The Female Brain, Louann Brizendine

Dr Louann Brizendine describes the uniquely flexible structure of the female brain and its constant, dynamic state of change – the key difference that separates it from that of the male – and reveals how women think, what they value, how they communicate, and whom they’ll love.

She also reveals the neurological explanations behind a number of observable behaviours. The reasons a woman remembers fights that a man insists never happened, for example. Thoughts about sex enter a woman’s brain perhaps twice a day but may enter a man’s brain up to once every few minutes.  A woman’s brain goes on high alert during pregnancy – and stays that way long after giving birth. A woman over 50 is more likely to initiate divorce than a man.

This is a fun, accessible book. Brizendine — a neuropsychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco — doesn’t burden us with facts. Instead, she offers breezy generalizations. “The female brain,” she writes, “has tremendous unique aptitudes — outstanding verbal agility, the ability to connect deeply in friendship, a nearly psychic capacity to read faces and tone of voice for emotions and states of mind, and the ability to defuse conflict.” She says that “all of this is hard-wired into the brains of women” — a process she works to document, but whose broader implications she never quite makes clear.

Published in 2006 by Bantam Books

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Dr Louann Brizendine is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and director of the Women’s Mood and Hormone Clinic at the University of California. She has more than three decades of experience as a physician, psychiatrist, psychopharmacologist and has studied the female brain for the past 20 years. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and son.