The Female Brain Quotes

“Women have less direct relationship to anger...When a woman "bites" her tongue to avoid expressing anger, its not at all socialization. A lot of it is brain circuitry. Even if a woman wanted to express her anger right away, often her brain circuits would attempt to hijack this response, to reflect on it first out of fear and anticipation of retaliation. Also, the female brain has a tremendous aversion to conflict, which is set up by fear of angering the other person and losing the relationship. Instead of triggering a quick action response in the brain, as it does in males, anger in girls and women moves through the brain's gut feeling, conflict-pain anticipation, and verbal circuits.
Scientists speculate that though a woman is slower to act out of anger, once her faster verbal circuits get going, they can cause her to unleash a barrage of angry words that a man cant match.
Typical men speak fewer words and have less verbal fluency than women, so they may be handicapped in angry exchanges with women.
Often when I see a couple who are not communicating well, the problem I see is that the man's brain's circuits push him frequently and quickly to an angry, aggressive reaction, and the woman feels frightened and shuts down.”
― Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain

“During times of physical separation, when touching and caressing is impossible, a deep, longing, almost a hunger, for the beloved can set in. We are used to thinking of this longing as only psychological, but it's actually physical. The brain is virtually in a drug-withdrawal state. During a separation, motivation for reunion can reach a fever pitch in the brain. Activities such as caressing, kissing, gazing, hugging, and orgasm can replenish the chemical bond of love and trust in the brain. The oxytocin-dopamine rush once again suppresses anxiety and skepticism and reinforces the love circuits in the brain. From an experiment we also know that oxytocin is naturally released in the brain after a twenty-second hug from a partner- sealing the bond between huggers and triggering the brain's trust circuits.”
― Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain

“Male love circuits get an extra kick when stress levels are high. After an intense physical challenge, for instance, males will bond quickly and sexually with the first willing female they lay eyes on.
Women, by contrast, will rebuff advances or expressions of affection and desire when under stress. The reason may be that the stress hormone cortisol blocks oxytocin's action in the female brain, abruptly shutting off a woman's desire for sex and physical touch.”
― Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain

“Female sexual turn on begins, ironically, with a brain turn off. The impulses can rush to the pleasure centers and trigger orgasm only if the amygdala- the fear and anxiety center of the brain- has been deactivated.
The fact that a woman requires this extra neurological step may account for why it takes her on average three to ten times longer than the typical man to reach orgasm.”
― Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain

“The changes that happen in the mommy brain are the most profound and permanent of a woman’s life. For as long as her child is living under her roof, her GPS system of brain circuits will be dedicated to tracking that beloved child. Long after the grown baby leaves the nest, the tracking device continues to work. Perhaps this is why so many mothers experience intense grief and panic when they lose day-to-day contact with the person their brain tells them is an extension of their own reality.”
― Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain

“Maternal stress during pregnancy has effects on the emotional and stress hormone reactions, particularly in female offspring. These effects were measured in goat kids. The stressed female kids ended up startling more easily and being less calm and more anxious than the male kids after birth. Furthermore, female kids who were stressed in utero showed a great deal more emotional distress than female kids who weren’t. So if you’re a girl about to enter the womb, plan to be born to an unstressed mom who has a calm, loving partner and family to support her. And if you are a mom-to-be carrying a female fetus, take it easy so that your daughter will be able to relax.”
― Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain

“If you’re a girl, you’ve been programmed to make sure you keep social harmony. This is a matter of life and death to the brain, even if it’s not so important in the twenty-first century. We could see this in the behavior of three-and-a-half-year-old twin girls. Every morning the sisters climbed on each other’s dressers to get to the clothes hanging in their closets. One girl had a pink two-piece outfit, and the other had a green two-piece outfit. Their mother giggled every time she’d see them switch the tops—pink pants with a green top and green pants with a pink top. The twins did it without a fight. “Can I borrow your pink top? I’ll give it back later, and you can have my green top” was how the dialogue went. This would not be a likely scenario if one of the twins were a boy. A brother would have grabbed the shirt he wanted, and the sister would have tried to reason with him, though she would have ended up in tears because his language skills simply wouldn’t have been as advanced as hers.”
― Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain

