The Male Brain Read online

  I didn’t know this when my own son was born, so I gave him lots of unisex toys. When he was three and a half years old, in addition to buying him one of the action combat figures he was begging for, I bought him a Barbie doll. I thought it would be good for him to have some practice playing out nonaggressive, cooperative scenarios. I was delighted by how eagerly he ripped open the box. Once he freed her from the packaging, he grabbed her around the torso and thrust her long legs into midair like a sword, shouting, “Eeeehhhg, take that!” toward some imaginary enemy. I was a little taken aback, as I was part of the generation of second-wave feminists who had decided that we were going to raise emotionally sensitive boys who weren’t aggressive or obsessed with weapons and competition. Giving our children toys for both genders was part of our new child-rearing plan. We prided ourselves on how our future daughters-in-law would thank us for the emotionally sensitive men we raised. Until we had our own sons, this sounded perfectly plausible.

  Scientists have since learned that no matter how much we adults try to influence our children, girls will play house and dress up their dollies, and boys will race around fighting imaginary foes, building and destroying, and seeking new thrills. Regardless of how we think children should play, boys are more interested in competitive games, and girls are more interested in cooperative games. This innate brain wiring is apparently different enough that behavioral studies show that boys spend 65 percent of their free time in competitive games, while girls spend only 35 percent. And when girls are playing, they take turns twenty times more often than boys.

  It is commonly said that “boys will be boys,” and it’s true. My son didn’t turn Barbie into a sword because his environment promoted the use of weapons. He was practicing the instincts of his male brain to aggressively protect and defend. Those stereotypically girl toys I gave him in his first few years of life did not make his brain more feminine any more than giving boy toys to a girl would make her more masculine.

  I later found out that my son had plenty of masculine company when it came to turning Barbie into a weapon. In an Irish nursery school, researchers observed that boys raided the girls’ kitchen toys and even unscrewed the faucet handles in the miniature sink to use as toy guns. In another nursery-school study, researchers found that preschool boys were six times more likely than girls to use domestic objects as equipment or weapons. They used a spoon as a flashlight to explore a make-believe cave, turned spatulas into swords to battle the “bad guys,” and used beans as bullets.

  The next time I talked to Jessica, she told me David came home from kindergarten one day with a black eye. His teacher said he had called Craig a sissy for playing with the girls, and Craig hauled off and hit him. Jessica said, “I felt so bad for him that I took him out for ice cream, and out of the blue, he turned to me and said, ‘I love you, Mommy. I’m gonna marry you when I grow up.’ Seeing him with that black eye and hearing him say that to me just about broke my heart. Why would his best friend hit him like that, just for calling him a name?”

  I told Jessica that by the time a boy is just three and a half, the greatest insult is being called a girl. Boys tease and reject other boys who like girls’ games and toys. And after the age of four, if a boy plays with girls, the other boys soon reject him. Studies show that beginning in the toddler years, boys develop a shared understanding about which toys, games, and activities are “not male” and must therefore be avoided. Boys applaud their male playmates for male-typical behavior while they condemn everything else as “girly.”

  Curiosity about the origins of boys’ strong preference for masculine toys led researchers to explore this further with young rhesus monkeys. Because monkeys are not gender socialized as to which toys are masculine or feminine, they made good subjects for this study. Researchers gave the young male and female monkeys a choice between a wheeled vehicle, the “masculine” toy, and a plush doll figure, the “feminine” toy. The males almost exclusively spent time playing with the wheeled toy. But the females played equal amounts of time with the doll and the wheeled toy. The scientists concluded that gender-specific toy preferences have roots in the male brain circuitry in both boys and male monkeys. And there is further evidence that this toy preference has its origins in fetal brain development. In human girls, a prenatal exposure to high testosterone, due to a disorder called CAH (congenital adrenal hyperplasia), has been found to influence later toy preferences. By the time these CAH girls are three or four, they prefer boy-typical toys more than other girls do.

  Scientists believe that boys’ toys reflect their preference for using big muscle groups when they play. A related preference for action shows up even in art class. Researchers found that elementary-school boys preferred to draw action scenes like car and plane crashes. Nearly all their drawings captured a dynamic movement, and they used only a few colors. The girls in the study drew people, pets, flowers, and trees and used many more colors than the boys did.

  David not only liked drawing action scenes and playing with boy toys, but by the age of five, his favorite board game was Chutes and Ladders. He would do anything to win, including cheat. He’d slyly move his marker the wrong number of spaces so he could climb up a ladder or avoid having to slide down a chute. And he was devastated when he lost. Jessica said, “Every time Craig and David play this game, they end up fighting.” I could relate. When my son was in kindergarten, we had to remove all the win-lose board games and put them in the closet for a while. Victory is critically important to boys because, for them, play’s real purpose is to determine social ranking. At an early age, the male brain is raring for play-fighting, defending turf, and competing. Losing is unacceptable. To a young male brain, the victory cry is everything.

