Confused Or Frustrated By Your Man? Science Can Explain What He's Thinking
Women are from Venus, and men are from Mars. Sometimes it really does feel like our man is from a totally different planet. How often do we mutter under our breath, “Why would he do that? Why would he say that? What was he thinking? Was he even thinking at all?”
Fortunately, science can provide answers to some of our questions about why our men act the way they do. As Dr. Louann Brizendine, a practicing neuropsychiatrist, New York Times best-selling author, and media commentator specializing in the male and female brain, often says, “Male and female brains are more alike than they are different; after all, we are the same species.” Male and female brains have the same basic machinery; they’re just influenced differently by different sex hormones. When a man’s brain is marinated in testosterone during in-utero growth and development, and again during puberty, there is a physical result. The same goes for a woman’s brain under the influence of estrogen.
And the result of brain (and evolutionary) developments are male and female behaviors. So let’s look at how science explains some of the things that make us roll our eyes at our men:
He Can’t Find the One Thing Right in Front of Him
My husband stands in front of the open fridge. “Babe, where are the pickles?” From the living room sofa, I give him a description of it’s most likely location. A pause. Then he says, “I can’t find it. It must not be in the fridge.” So I get up and locate the jar in the back of the fridge in about 3 seconds.
When I told this anecdote to a group of women a few days later, they all immediately responded with exclamations of frustration over their own similar experiences. Why is it that men can’t seem to find the ketchup or their keys, etc?
Well, historically, men were the hunters. And over the millennia, their vision has evolved to support that task of aiming at a target. They have “a type of long distance ‘tunnel vision,’ allowing them to see accurately over longer distances, rather like a pair of binoculars.” But that means their focus is narrower, whereas women have greater peripheral vision. As the historical defenders of the “nest,” women needed to have the big picture, and so their eyes evolved to have “a greater variety of cone-shaped cells...which, in turn, gives them superior color vision” and “an arc of at least 45 degrees clear vision to each side of the head, and...above and below the nose.”