Futurist Edie Weiner on New Transformations, Part 4

We recently spoke with prominent futurist Edie Weiner, president of Weiner, Edrich, Brown. She laid out for us some of her fascinating insights about the five most important social shifts she predicts will take place over the coming years. We are posting them as a series each day this week. We shared her thoughts on the first shift having to do with the economy. The second shift she discussed with us involves 10 new value propositions that Edie says will become increasingly important--click here and here to read about them. Today, we're sharing the third and fourth shifts.

The third shift has to do with brain gender. One of the things that we know from brain imaging and brain mapping is that the male brain and the female brain are fundamentally distinct from each other physiologically. In a nutshell, we all begin with a female brain. Within five to six weeks after conception, the male embryo is coded to produce a much higher dose of testosterone, which washes through the system. And the male goes on to develop a much more specialized brain with different kinds of functions. The female brain goes on to develop 10 to 20 million more connections in the corpus callosum, between the left and the right hempishpheres, so it becomes a much more integrated brain. And the second time that that differentiation occurs is in adolescence.

When you look at fMRI imaging and you give a male a problem to solve, only the part of the brain that specializes in solving that kind of problem is lit up. The rest of the brain is very quiet, which makes it a very efficient brain. If you put a female brain under an fMRI and you give a female a problem to solve, you’ll see lights, bells and whistles happening all over the brain. So the female brain is very effective because it’s taking into account everything. These are two very different paths of problem solving and the thing to understand is that effectiveness is no good without efficiency, and efficiency is no good without effectiveness. We need both.

This brings us to the fourth point, which is an an "Edieism." You’re not going to find this in the science, but it’s based on my observations over 45 years of professional work and all the people that I know and situations I’ve been in. If you think about an x-axis on a graph of testosterone distribution, all the way out on the right you have no testosterone and all the way on the left is very high. Then you have two bell-shaped curves that come down to the center in the middle of that x line but never hit it because there’s a huge cross-over population of male and female. All the way on the right, you have women who have little or no testosterone (and having no testosterone is actually a deadly disease).

The very low-testosterone women tend to be lovely, they care about others, but they sometimes can’t balance a checkbook or read a map to save their lives. Then, if you go all the way to the left, you have extreme, high testosterone, raging high, and those are your criminials and terrorists. Because they have little empathy or sympathy, it’s all abstract. And in the middle you have cross-over. As you come down towards the middle, you have women who have higher testosterone, who tend to be the neurosurgeons, the rocket scientists, and even the sculptresses because it’s very spatial. And coming down toward the middle on the left-hand side are the men who are lower testosterone, and they tend to be your social workers, your ministers. So what one of my observations has been, from a personal and professional perspective, that for a long-term relationship to work, it’s important for both parties to be equidistant from the center.