  PUSHING HIS LIMITS

  “Aarghhh!” David shouted as he charged forward, thrusting and jabbing his new laser sword at Craig. Not to be outdone, Craig snatched the sword out of David’s hands and took off running with it. But he made it only a few yards before David caught up and grabbed the back of his mud-caked shirt. Within seconds they were on the ground wrestling for possession of the sword. To someone not familiar with the ways of young boys, this would look like a fight. But David and Craig were having a blast.

  Boys wrestle and pummel each other with gusto, competing for toys and trying to overpower each other. They play this way up to six times more than girls do, a reality that Jessica now found highly entertaining, although she hadn’t always seen the humor in it. Boys discover their place in the world by pushing all of their body’s physical limits, so it’s not just fighting but also being able to fart or burp the loudest or the longest that gives a boy bragging rights. Jessica said, “I’ll never understand why David and Craig think farting on each other is so funny. But they think it’s hilarious, and Paul laughs as hard as they do.”

  For David and Craig, every day was filled with a series of serious physical contests. How fast can you run? How high can you climb? How far can you jump? A boy’s success or failure in sports and other contests can make or break his sense of self. Even though Jessica could appreciate that males are naturally driven to test their physical abilities, she still worried that David would get hurt. But Paul—who grew up with three brothers—knew that the bumps and bruises were a normal part of boyhood.

  During the juvenile pause, boys imitate their dads, uncles, and older male cousins, and they’re particularly intrigued with the men who stand out as alpha males. Go to the zoo and watch the primates, and you’ll see the most powerful male sitting by himself chewing grass and the little guys running up and attacking him from behind. The little guys are playing at things they’ll be required to do in their future. When the alpha male has had enough, he’ll shoo away the juveniles. Undaunted, they will continue to wrestle with each other, literally tumbling across the ground. This rough-and-tumble play is also observed in groups of human boys everywhere.

  SHOWING HIS STRENGTH

  By the time boys are in first grade, they get a brain high when they show their
strength and aggression. Using physical force together with insults is even better. As child researcher Eleanor Maccoby says, “These boys are just trying to have their kind of fun.” This way of playing gives their brain a massive feel-good reward in the form of a dopamine rush. The neurochemical dopamine is addictively rewarding—the brain likes it and wants more—so boys are always seeking the thrill of the next high. That’s why they love scary movies, haunted houses, and daring each other to take risks. Boys don’t necessarily want to get hurt, but they usually think the excitement is worth it. Jessica said, “I’m just happy to get through a day without putting ice or Band-Aids on somebody.”

  By grade school, the play styles of boys and girls in groups have diverged, and children self-impose sex segregation. Observational studies found that, worldwide, boys on playgrounds wrestle, roughhouse, and mock-fight frequently; girls do not. In addition to their different play styles, boys and girls may also dislike playing together because, as research shows, by the time boys are in first grade, they’re no longer paying much attention to girls or listening to what they say. A study of boys in a first-grade classroom in Oregon found that boys paid the most attention first and foremost to what other boys said. The teachers placed second, and the girls placed a distant third—if they placed at all. As a matter of fact, ignoring girls altogether was the most common. David and most of the other boys in his first-grade class had already sworn off playing with girls, and their female classmates were just fine with that. They didn’t like playing with the boys either.

  A study on an Irish kindergarten playground may shed even more light on the girls’ and boys’ interactions with each other. The researchers noted that the boys monopolized the tricycles and bicycles and played ramming games, while girls—on the few occasions they got a turn to ride—were very careful not to hit other kids’ bikes or anything else. The boys even became territorial and possessive of their bikes, showing a willingness to fight for them that the girls did not show.

  FIRST IN LINE

  Jessica said she couldn’t understand it when David’s teacher wrote on his report card that he was always fighting to be the first in line for recess and lunch. Since Grace never seemed to mind waiting her turn in line, the importance David placed on being first took Jessica by surprise.

  The pecking order clearly matters more to boys. Studies show that by age two, a boy’s brain is driving him to establish physical and social dominance. And by the age of six, boys tell researchers that real fighting is the “most important thing to be good at.” Scientists have also learned that boys are remarkably fast at establishing dominance in a group through rough-and-tumble play.

  In a study conducted with boys and girls at a nursery school, the boys demonstrated a clear hierarchy by the end of their first play session. Among the girls, some dominance hierarchy was established too, but it was more fluid. In the boy groups, however, by the end of just the second play session, the boys unanimously agreed about the ranking position of each boy, and these rankings remained stable for the remainder of the six-month study.

  How do boys know so quickly who’s tough and who’s not? While bigger boys typically rank higher in status, researchers found that the leaders weren’t always the biggest. In the study, the alpha boys were the ones who refused to back down during a conflict. These boys aggressively demonstrated their strength by picking on, intimidating, or roughing up boys who challenged them. In the hormone tests taken on all the boys in the group, it turned out that alpha boys had higher testosterone levels than did the other boys. And to the researchers’ surprise, the rank a boy had attained in the group by the age of six predicted where he’d be in the hierarchy at age fifteen.

