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| Kathmandu, Sunday November 23, 2003 Mangshir 07, 2060. |
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Guys’ brains are different, really
By dave barry miami herald
Miam I like to think that I am a modest person. (I also like
to think that I look like Brad Pitt naked, but that is not the issue here.) There comes a
time, however, when a person must toot his own personal horn, and for me, that time is
now. A new book has confirmed a theory that I first proposed in 1987, in a column
explaining why men are physically unqualified to do housework. The problem, I argued, is
that men - because of a tragic genetic flaw - cannot see dirt until there is enough of it
to support agriculture. This puts men at a huge disadvantage against women, who can detect
a single dirt molecule 20 feet away.
This is why a man and a woman can both be looking at the same
bathroom commode, and the man - hindered by Male Genetic Dirt Blindness (MGDB) - will
perceive the commode surface as being clean enough for heart surgery or even meat slicing,
whereas the woman can’t even ‘’see’’ the commode, only a teeming,
commode-shaped swarm of bacteria. A woman can spend two hours cleaning a toothbrush holder
and still not be totally satisfied; whereas if you ask a man to clean the entire New York
City subway system, he’ll go down there with a bottle of Windex and a single paper
towel, then emerge 25 minutes later, weary but satisfied with a job well done.
When I wrote about Male Genetic Dirt Blindness, many irate
readers complained that I was engaging in sexist stereotyping, as well as making lame
excuses for the fact that men are lazy pigs. All of these irate readers belonged to a
gender that I will not identify here, other than to say: Guess what, ladies? There is now
scientific proof that I was right.
This proof appears in a new book titled ‘’What
Could He Be Thinking? How a Man’s Mind Really Works.’’ I have not
personally read this book, because, as a journalist, I am too busy writing about it. But
according to an article by Reuters, the book states that a man’s brain ‘’takes
in less sensory detail than a woman’s, so he doesn’t see or even feel the dust
and household mess in the same way.’’ Got that? We can’t see or feel the
mess! We’re like: ‘’What snow tires in the dining room? Oh, ‘those’
snow tires in the dining room.’’ And this is only one of the differences between
men’s and women’s brains. Another difference involves a brain part called the
‘’cingulate gyrus,’’ which is the sector where emotions are located.
The Reuters article does not describe the cingulate gyrus, but presumably in women it is a
structure the size of a mature cantaloupe, containing a vast quantity of complex,
endlessly recalibrated emotional data involving hundreds, perhaps thousands of human
relationships; whereas in men it is basically a cashew filled with NFL highlights.
In any event, it turns out that women’s brains secrete
more of the chemicals ‘’oxytocin’’ and ‘’serotonin,’’
which, according to biologists, cause humans to feel they have an inadequate supply of
shoes. No, seriously, these chemicals cause humans to want to bond with other humans,
which is why women like to share their feelings. Some women (and here I am referring to my
wife) can share as many as three days’ worth of feelings about an event that took
eight seconds to actually happen.
We men, on the other hand, are reluctant to share our
feelings, in large part because we often don’t have any. Really. Ask any guy: A lot
of the time, when we look like we’re thinking, we just have this low-level humming
sound in our brains. That’s why, in male-female conversations, the male part often
consists entirely of him going ‘’hmmmm.’’ This frustrates the woman,
who wants to know what he’s really thinking. In fact, what he’s thinking is,
literally, ‘’hmmmm.’’ So anyway, according to the Reuters article,
when a man, instead of sharing feelings with his mate, chooses to lie on the sofa, holding
the remote control and monitoring 750 television programs simultaneously by changing the
channel every one-half second (pausing slightly longer for programs that feature
touchdowns, fighting, shooting, car crashes or bosoms) his mate should ‘’not’’
come to the mistaken conclusion that he is an insensitive jerk.
In fact, he is responding to scientific biological brain
chemicals that require him to behave this way for scientific reasons, as detailed in the
scientific book ‘’What Could He Be Thinking? How a Man’s Mind Really Works,’’
which I frankly cannot recommend highly enough.
In conclusion, no ‘’way’’ was that pass
interference.
Courtesy : International Herald Tribune |
