This Is Your Brain

The New Feminine Brain: How Women Can Develop Their Inner Strengths, Genius, and Intuition
by Mona Lisa Schulz, M.D., Ph.D.

Ever wonder why most women can juggle the kids, the office, and the kitchen renovation all at once but most men prefer to concentrate on one thing at a time? This is because women naturally have more connections than men do between their right and left brains, allowing them to divide their attention and multitask. Yet this mental ability to deal with multiple pressures and demands can ultimately have both a physical and a mental cost. Stress changes the brain physically and triggers physical symptoms in the body. Indeed, women today have markedly more problems with low moods and depression, anxiety and fears, attention and memory than women of just a few generations ago — and markedly more than men.

In this groundbreaking new book, the first to focus on the unique strengths and innate genius of women's brains, psychiatrist, brain scientist, and medical intuitive Dr. Mona Lisa Schulz shows you that your feminine brain today is not your grandmother's brain: it's dramatically different from the traditional female brain of your ancestors — and also quite different from a traditional man's brain. The New Feminine Brain explains how women of all ages can protect their hormonally sensitive brains from stress; shore up their moods, self-confidence, focus, and memory; and heal a host of emotional and physical problems. It also provides important health information for using and improving your intuition — a fast form of intelligence that traditionally has been considered more readily accessible to women than men — to help balance mind and body for better health, better relationships, and an overall better life.

Dr. Schulz makes brain science both engaging and accessible as she combines scientific research, patients' stories from her clinical practice, and personal stories of her work and life as a psychiatrist and a medical intuitive — identities she learned to merge in order to better understand her own brain — to help women more fully appreciate their own distinctive abilities. Questionnaires and quizzes throughout the book allow you to understand how your brain is wired, and guide you in rewiring and bolstering any connections that need it, with mental exercises, nutritional supplements, and the latest information on medications. As she helps you make your brain the best it can be, Dr. Schulz leads you on a fascinating, personalized journey of self-discovery and healing. From it you will gain a better appreciation of your innate genius, your intuition, and the amazing strengths of your new feminine brain.

Chapter 1

Women have a unique feminine brain. It is different from a man's brain. And it has its own styles of thought. Yet for the last fifty years women have had to fit their brains into a "male" world. We have had to learn how to, as the song says, "walk like a man," and "talk like a man," but stay a woman inside. To accommodate these two divergent roles, our brains have had to rewire themselves.

It's a biological fact that the process of learning any new skill creates physical, structural changes in the brain. Much research has demonstrated learning-induced changes in the brain. A recent study showed that even learning to juggle objects caused physical changes in brain anatomy. When a woman learns to juggle the traditional feminine role with newer, once typically male responsibilities, her brain changes physically and functionally. And as our world has gotten more technologically complex, the task of assuming roles common to both sexes has taken its toll on women's emotional and physical health.

So just being a woman today gives you some inborn mental and emotional challenges. However, the unique wiring of your brain and body also gives you some unique gifts and abilities.

In this book, I'll tell you how, as a woman, you can keep your brain tuned in to your natural mood cycles and thought patterns, but also be able to tune in to the new challenges that you face as you go to work in the boardroom, the home, the hospital, or the office — without compromising your health.

I can help you do this because I have done it myself.

The New Feminine Brain

After four years of medical school and three years of a Ph.D. program in neuroanatomy and behavioral neuroscience, I knew how traditional science viewed the female brain. I had studied it and compared it to the male brain. I had researched how emotions are wired in the brain; how memory and attention are wired; how morality, movement, desire, and passion are wired; and how the brain and body are interconnected. But fourteen years ago, when I walked onto the medical floor at Boston City Hospital as a medical student doing a clerkship, I looked around at the other doctors and realized that a lot of women working there didn't have the traditional feminine brain I'd learned about. Sure, there were the empathetic, motherly types who went into pediatrics or family practice and in their spare time ran recycling drives and worked for the homeless. But one woman we all had pegged for pediatrics shocked us by going into surgery — the most macho of all medical specialties.

In short, my understanding of how a woman's brain is wired was turned on its head. And what I had learned in seven years of training didn't amount to a row of pins when it came to making clinical decisions about my patients. At no time was this more obvious than my first day in the hospital, when I was sent to the emergency room to examine my first patient. I looked the part of a traditional doctor in my brand-new white 100-percent-cotton doctor's jacket, carrying my brand-new black doctor's bag. But it soon became apparent that despite two advanced degrees and $275,000 in tuition (and student loans), the traditional — read, masculine — approach to medicine wasn't going to work for me.