  Of course, only one boy can be the top dog, so the rest must find other ways to succeed and avoid being picked on in the boy pack. One strategy is to form an alliance with the alpha boy by giving him things he wants and doing him favors. When my son was in elementary school, he casually asked me to buy him the biggest bags of Chex Mix to send to school with him for snack time. I thought he wanted to share them with his friends, so I didn’t question it. It wasn’t until I inadvertently bought him the smaller size that I discovered why he’d wanted the big bag. It turned out that he’d been using Chex Mix at recess “to hire everyone he could hire,” as he put it or, as I saw it, to buy off the top dogs and appease the bullies. When he saw the smaller bag on the counter by his backpack, he shouted, “Now I’m done for! And all because of you!”

  Boys can usually work things out within the checks and balances of the boy pack, but this cruel Lord of the Flies system still strikes horror in most mothers’ hearts—including mine. Regardless of how mothers feel about it, though, boys instinctively know they must learn how to succeed within the male hierarchy. And that’s not the only type of learning boys do differently.

  SQUIRMING BOYS LEARN BETTER

  Tightly clutching the remotes in their fists, David and Craig punched, jabbed, and dodged, occasionally throwing an insult along with a punch. As with many boys their age, Wii had become their favorite toy. To use this active video-game system, the boys mimicked the action they wanted to see displayed on the screen. When David threw a punch, his video character mirrored him. When Craig dodged the punch, his character did the same.

  Research from Stanford University showed that playing Wii activates parts of the male brain linked to dopamine production. Boys get rewarded by this feel-good brain chemical, just as they do when they’re roughhousing. The more opponents they conquer, the more stimulated their male brain becomes, and the more dopamine their brains release. It’s a thrill a minute.

  Even in a conventional video game, when a boy is not actually moving, watching every move of the athlete or video character still gives him a thrill. Moreover, the signal gets sent from his brain through the neurons and into the muscles in his body even if he isn’t moving. If we were to watch David’s body and brain with an fMRI camera when he plays a game like Super Mario Brothers, every time he makes Mario jump, we’d see David’s brain activate the neurons that control his own jumping muscles. He would embody the movement he sees even though he’s not really jumping. Boys react more physically to their environment than girls do in this way. Their muscles are practically twitching in response to everything they see going on around them. And that difference may mean that boys use their muscles and nervous systems more than girls to think and express themselves as well.

  For instance, when a boy first learns to read the word run, his brain fires messages to his leg muscles and makes them twitch: He’s rehearsing the action of running in order to learn the word. And to read and understand the meaning of the word slug, David’s sensation area in the brain for slimy and squishy is activated. Then the movement area of his brain for slow and slithering is engaged, and even the emotional area of his brain for disgust gets into the action. These brain areas are needed for him to completely embody, learn, and remember the meaning of slug. Scientists refer to this process as embodied cognition, because the muscles and body parts he uses to learn a word will stay connected to the meaning of that word. This is true for all our brains but seems particularly significant for boys. It may annoy their teachers, but boys who squirm can learn better than boys who sit still.

  Boys like David are twisting and turning all the time, and scientists believe this may also give them their advantage at spatial manipulation. By age five, according to researchers in Germany, boys are using different brain areas than girls to visually rotate an object in their mind’s eyes. The boys mentally rotated the pictures of the objects by using both sides of their brain’s spatial-movement area in the parietal lobe. Girls used only one side to do the task. While that in itself is revealing, what I found most intriguing is that this spatial-movement area in the male brain is locked in the “on” position. That means it’s always working in the background on autopilot. But in the female brain, this parietal area is “off,” waiting in standby mode, and not turned on until it’s needed.

&nbs
p; From age five on, mental rotation of objects is one of the biggest cognitive differences between boys and girls. In the boy brain, solving problems that require spatial rotation begins in the visual cortex and goes straight to the already “on” parietal spatial-movement area in both hemispheres. It then fires signals to the muscles that cause them to mimic the shape and position of the object. The researchers concluded that most boys, and also some girls, get a holistic, visceral sense of how an object occupies space—they embody its reality, making it easier for them to grasp its three-dimensionality.

  Curious to find out how this applies practically in the classroom setting, researchers studied students in a grade-school math class to see how girls and boys solved conceptual math problems and how long it took them. The boys solved the problems faster than the girls. But what was most surprising to the researchers was that most of the boys, when asked to explain how they got the answer, gave an explanation without using any words. Instead, they squirmed, twisted, turned, and gestured with their hands and arms to explain how they got the answer. The boys’ body movements were their explanations. Words, in this instance, were a hindrance.

  What also got my attention about this study was what the researchers did next with the girls. In the following six weeks of the experiment, they taught the girls to explain their answers with the same muscle movements the boys had made without using words. At the end of the six weeks, once the girls stopped talking and started twisting and turning, they solved the problems as quickly as the boys. The male and female brains have access to the same circuits but, without intervention, use them differently.

  THAT BOY SMELL