The Thinking Man — not!

I like to drive and I have always thought that I was a better driver than any man I know ("man" because "driving" has traditionally been his domain). I map directions in my head before I start driving. I am fast but careful. I can do a mean parallel parking, and I am the undisputed queen of reverse parking. I can squeeze into the tightest parking space, on reverse and succeed after only one try. I am so good at it that I put it under "other skills" in my resumé. I relish it when I do my famous reverse parking within the sight of huddled men who stay and watch, expecting me to fail or even ask them for help. As soon as I have parked before the perplexed faces of these doubting Thomases, I alight from my car, pause a while, look at them and motion these strangers to a modest applause. Then I send them to ask the mayor for the keys to the city.

If you are like my Dad, you would just dismiss me as a fluke, or his more recent metaphor, his "parenthetical remark" of a child, which is his usual explanation when asked why his daughter is the way she is. But if you ask the scientists of Bradford University who recently presented at a conference in London, they will tell you that women seem to really be the better drivers and it is all because of hormones, specifically estrogen. Okay, by now I am hearing men expressing disbelief at the driving prowess of this hormone which they have always considered as "dangerous" when it rises to the critical level of La Mesa Dam every month in the women of their lives. So let me try to overrun men’s disbelief by splashing on the scientific integrity of the research that was presented at the recent meeting in London of the Society for Endocrinology, which was reported in BBC last Nov 7.

The subjects were 43 men and women aged 18 to 35 who underwent neuropsychological tests that assessed skills such as spatial recognition memory, rule learning, attention, planning and motor control – skills that are required in driving. They found out that "estrogens may positively influence neuronal activity in the frontal lobes, the area of the brain stimulated by tasks of attention and rule learning, which could explain the female advantage when performing these tasks." The frontal lobes seem to be the dashboard that has the controls necessary for driving and this dashboard functions better when it is "pink," so to speak, with estrogen. The women seemed to be better at paying attention to shifting stimuli, which is a crucial element when driving. The scientists say that men may have the skills of "navigation, spatial awareness and confidence" although they seem to have more serious accidents because they happen at greater speeds and are able to put on the brakes less quickly than women who have more accidents at "T junctions and roundabouts" and are more cautious. So, gentlemen, do not be surprised when a woman driver in her car parked next to you in traffic dismisses your bold and daring attitude as you crank up your engine. Her estrogen may be saying, "Johnny Bravo, hold your horses, I am driving because I want to get from point A to point B with preferably the same body parts arranged in the order with which I started." Because you see, when men do that, women do not see a man with bold and daring charisma, we see a testosterone meter, oblivious that he is about to hit the critical mark, not to mention the MMDA roadblock just ahead.

Speaking of the hormone testosterone, it is what seems to influence the onset of autism in fetuses, according to recent research. Both males and females have testosterone, with the male fetus producing this from their testes while female fetuses from their adrenal glands. Males just have more of it.  The Cambridge Autism Research Center researchers, writing in the journal Science, and also reported in BBC last Nov 11, say the "evidence points to exposure to male hormones, such as testosterone, before birth affecting these brain development patterns." They found out from brain scans that brains with autism seem to be "extreme male brains." They point to evidence that males generally have "greater early growth of certain brain regions, and less hemispheric connectivity than females." It is known that in fetal development, boys’ brains grow more quickly than girls’ and in the brains of people with autism, this growth appears to be exaggerated, even in certain brain regions where they found that the amygdala of toddlers with autism was "abnormally large." The amygdala is the emotional launch pad of the brain. The researchers say there is still a large unknown in "autism," even saying that perhaps it is not a "disease" to be treated but just another variation of the brain that "develops differently." There was a CNN special on autism a few months ago where we were able to glimpse into the "reflection" of the autistic people themselves as they wrote them. It really seemed to be a world they inhabit within themselves, hard to reach from outside by the people they live with, but, at the same time, no less real than the lives people without autism, inhabit and flesh out.

But let us go back to Johnny Bravo with his regular share of nature’s testosterone. Picturing a Johnny Bravo now in your head, you may find that funny but depending on whether you are a man or a woman, researchers also say there are differences in how men and women find humor in things. Scientists will never content themselves with common knowledge that sense of humor differs in men and women. They had to be serious about humor (they also have to be so in order to be accepted as a study in the recently published Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) so a team at Stanford University headed by Professor Allan Reiss hooked up the brains of Tickle-me Elmos and Elmas (10 each) to brain-scanning machines and showed them 70 black and white cartoons. All the men and women (and I guess the scientists too) found the cartoons funny. But how they found them funny was another story. They found out that the "brain regions were activated more in women, including both the left prefrontal cortex and the mesolimbic reward center." Translation: Men seem to expect the cartoons to be funny right from the start before any form of "thinking," while women still have to very quickly run it through the rubric of language and memory to detect what is funny. Still, the women turned out to able to detect what was funny more quickly than did the men. I wonder why this is at all a surprise. Having lived with circus clown Adams the entire history of humankind, women have sort of have cemented the grooves in our brains for that. Women also seemed to get more "kick" out of the punchline than the men did, with women not expecting anything funny at all to start with. I think that "expect-nothing" attitude is also something we developed living with our reliable Adams.

The Stanford team would have been well advised by the Pulitzer-winning wisdom of humorist Dave Barry. He thinks, and I agree, that there is a vast difference in "what" (not just "how") men and women find funny.  To illustrate the point on the differences in the sense of humor of the sexes, he once wrote of his experience being in a breastfeeding class with his wife. Published in The Miami Herald on March 19, 2000, he wrote: "…the breastfeeding instructor walked around the room holding up a cloth model of a breast – kind of like a Muppet – with a little string on the back that the instructor pulled to make the breast change shape. The women looked on with mature, intelligent, concerned expressions. But I made eye contact with a number of men as the Breast Muppet went around, and I can state with certainty that if not for the fact that we knew this was a Serious Matter Involving The Health Of The Baby, plus the fact that our wives would hit us, we would have laughed ourselves into a state of dehydration." He went on to say that according to his research, the slapstick humor of the Three Stooges appealed to two groups of people: 1) People with brain damage; and 2) Men. And yes, Dave, as you correctly predicted, "women readers (including this writer) are thinking, ‘That’s only one group!’"

So ladies, next time you see a man laughing and/or driving, behold a nature’s wonder – a creature capable of all that frenzy without the required brain activity. And sure gentlemen, I will revise that statement but only after I have finished laughing…

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