotions.

Compared to systematicity, which is the natural way to understand and predict the nature of events and objects, empathy is the natural way to understand people. Let's try to empathize with Julia in the last example. She did celebrate her birthday and received the gift she wanted, but that week she was expecting answers about the tests she did at the hospital. Maybe the results were not good. Maybe we should have asked her how she was doing and connected to her feelings, to her mental world. Simple rules about human behavior are almost useless even in this seemingly simple interaction.

As you can see, systematicity and empathy are completely different types of processes. One process - empathy - is used to understand a person's behavior, and the other - systemicity - is used to predict almost everything else. In order to be systematic, you need detachment and distance to monitor information and follow and see what are the factors that cause changes in information. whereas for the purpose of empathy you will need the learning of closeness and connection to understand that you are interacting with a person, not an object, with a person who has feelings, and his feelings affect your feelings.

Ultimately, empathy and empathy rely on separate sets of brain regions. These are not mysterious processes but processes based on our neurophysiology.

The main brain types

In 1987 Doreen Kimura, a psychologist from Vancouver, asked the question "Are the minds of men and women really different?" And she went on to say, "It would be amazing if it turned out that the minds of men and women are not different, if you take into account the great morphological differences and the behavioral differences, differences that are often amazing, between women and men."1 Kimura is a clear example of the traditional researchers in this field, who emphasized two Different dimensions in defining the male and female brain: language (female superiority) and spatial ability (male superiority). I do not deny the importance of language and spatial ability in defining the differences between the sexes, but it seems to me that there are two other dimensions that have been forgotten: empathy and systemicity. Furthermore, it is possible that the superiority of women in the field of language is due to a greater empathic ability, and the good spatial ability of men is perhaps only one side of their systematicity. But more on this subject later.

We all have both systemic and empathetic skills. The question is, how much of each do we have? When it comes to measurement, we need good benchmarks or tests for each of these skill areas. Later in the book, two of our tests will be presented: the Systemizing Quotient (SQ) test and the Empathy Quotient (EQ) test. The differences between those whose score in one of these tests is higher than another person's score are important, and we will discuss these differences. But for now we can compare three types of brains. Three broad groups of people can be seen in them:

Humans whose empathy is stronger (more developed) than systematicity. In abbreviated notation: A > M (the sign > means "greater than"). This is the brain I call a female brain" or type A brain.

People whose systemicity is stronger than empathy, and in abbreviated notation: M > A. This is the brain I call the male brain or M-type brain.

People whose empathy and systemicity are equally strong, and in abbreviated notation: m = a. I will call such a brain a balanced brain" or a "type MA brain".

Which of these do you belong to? Type A, Type M or Type MA? You can now guess the answer, but it is not about how you would like to see yourself, but about your actual scores on these aptitude tests. We all may fantasize or delude ourselves that we have good strength and physical fitness and are able to catch a bus in a run. But what will turn out if they put us to a real test?

Now we will describe two less common brain types:

1. People with an extreme male brain, i.e. extreme M-types. We will mark them with the abbreviated notation M >> A (the sign >> indicates a very large difference between the skills in the two fields.) For these, the systematicity is normal or even highly developed, while their empathy is lacking. In other words, these people may be talented programmers, but they may be "mindblind".2 In chapter 10 we will deal with people on the autism spectrum and check if they fit the profile of the extreme male brain.

2. Humans with an extreme female brain, i.e. extreme A types, and in abbreviated notation A >> M. These are endowed with normal or even highly developed empathic skills, while their systematicity is lacking. In other words, it is possible that these people excel in empathy, know how to connect accurately and surprisingly quickly to the feelings of others, and yet, they may be "blind to systems". In chapter 12 we will ask whether an extreme female brain does exist, and if so, whether this psychological profile raises special difficulties.

I would like to linger a moment longer on the idea of ​​autism as the radicalization of the male brain and briefly describe the characters we are going to meet later on in our journey. Imagine a person who excels in systematics so much that he recognizes repeated names of photographers in the lists of participants in the making of various television films. How does he keep track of so much information in the tiny print on the TV background? Or draw you an excellent system that knows how to tell you that if March 22 falls on a Tuesday, November 22 will also fall on a Tuesday. How did he manage to adhere to the rules governing the calendar in such great detail? But now imagine that this systemic champion has a very hard time with empathy. He may not realize that the mere fact that he considers someone a friend, does not mean that the thing is mutual, or not notice that his wife is depressed except when she really cries.

Our gender does not determine our brain type

Suppose I can see you now. Of course, it is enough for me to look at a person, and even just their face, to determine if they are a man or a woman. But I don't suppose for a moment that a person's gender teaches me anything about the type of mind they have as an individual.

