Great--Now Men Have an <i> Excuse </i> for Being Weird

Breathtaking news out of Yale University’s School of Medicine last week: Men and women use their brains differently.

As I read the news reports, only one response seemed possible: Hey! I coulda been a Yale scientist!

Why, only days before, in one of my keenly incisive premenstrual fits, I made a fascinating scientific discovery about the difference between men and women while talking at my husband. I made my finding--that men are weird--after he told me about a conversation with a friend of his, a conversation that would not have taken place between women in a kajillion years.

My husband and his old pal were having a beer, discussing exactly how much of our nest egg my husband had lost by placing foolish bets on incompetent football teams (adjectives mine), when the friend mentioned--but only in passing--that he and his wife had separated. They had not just separated, mind you. They had been apart for a year. This was news to my husband.

My scientific inquiry proceeded thusly:

Me: So, you’re telling me they have been apart for more than a year, and you just found out?

Husband: Yep.

Me: Did you ask why they split?

Husband: Nope.

Me: Who left?

Husband: I dunno.

Me: Do they ever talk?

Husband: No idea.

Me (loud, but basically under control): What kind of friends are you, anyway? Men are so wee-erd!

Husband: That time of month?

Me: What are you, the FBI?

*

So. What sex-differentiated secrets of the universe have the Yale behavioral scientists unlocked?

I hate to keep stealing their thunder, but they confirmed something that I-- a product of a West Coast public university --have long known: In certain kinds of thinking tasks, men use one side of their brain and women use both.

You are wondering: Does this mean the male aversion to asking for directions is biologically based?

You want to know: Does this mean the female propensity for putting on mascara and driving at the same time is biologically defensible?

Well, I’m not sure because, of course, I have never been to Yale, but you can be sure there will be no shortage of lame jokes on this subject.

Actually, what the researchers (led by a wife-and-husband team who did not disclose the nature of their fights) discovered by using magnetic resonance imaging is that women use both spheres of their brains to solve language problems, while men use only one sphere. This difference--one long suspected by brain researchers--may have dramatic implications for people with reading disabilities.

Scientists may be able to develop simple tests to identify which children will have reading disabilities before they take on the task of learning to read. The hope is that techniques will be found to help such children overcome difficulties before they become frustrated, develop an aversion to “Sesame Street” and turn into Republicans bent on assassinating public broadcasting.

Now, the scientists wouldn’t actually come right out and say this, but what both spheres of my brain infer from the difference between the way the sexes use their heads is that women are right-brained and left-brained, but men are only half-brained.

In other words, when blowhard Rush Limbaugh claims he is talking with “half my brain tied behind my back,” turns out he’s telling the truth.

Those of us who voted with our left-leaning brains in the last election already knew that.

*

News of the Yale study was published in the journal Nature. Normally, scientific journals are not my reading material of choice. (I generally prefer ultra-feminist tracts explaining why leg shaving is a form of sexual enslavement.) However, it behooves the scientifically minded to go directly to the source, bypassing newspaper accounts and the “interpretation” of “reporters.”

So I read “Sex Differences in the Functional Organization of the Brain for Language.” And, I am sorry to say, it was gibberish, completely incomprehensible, totally useless. (Except as a potentially groundbreaking cure for insomnia. This sentence alone was better than warm milk, turkey and William F. Buckley Jr. combined: “A 2x2x3x3 analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed with the following factors: region of interest (IFG versus ES), hemisphere (left versus right), task (case versus rhyme versus semantic), and sex (male versus female).” Zzzzzzz.)

Fortunately, an essay that accompanied the scientific article was written in a moron-friendly form of English. I was able to make sense of only one sentence, a partial one at that: “ . . . Women are more likely than men to use verbal strategies to solve ostensibly nonverbal problems. . . .”

Meaning--if I may be so bold as to translate for you non-scientists--that a woman, confronted with a husband who did not pepper his divorcing friend with probing personal queries, will badger her husband with questions and value judgments about the quality of his friendships and the nature of men.

Well, I would anyway.