Serge Ginger. Female Brain And Male Brain

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Today you are in luck - you will have two lectures.

One for women; the other is for men!

In fact, I've already started: right now, women and men are hearing different messages!

Hearing with both hemispheres

For example - in general, of course, (with many individual variations) - women perceive my voice twice as loud (more precisely, 2, 3 times louder) than men. So, they perceive my voice as a "cry" (and they think that I am angry), whereas men have the feeling that I am speaking in confidence, with some sympathy …

Women listen to me with both of their hemispheres (left brain and right brain), while men listen to me mostly with their left brain - verbal, logical and therefore critically! Women have more connections between the two hemispheres through the corpus callosum, and my speech is colored with emotions, subjectively perceived through their desires and fears, through their ethical or social values (such as feminism!). They listen to what I say, but for the most part they are attentive to how I do it, sensitive to the tone of my voice, to the rhythm of my breathing, to my intended feelings.

Of course, this dominance of hearing and subjective listening is just details, but the main interest is that we can observe this here and now.

Two different views

To be honest, we belong to two different "species". In our time, we are just completing the decoding of the human genome and, as you may know, it has been proven that humans and monkeys have approximately the same (98.4%) gene composition: and the difference between male and male monkeys is 1, 6%, while the difference between men and women is 5%!

So, the human male is physiologically closer to the male monkey than to the woman!

And, as you may have guessed, the woman is closer to the female monkey!

Of course, this kind of provocation and quantitative sloppiness of calculations has a qualitative aspect: for example, genes that contribute to the development of language, art, philosophy and other sciences, but they highlight a large gap between the sexes - within all animal species, including the human species.

I usually teach my students the effect of brain function on psychotherapy in a four-day workshop (with some demonstrations), but today I only have a few minutes to quickly mention it, and I will give just a short list, about twenty main differences between men and women.

Right Brain - Male

Researchers from all countries now agree with this:

the left brain is more developed in women, the right brain (the so-called "emotional brain") is more developed in men - contrary to popular opinion of the general public (and sometimes even psychotherapists!). This happens under the influence of sex hormones and neurotransmitters (testosterone and the like).

Thus, a woman is more involved in verbal interaction and communication, while a man is more prepared for action and competition.

Already in kindergarten, during 50 minutes of the lesson, little girls speak for 15 minutes, and boys - only 4 minutes (four times less). Boys make noise and fight 10 times more often than girls: on average, 5 minutes versus 30 seconds. When they are 9 years old, girls are 18 months ahead when it comes to verbal development. When they are adults, women answer an average of 20 minutes for each phone call, while men only speak for 6 minutes, and solely to provide urgent information. A woman needs to share her ideas, feelings, thoughts, while a man seeks to control his emotions and tries to find a solution. He interrupts his wife to propose a solution - and the wife doesn't feel heard! In fact, men are more emotional than women, but they do not express their feelings, and this should not be neglected in marriage and during psychotherapy. For a woman, time is more important, the left hemisphere is responsible for this. Space is more important to a man, and here the right hemisphere plays an important role.

Orientation

Woman interacts with Time (left brain).

Man interacts with Space (right brain): The advantage of men in tests of three-dimensional spatial rotation is enormous since childhood (Kimura, 2000).

A woman operates with specific markers: the advantage of women in memorizing or naming specific objects is enormous.

A man operates with abstract concepts: he can improvise "shortcut" the path to get to his car or hotel.

Sense organs

Globally speaking, women are more empathetic, that is, they have more developed sense organs:

• her hearing is more developed: hence the importance of pleasant words, tone of speech, music;

• her tactile sense is more developed: she has 10 times more skin receptors that are sensitive to contact; oxytocin and prolactin (the "attachment and cuddling" hormones) increase her need for touch;

• her sense of smell is more accurate: 100 times more sensitive during certain periods of her menstrual cycle!

• her vomeronasal organ (Vomero Nasal Organ), the real “6th sense” (chemical and organ of relations between people), seems to be more developed and more vividly perceives pheromones that reflect various emotions: sexual desire, anger, fear, sadness … is this called "intuition"?

As for vision, it is more developed in men and more eroticized: hence their keen interest and attention to clothes, cosmetics, jewelry, nudity, pornographic magazines … Although women have better visual memory (for faces, recognition of faces, shape of objects …).

Where do these differences come from? Evolution theory

Researchers explain the fundamental biological and social differences between men and women by natural selection over more than one million years of human evolution. This adaptive evolution, they hypothesize, shaped our brains and senses through the combined action of hormones and neurotransmitters.

Men have adapted to hunting over large areas and distances, as well as fighting and warfare between tribes. Usually they had to chase their prey (animal) in silence, sometimes for several days, and then find their cave again (orientation meaning). They had very little verbal interaction (it is estimated that prehistoric man met no more than 150 people during his entire life).

At the same time, the woman's brain adapted to raising and teaching children, which implies verbal interaction in the limited space of the cave.

So, at the biological level, men were programmed to compete, and women to cooperate.

Thus, everyone can see that biologically, psychotherapy is … a woman's business!

These predispositions seem to be biologically related (hormones and neurotransmitters). They are created during the very first weeks of intrauterine life and seem to change little under the influence of education and culture.

Nature and learning

Today neurologists and geneticists believe that our personality is determined:

• approximately 1/3 - by heredity: chromosomes from the nuclei of our cells (and mitochondrial DNA heredity, 100% transmitted by the mother);

• approximately 1/3 - by intrauterine life: during the first weeks after conception, each embryo (fetus) is female, and masculinization occurs later - this is a slow and difficult hormonal and socially determined conquest.

So the girl is not the boy who lost his penis (Freud's hypothesis), but the boy is the girl who conquered the penis! The so-called penis envy or need for it is a hypothesis that has never been confirmed. Among transsexual people, one can find five times more men wanting to become a woman than women wanting to be a man. During the war, twice as many homosexual men were born, probably due to the stress of the mothers, which upset the hormonal balance.

These two parts - hereditary and congenital - seem to be important: for example, if a twin man is homosexual, his identical twin is also homosexual 50–65% of the time. In the case of fraternal twins - 25–30%, which is two times less, but still 5 times more than in the general population! Homosexuality in many cases can be determined at the age of 1–2 years.

• approximately 1/3 - qualities acquired after birth: the influence of the cultural environment, education, education and training, random circumstances or psychotherapy.

In general, the correlation between individuals is assessed in:

50% - between identical twins (heredity);

25% - between fraternal twins (hormonal "saturation" during intrauterine life);

10% - between brothers and sisters (education);

0% - between strangers.

These three factors - heredity, acquisitions in the womb, acquisitions during life - can be traced in different proportions in many areas of ability: intelligence, music, sports, and even optimism.

Depending on the amount of pessimistic or optimistic genes that you have inherited, you can frame these studies in different ways:

• “our personality is predetermined - from our birth approximately by 2/3”;

• “our personality is created - approximately 2/3 from our conception”.

Hormones

When we put the ball on the ground, the boys hit it, and the girls take the ball and press it to their hearts. This is independent of their education and culture, and has a lot to do with their hormones.

Testosterone is a hormone of desire, sexuality and aggression. It could be called the "hormone of conquest" (military or sexual!). He develops:

• muscle strength (40% muscle in men, 23% in women);

• speed (reactions) and impatience (92% of drivers honking at traffic lights are men!);

• aggression, competition, domination (the dominant male maintains the quality of the species);

• endurance, perseverance;

• wound healing;

• beard and baldness;

• vision (far away, like a "telephoto lens");

• the right side of the body and fingerprints;

• accuracy of throwing;

• orientation;

• attractiveness of a young female (capable of producing offspring).

Effects of estrogen:

• agility, individual finger movements;

• left side of the body and fingerprints;

• On average, 15% fat for men and 25% for women (to protect and nourish the baby);

• hearing: women perceive a wider range of sounds, they sing melodies 6 times more often, they have a keen recognition of sounds and music (to get to know their child).

To summarize: some applications of psychotherapy

Neuroscience research supports a lot of traditional knowledge. It helps in day-to-day work in psychotherapy and counseling (with individuals or couples).

And now, to conclude this short lecture, here are some concrete examples of the daily influence of neuroscience on psychotherapy practice.

They help the therapist:

• Listening to the woman patiently until she finishes without trying to “solve” her problem (which would be a male action-oriented response: instead of her “mother,” the therapist becomes her “father”);

• encourage men to talk more, express and share their feelings;

• emphasize the importance of sight for men and listening for women, especially in erotic foreplay (music, pleasant voice);

• stimulate sick people: finding patients near a window (open to the outside world) helps healing; stimulate the elderly: passive inactivity accelerates aging;

• during psychotherapy to find internal connections between sexuality and aggression (both are regulated by the hypothalamus and testosterone);

• be very careful with the "memories" of early sexual disorders: memories of scenes, real or only seen in the imagination, are in the same areas of the brain and create the same neurochemical reactions (40% of "memories" are false memories, recovered from conscious or unconscious fears or desires);

• mobilize frontal lobes, a center of responsibility and autonomy (being able to say no); hence the wealth of paradoxical and provocative therapy.

Some general notes:

• sexual activity accelerates wound healing (testosterone);

• body-oriented therapy helps to mobilize neural tracts: movement> right brain> limbic brain> emotions> deep engramming (coding) of experience;

• a certain amount of emotions helps memorization; verbalization after helps recovery in the future;

• long-term memorization occurs mainly during sleep (paradoxical sleep phase); therefore, in the case of mental trauma (accident, death of a loved one, rape, terrorist act, earthquake), a psychotherapeutic session before the first episode of dreams is useful ("Emergency Gestalt Therapy", Ginger, 1987);

• women attempt suicide ten times more often (they express their feelings); men are more successful in suicide;

• women speak without thinking; men act without thinking;

• women who are unhappy in personal relationships have problems at work; men who are not happy at work have problems in personal relationships;

• women need intimacy in order to appreciate sexuality; men need sexuality to value intimacy.

Finally, and this is fundamental, to follow the results of research in genetics and neurology and constantly (weekly) update your knowledge.

There is probably a big difference between working with a therapist - male or female!

Our perception of the world is very different … but pleasantly complementary!