From the evidence I will present here it appears that not all men have a male brain and not all women have a female brain. In fact, there are women with male brains and men with female brains. The main claim of this book is that more men than women have type M brains, and more women than men have type A brains.

Hence, if you are a man and you are going to a job interview in the nursing and care professions, and if you are a woman on your way to a job interview in a technical profession, you should not be afraid that the interviewer will come to any conclusion regarding your skills to do the job based only on your gender. I, for example, am a man, but I am not at all suitable for work in technical support of any system (computers or other systems). I was actually attracted to the profession of clinical psychology - a world dominated by women. When I need advice on how to fix my computer I turn to one wonderful woman from Trinity College, Tracy Shema. And two senior scientists, Svetlana and Rebecca, help me understand the biochemistry of hormones. (I will properly introduce Svetlana and Rebecca to you in chapter 8, as they both have interesting stories to tell us.)

When I talk about mental differences between the sexes, I am only dealing with statistical averages. And if something should be made clear from the start, it's this: the search for differences between the sexes is not stereotyping. The search for differences between the sexes allows us to discover how social and biological influences work on the two sexes in different ways, but it says nothing about individual human beings. If we find that men, compared to women, are on average taller, heavier, stronger, faster, hairier, their heads are wider and their arms are longer, this does not mean that we will not find women who deviate from this rule. (My grandfather, the endocrinologist Robert Greenblatt, documented in his writings several instructive examples of such exceptions.3) Stereotyping, on the other hand, judges individual people according to a set of assumptions that pertain to the group, and this is an obscene and harmful thing. We condemn it in contexts of discriminating against people due to their race, gender, age or status, and for good reason. Stereotyping reduces individual people to the average, while science recognizes the fact that many people exceed the average range of their group.

Mars and Venus

Some books on the differences between the sexes take a rather light-hearted approach. Although reading them is entertaining, from a scientific point of view there is not much benefit in stating that "men are from Mars and women are from Venus". The joke that we come from two different planets, for example, distracts us from the serious fact that the two species evolved on the same planet, and even so it is possible to notice the differences in their ways of thinking. We need to know the reason for this, and in chapter 9 I will examine the possibility that the brain types of the two species evolved out of adaptation to different biological niches due to different evolutionary pressures. Furthermore, the view that men come from Mars and women from Venus presents the differences between them too extreme a presentation. The species are indeed different from each other, but not so different that we are unable to understand each other.

There is another reason why I believe that a serious book on this subject is needed. Humor is important and there is room for satire, but light jabs at the opposite sex can easily degenerate into sexism. For example, I recently heard a joke told by a British television talk show host: "Women are Venus, men are stupid." Several women in the audience laughed, and the presenter's partner asked: "Do we really need men? What are they needed for?" To this the first waitress answered her: "I heard that the men are easy to train and you can make good pets out of them." In some respects, such sexist slurs from women on men are incredible, and they would not be tolerated if the joke was about a woman, a black person, a Jew or a homosexual. That day my teenage son showed me a book he had read. The book fell and opened to a page with this joke: "Why did God create women? Because the dogs can't open the fridge and bring beer." Such sexist humor is obscene, and when we hear women using it against men it sounds to our ears like the humor of victims who have become offensive. I do not believe that the differences between the sexes should not be used as a subject for jokes, but in my opinion it is important that we do not repeat the old forms of oppression in new clothes.

The politics of investigating gender differences

Responsible scientists in this field are careful not to perpetuate the mistaken attitudes of previous generations and reject the assumption that the differences between the sexes mean that one of the sexes is generally inferior. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Gustave Le Bon made a general mistake when he concluded that the inferiority of women "is so clear that no one can dispute it even for a moment."5 A hundred years later, it is not difficult to dispute Le Bon's position. Often (if not always) psychological differences between the sexes are indeed revealed, but there are areas where women excel more than men and areas where men are superior to women. In general intelligence, one gender is not better than the other, but the profiles of the two genders (reflecting relative advantages in certain areas) are indeed different. I am testing the claim that women are better at empathizing and men are better at systems, and that it does not follow from these differences that one gender is endowed with a higher general intelligence than the other.

In previous years, the very idea of ​​psychological differences between the sexes caused a public uproar. In the XNUMXs and XNUMXs, there was an ideology that dismissed the psychological differences between the sexes as a myth, or claimed that if there are differences here, they are not substantial - that is, they do not reflect deep differences between the sexes as such, but different cultural forces acting on the two sexes. But from evidence that was discovered in separate laboratories and accumulated over many decades, I was convinced that fundamental differences do exist and it is worth dealing with them. The old idea that these differences might all stem from cultural origins is now too simplistic.