All I was told about the patient was her name and age. But as soon as I heard her name, information about her started coming to me intuitively. I could see in my mind's eye where her body was affected, and at the same time, I could sense her emotional state and how that might have predisposed her to illness. With these clues, I quickly checked the reference books in the on-call room for background in illnesses and conditions associated with her symptoms and made a note of tests I might need to do to make a diagnosis. It was the intuitive information, combined with all the knowledge packed in the traditional doctor's bag of my brain, that helped me approach that first patient with some degree of skill, if not poise. Even so, using my ophthalmoscope that first time, I shone the light into my own eye, not the patient's, to her great amusement.

Though I quickly realized I wasn't going to be a traditional doctor, it seemed that I wasn't going to be like some of my female colleagues either. I still couldn't get my hair and wardrobe organized like many other women, and I didn't go for the bib jumpers and clogs of some of the female doctors headed for family practice. I knew I had to figure out how my brain worked so that I could fit into this system and be successful.

Today, I know that's what we all do when thrust into a new situation or encountering a problem: We learn where our strengths lie, where our areas of genius are, where our flaws and "loose screws" are, so we can cultivate the areas in which we excel, and work around our shortcomings. Back then, I figured it out by trial and error. I learned, for example, that I was really good at finding a vein and drawing blood, but I was terrible at figuring out blood gas — checking the oxygen level of the blood leaving the heart, a delicate procedure that involves inserting a needle into an artery. We medical students learned each other's strengths and weaknesses, so that together, as a team, we could combine our skills and create one big brain. Some drew blood; others took blood gas readings.

This book will show you how you have done much the same thing in your life — compensated for your weaknesses by developing your strengths. When you were born, you had a traditional female brain that combined the genetic heritage of your parents and the in utero environment in which your mother developed you until you were born. Then, as you grew up in the incubator of your childhood, that genetic heritage was molded and acculturated to life in this society.

At the same time, you discovered the ways in which you weren't Everywoman. You found unique parts of yourself that were decidedly your genius, and other parts that tripped you up. You learned very quickly what your flaws are, and chose whether or not to show that vulnerability in relationships, in vocational settings, or even in your family. You learned very quickly whether you had the attention span of a gnat or you could stare for hours at a flower or a puzzle, trying to figure it out. Your mother and father learned whether they had to give you a list and copy it in triplicate because your memory was like a sieve and you lost everything. And your friends learned very quickly whether you had a memory like the Encyclopaedia Britannica and recorded anything they said or did.

Perhaps your personality, your temperament, was your foible but also your genius. Maybe everyone thought of you as a Mother Teresa, always ready to help with a kind and caring smile. Perhaps when you became a teen, you hit a dark, rainy week and cloistered yourself until your mood lifted. Maybe you were habitually irritable, but were also capable of focusing that edginess into creating an amazing short story or a play that kept your entire class riveted. Perhaps you jumped a mile when someone sneaked up behind you; anxiety and nervousness were your challenges, but also kept you alert to what others wanted or needed. Maybe you put your obsessiveness and compulsivity to good use in a detail-oriented after-school job such as shelving books at the library or canned goods at the grocery. As you were thrust out into the adult world, you learned to identify your particular struggles with attention, memory, personality, and mood.

We all have challenges in every one of those four areas. We are not Everywoman; each of us is unique. Contrary to what I learned in my medical and scientific training, there is no longer a traditional female brain. This is confirmed over and over in my clinical work as a neuropsychiatrist and as a medical intuitive. The complex world we now live in — like the complex hospital world into which I was thrust in 1991 — has molded, remolded, and rebuilt our brains. This capacity of the brain to remold itself is what science calls "plasticity." Women's brains today physically reflect our responses to the unique challenges that confront us. And our brains continue to change as we struggle with our list of expectations: to be mothers, to hold down full-time jobs, to come home and run households, to be attentive to our mates or partners, to be active in the community.

While juggling all these roles, we are further challenged by all the ways in which information comes to us today. Centuries ago, we got our information by talking to friends and neighbors over the back fence, and from letters, telegrams, books, and newspapers. Then came the telephone, radio, and TV. Now we have satellite radio and cable TV, email, pagers, cell phones, the personal digital assistant, the Web. We have to perceive and pay attention to all this information, sort through it for what's important, and try to remember that. Even if you choose only one television information channel, such as CNN or ESPN, you're really getting several: The newscaster is speaking on the main audio/visual track while running text across the bottom of the screen feeds you updates; and then there are the commercials.

All of this input affects your perception, attention, and memory circuits. A recent study showed that children who watch too much television too early in their lives have an increased risk of developing attention deficit disorder (ADD). Cartoons in particular feature frequent changes of scenes with manic activity that can "prime" a child's brain to shift quickly from one topic to another instead of learning to focus and maintain attention in the way needed to learn and stay on task in a classroom.

