The Female Brain

From Femme Mentale in SFGate, on the new book The Female Brain. It's based on some interesting sex-based neuroanatomical research but ends up as:

Brizendine uses those [anatomical] differences to explain everything from why teenage girls feverishly swap text messages during class, to why women fake orgasms to why menopausal women leave their husbands.

So the next time parents scold their daughters for excessive text messaging, consider Brizendine's neurological explanation:

"Connecting through talking activates the pleasure centers in a girl's brain. We're not talking about a small amount of pleasure. This is huge. It's a major dopamine and oxytocin rush, which is the biggest, fattest neurological reward you can get outside of an orgasm."

Yeah, and *HUGZ* feels just like an embrace in person. OMG hawt <3 <3 <3 ;-/

It's not unlike the maps pictured above, but you can't really blame bad neuro-journalism on the media when a neuropsychiatrist is quoted saying things like:

"Women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion, while men have a small country road," she writes. Men, however, "have O'Hare Airport as a hub for processing thoughts about sex, where women have the airfield nearby that lands small and private planes."

I could maybe buy into the Lear jet theory if she wasn't also making assumptions about air traffic controllers. "Thoughts about sex enter women's brains once every couple of days; for men, thoughts about sex occur every minute."

Has she not seen Sex and the City?