“Whether or not she is being listened to will tell a young girl if others take her seriously, which in turn goes to the growth of her sense of a successful self. Even though her language skills aren’t developed, she understands more than she expresses, and she knows—before you do—if your mind has wandered for an instant. She can tell if the adult understands her. If the adult gets on the same wavelength, it actually creates her sense of self as being successful or important. If she doesn’t connect, her sense is of an unsuccessful self. Charles in particular was surprised by how much focus it took to keep up the relationship with his daughter. But he saw that, when he listened attentively, she began to develop more confidence.”
― Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain

“The “nervous system environment” a girl absorbs during her first two years becomes a view of reality that will affect her for the rest of her life.”
― Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain

“The more you do something, the more cells the brain assigns to that task,”
― Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain

“It is commonly believed that men leave their aging, chubby, postmenopausal wives for fertile, younger, thin women. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Statistics show that more than 65 percent of divorces after the age of fifty are initiated by women.”
― Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain

“An experiment on mothering behavior in rats found that physical contact is required to maintain the female brain circuits for active maternal behavior.”
― Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain

“Girls as young as a year old are more responsive to the distress of other people, especially those who look sad or are hurt.”
― Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain

“Scientists have also shown that high nurturing—from any loving, trust-inducing adult—may make babies smarter, healthier, and better able to deal with stress.”
― Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain

“how well you mother your daughter will determine how well she mothers your grandchildren.”
― Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain

“Although behavior itself can’t be passed on genetically, new research shows that nurturing capacity in mammals is passed on, in what scientists now call a nongenomic or “epigenetic”—meaning physically on top of the genes—type of inheritance.”
― Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain

“Researchers have found that if mothers, for whatever reason—too many children, financial pressures, or careers that don’t allow enough child-care time—cannot be good enough nurturers and are only weakly attached to their babies, they can negatively affect the trust and security circuits of their children.”
― Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain

“Women are no more built for monogamy than men are. They are designed to keep their options open, and they fake orgasm to divert a partner’s attention from their infidelities.”
― Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain

“Havlicek argues that his findings support the theory that single women want nurturing men who will help raise a family. But once the home is secured, they have the biological urge to sneak around with men who have the best genes.”
― Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain

“Many sex therapists say that, for women, foreplay is everything that happens in the twenty-four hours preceding penile insertion. For men, it’s everything that happens three minutes before.”
― Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain

“The act of hugging or cuddling releases oxytocin in the brain, especially in females, and likely produces a tendency to trust the hugger. It also increases the likelihood that you will believe everything and anything he tells you. Injecting the hormone oxytocin or dopamine into the brain of a social mammal can even induce cuddling and pair bonding behavior without the usual prerequisite romantic love and sexual behavior, especially in females.”
― Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain

“Worldwide, men prefer physically attractive wives, between ages twenty and forty, who are an average of two and a half years younger than they are. They also want potential long-term mates to have clear skin, bright eyes, full lips, shiny hair, and curvy, hourglass figures.”
― Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain

“Women, researchers have found, also look for mates who are, on average, at least four inches taller and three and a half years older.”
― Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain

“Connecting through talking activates the pleasure centers in a girl’s brain. Sharing secrets that have romantic and sexual implications activates those centers even more. 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.”
― Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain

“The first two weeks of the cycle, when estrogen is high, a girl is more likely to be socially interested and relaxed with others. In the last two weeks of the cycle, when progesterone is high and estrogen is lower, she is more likely to react with increased irritability and will want to be left alone.”
― Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain

“Stressed mothers naturally become less nurturing, and their baby girls incorporate stressed nervous systems that change the girls’ perception of reality.”
― Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain

“The two sisters were raised by the same mother but under different circumstances, so one daughter’s brain circuits had incorporated a nurturing, safe mom and the other’s a fearful, anxious one.”
― Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain

“girls can hear a broader range of emotional tones in the human voice than can boys.”
― Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain

“In the brain centers for language and hearing, for example, women have 11 percent more neurons than men. The principal hub of both emotion and memory formation—the hippocampus—is also larger in the female brain, as is the brain circuitry for language and observing emotions in others. This means that women are, on average, better at expressing emotions and remembering the details of emotional events. Men, by contrast, have two and a half times the brain space devoted to sexual drive as well as larger brain centers for action and aggression. Sexual”
― Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain

“Female sexual turn-on begins”
― Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain