Our promise to you: this will help you understand at least one aspect of at least one man you know.
To get a better grasp on male behavior, we picked up, well, The Male Brain¹. Here’s what we found:
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Boys
Even when little boys are in the womb, they don’t like girly stuff
The male brain has a substance, the Mullerian Inhibiting Substance (MIS), also known as the “Defeminizer” which strips away everything that is feminine from the male by suppressing brain circuits for female-type behaviors. This is also what destroys the female reproductive organs and helps build male ones.
Why won’t he look at me?
By the time a boy is seven months old, he can tell when his mother is angry by looking at her face. But by the time he’s twelve months old, he can easily ignore her because his brain has built immunity to those expressions.
Stop the guns
Even if you give a boy a typically ‘girl’ toy (such as a Barbie or a pot of tea), he will play with it in a completely different way (turning Barbie into a gun; smashing the pot of tea). The male brain instincts are to aggressively protect and defend, so their preference for toys like weapons and cars are not entirely socialized.
Boys also use embodied cognition more than girls. When they learn a word, they use muscles and body parts to embed those meanings in their brains. So if they hear the word ‘run’, parts of their nervous system send signals to their muscles as if they themselves are running.
Teens
Hormone overdrive
Between the ages of nine and fourteen, testosterone levels increase twentyfold. It’s the testosterone that ‘masculinises’ all the thoughts and behaviors that emerge from his brain.
They’re not faking it
When teenage boys act bored, they are actually bored. The pleasure centre in the teen boy brain is practically numb compared to the adult or child brain, and requires more than normal levels of stimulation.
Men
Why the angry face?
The male brain area for suppressing anger, the septum, is smaller than it is in females; so men tend to express anger more commonly than women. The angriest of faces tend to belong to men who have the highest levels of testosterone. Research has also found that after anger reaches a certain level in men, those high testosterone conditions also induce pleasure, making the anger grow, and harder to stop.
Men make better players
The unique way fathers play with their children makes children more curious and improves their learning ability. Daddy play is more creative and stimulating.
The way mothers talk to their children is different than how fathers do. And although fathers may have a rougher style, researchers think fathers act as a bridge for teaching children to communicate in the real world, where they will discover that people don’t respond to their needs and thoughts the way their mothers have been doing at home.
Daddycare
Hormonal changes occur in fathers-to-be. Testosterone levels go down and prolactin goes up in order to prepare them for paternal behavior. By the time children are born, fathers are better at hearing and emotionally responding to crying babies than non-dads are.
The same brain circuits that are activated when people fall in love also activate when parents interact with their babies (and these are reinforced by gazing into the baby’s eyes or with skin-to-skin contact). The more a man holds and cares for his child, the more connections his brain starts making for paternal behavior.
What women want
For reasons unknown, married men live 1.7 years longer than single men.
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Notes:
¹Brizendine, Louann, M.D. The Male Brain. Three Rivers Press. New York. 2010.