We must be careful, of course, and avoid the hypothesis that the differences between the sexes arise from biology alone. Those who make such an assumption make the opposite error to the error of the sixties and seventies, when it is widely believed that all differences between the sexes reflect socialization processes. Like some of the readers of this book, I would like to believe that within them, the man's soul and the woman's soul are not fundamentally different. That would be a very satisfying truth. It will result from it that all those hundreds of years of inequality between the sexes that have passed through the world - inequality that still prevails today - can basically be tamed and eliminated with fairer and better methods of education. I am still steadfast in my support for efforts to eliminate inequality in society. But in chapters 7 and 9 I discuss, among other things, the question of whether it is possible to explain the differences found between the sexes in friendship alone, or whether an important role was also known for biology.

It is understood that the discussion of the differences between the sexes throws us straight into the heart of the polemic about political correctness. Some argue that the very search for differences between the sexes shows a sexist attitude that seeks to perpetuate the historical injustices done to women. There is no doubt about the reality of the oppression women were oppressed, and perpetuating it is the last thing I would want. In the same way, I don't want to oppress the men - a goal set for them by some female writers. And yet it is possible to ask questions about the differences between the sexes without any intention of oppressing one sex or another.

It took me over five years to write this book. The reason is that in the nineties this issue was so politically sensitive that I had difficulty completing it. I put off finishing the writing because I wasn't sure if it would be possible to have a meaningful discussion about psychological differences between the sexes. Fortunately, the number of people, including feminists, who understand that posing such questions does not necessarily lead to the perpetuation of inequality between the sexes, is now increasing. On the contrary, it is precisely by buying knowledge and using it responsibly that sexism can be eliminated. My friends, most of whom consider themselves feminists, convinced me that the time was ripe for such a discussion. My friends are also starting to recognize this.

It can be said that sexism occurs when it is determined that a certain man or woman is x or y only based on their gender. If there is any message in this book, it is to analyze such a sexist assumption and show how wrong it is. In a legal battle for custody of a child, do not assume in advance that the preferred parent is the mother, because it is certainly possible that the father has a great empathic ability and is good at connecting to the needs of his child, while the mother is unable to do so. Family courts generally assume that the better parent is the mother, but such a presumption is fundamentally wrong. This is stereotyping. And don't assume that a girl who enrolls in mathematics studies at the university will not succeed in her studies. She may be more systemically competent than the guy waiting outside to apply. Humans are individual beings.

At the dawn of this new millennium, the picture I saw in the nineties has changed radically. Compared to the old type of feminists, who declared that anything a man can do a woman can do just as well nowadays, many feminists are proud that there are things that most women can do and most men can't do just as well. Hosting a large group without offending anyone and making each guest feel welcome and belonging is just one example of something that many men may shy away from. This is a task that many women know how to perform without much effort. Talking about a friend's delicate personal problem in a way that will make the friend feel that his interlocutor supports him, and cares for him and quickly understands him, this is also something that many women feel is part of them, but many men would stumble upon it or prefer to avoid it altogether. These abilities require good empathic skills.

We've always known that people gravitate to certain topics when they're looking for something to read. At the newsstand on the train platform or in the departure lounge at the airport, those with type A brains will reach for the magazine rack for fashion, romance, beauty, intimacy, emotional issues, personal counseling, interpersonal relationship counseling, and parenting. Those with type M brains will go to another shelf (we have to thank the store owners who separate them for us with such clarity), which contains magazines dealing with computers, cars, boats, photography, consumer guides, science, science fiction, do-it-yourself, musical equipment, audio systems, Action, firearms, tools and camping.

Furthermore, people with different types of brains tend to engage in very different hobbies. Male-minded people often spend many happy hours maintaining their car or motorcycle, flying tiny airplanes, sailing, watching birds or trains, doing math, improving their audio systems, programming or playing computer games, DIY assembly, photography, and the like. Those with a feminine mind would prefer to spend their time at morning coffee or dinners in the company of friends and advise them on problems in interpersonal relationships, or take care of people or pets, or work as a volunteer in telephone aid organizations listening to anonymous callers who are depressed, hurt, needy and even suicidal.

The same types of issues that differentiate men's and women's minds in choosing reading material and hobbies also generally characterize men's and women's choice of television and radio programs. These distinctions are familiar to us. They are also sold to magazine publishers, store clerks and television show producers. But from what age do these differences exist? Let's go back to childhood and get to know a real boy and a real girl.

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