The Female Brain by Louann Md Brizendine Page A

getting them to agree to have sex. Females, as a result, had to get even better at spotting male lies and exaggerations—and the female brain is now well-adapted to this task. A study by the Stanford University psychologist Eleanor Maccoby showed, for example, that girls learn to tell the difference between reality and fairy tales or “just-pretend” play earlier than boys. By adulthood, modern females have fine-tuned their superior ability to read emotional nuance in tone of voice, eye gaze, and facial expressions.
    As a result of this extra cautiousness, the typical female brain isn’t as ready to admit to being overwhelmed by infatuation or the sheer excitement of sexual behavior as is the male. Women do reach the same or a higher romantic end point, but they’re often slower to confess to being in love and more careful than males in the beginning weeks and months of a relationship. Male brains have a different neurological love wiring. Brain-imaging studies of women in love show more activity in many more areas, especially gut feelings, attention, and memory circuits, while men in love show more activity in high-level visual processing areas. These heightened visual connections may also explain why men tend to fall in love “at first sight” more easily than women.
    Once a person is in love, the cautious, critical-thinking pathways in the brain shut down. Evolution may have made these in-love brain circuits to ensure we find a mate and then focus in exclusively on that one person, according to Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University. Not thinking too critically about the loved one’s faults would aid this process. In her study on being in love, more women than men said that their beloveds’ faults don’t matter much to them, and women scored higher on the test of passionate love.
    T HE B RAIN IN L OVE
    Melissa and Rob were talking on the phone almost every night. Every Saturday they would meet in the park to take Rob’s dog for a walk, or at Melissa’s apartment to watch the dailies on her latest film. Rob was feeling stable in his job and had finally stopped talking about his former girlfriend, Ruth. This waning attachment to Ruth gave Melissa a clue that she wasn’t just a rebound and that he was ready to focus in on her exclusively. She had already, involuntarily, fallen in love with him but hadn’t told him yet. She began warming to his physical affection, allowing her sex drive to catch up with her love drive.
    Finally, after three months, Melissa and Rob fell passionately into bed after a day lying in the sun at the park totally entranced by each other. The pair was tumbling into full-blown consummated love.
    Falling in love is one of the most irrational behaviors or brain states imaginable for both men and women. The brain becomes “illogical” in the throes of new romance, literally blind to the shortcomings of the lover. It is an involuntary state. Passionately being in love or so-called infatuation-love is now a documented brain state. It shares brain circuits with states of obsession, mania, intoxication, thirst, and hunger. It is not an emotion, but it does intensify or decreases other emotions. The being-in-love circuits are primarily a motivation system, which is different from the brain’s sex drive area but overlaps with it. This fevered brain activity runs on hormones and neurochemicals such as dopamine, estrogen, oxytocin, and testosterone.
    The brain circuits that are activated when we are in love match those of the drug addict desperately craving the next fix. The amygdala—the brain’s fear-alert system—and the anterior cingulate cortex—the brain’s worrying and critical thinking system—are turned way down when the love circuits are running full blast. Much the same thing happens when people take Ecstasy: the normal wariness humans have toward strangers is switched off and the love circuits are dialed up. So romantic love is a natural Ecstasy high. The classic