Your Brain: The Missing Manual

Love and Relationships

As you've seen, the quirks of biology split men and women into two opposing camps. Fortunately, biology uses its best trick to bring the two sides back together.

The Practical Side of Brain Science: Coming to Terms with Sex Differences

If you were hoping to end this chapter with a perfect explanation of why women act like women and men act like men, it's time to abandon your quest. As you've learned, genes, hormones, and civilization are locked together in a complex relationship that's as tangled as a bowl of overcooked spaghetti. However, the search for sex differences teaches some important lessons:

• Don't assume. Many pieces of the gender picture are missing or out of place. In the meantime, it's safe not to assume too much about what characteristics are necessarily female and what ones are unavoidably male. After all, less than 100 years ago the nearly universal male opinion was that women were too wholesome, frail, and emotional to be allowed anywhere near a polling booth.

• Don't get too cocky. If you're a man, you might be tempted to brag about the high-variability theory of intelligence. But unless you're one of the extremely rare outliers on the correct end of the scale, there's no reason to rejoice.

That trick is love, the brain-melting phenomenon that's behind a range of borderline psychotic behavior (such as writing tortured erotic poetry) and actual psychotic behavior (such as jumping out of a cake in a half-naked cupid suit to deliver that poetry). And ...