Your temperament, too, affects your capacity to perceive, pay attention, and remember. If you are moody, irritable, or nervous, or if you're even a bit obsessive or compulsive, your ability to perceive, process, attend to, and remember information will be challenged by today's information environment. And finally, even though the brain's capacity for adaptation is immense, your unique genetic predisposition for handling information will place certain limits on your brain's ability to change. All these factors will remold the brain you were born with so that it can be as efficient as possible. But still your brain can get tripped up by the main demands it faces.

This book will teach you how to appreciate, care for, and cultivate your unique genius, your brain's special power. You'll come to understand how your brain works, how it is wired—both your traditional brain and your New Feminine Brain. You will learn how your particular challenges are also wired into your brain. For instance, perhaps you have problems paying attention to a lecture or to directions your boss gives you for finishing a task or you have trouble remembering names and dates. Perhaps you have a winning personality that can get you in any door, but you also have problems with temperament and mood, with irritability or anxiety, any of which can affect how you fit in, as well as how you follow rules. Or, perhaps your challenges affect your ability to cultivate your own creative impulses in your vocation, to express your purpose in life.

Are you able to use your brain's power for building a sense of security and self-esteem, for feeling rewarded in life, and for avoiding addictive behavior? How do you use your brain's unique gifts in relationships? Are you able to feel a healthy empathy or do you love and feel so much that it hurts? Can you bond with children, your own and other people's? Do you have a capacity to love others? To love yourself? How do you express your uniqueness or eccentricities? Can you appreciate them? Can you learn to love the eccentricities of others? We'll deal with all these questions and how the New Feminine Brain's makeup affects your answers.

When I speak of the New Feminine Brain, I don't mean to imply that the brain of our female ancestors was not as good as ours today. Newer is not better, just different. Calling it the New Feminine Brain simply acknowledges the huge impact of all the different challenges women face today. As a result of the many competing pressures we have to deal with, we also have an increase in chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, environmental illness, multiple sclerosis, alcoholism, eating addiction, compulsive gambling, eBay addiction, ADHD (attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder), and obsessive-compulsive and attachment disorders. Many of these illnesses of body and brain that women struggle with now simply were not as prevalent in the ancestral brain — even a couple of generations ago.

Intuition

As we talk about all of these psychological and biological challenges, we will also talk about the importance of intuition — the ability to make good, beneficial, or correct decisions with insufficient information. Normally, we make decisions based on concrete information that we can see or hear. However, when we can't get enough facts from the outside world — or we are overwhelmed by too much information — we can function effectively by using our intuition. Despite what you've been led to believe, intuition doesn't come to you through tea leaves, tarot cards, a Ouija board, or from another world. Intuition is a natural product of your brain and body.

In all my university studies in neuroscience there was never any discussion of intuition. Yet we cannot talk about the New Feminine Brain without talking about intuition. Our lives as women today are bombarded with greater and greater complexity, so the New Feminine Brain has to exaggerate — to overdevelop — its intuition. We women today need to appreciate our intuition, which has sometimes been denigrated by our culture. We need to understand how it's wired into our brain and body and develop it further. Intuition helps us learn to adapt to what the world demands of us.

Many people try a variety of routes to gain access to their intuition and improve it. There's a lot of New Age nonsense about how to increase intuition, from burning incense to help pump up your intuitive circuits to wearing crystals to sitting under a pyramid. But intuition isn't enhanced by New Age paraphernalia. You don't need external devices to be intuitive.

If you have a brain and a body and you sleep at night, by definition, you have all the equipment you need to be intuitive. By managing problems with mood (Chapters 4 and 5), anxiety (Chapters 6 and 7), attention (Chapter 9), and memory (Chapter 10), you can clear out and open up brain pathways for intuition on your own. Learning your unique left brain/right brain style (Chapter 1), and learning your body's tendencies toward illness, also helps you find and use your intuition. In fact, the areas of your feminine brain and body that make you unique — whether you have an exceptional talent or are challenged by depression, anxiety, or other health problems — are exactly where to look to find your intuition.

I depend a lot on my own intuition and started to learn to do so almost as soon as I joined the working world of the hospital. During one of my first days on the medical floor at Boston City Hospital, I wrote an order on a patient's chart but forgot to put up the little red flag that alerts the nurses to check for a new order. I was standing near the nursing station in my white doctor's coat, when an immense presence started moving toward me from the other end of the hallway. Dressed all in white, from the old-fashioned nurse's cap to the white stockings and lace-up shoes, this wasn't just any nurse: It was the head nurse. Boom, boom, boom, boom, she marched up the hallway, barking "Doctor! Doctor!" I was looking all around to see who she was talking to, until I realized she was talking to me. "Did you put this chart on the order stand?" she demanded. I could only stammer, "Ah, ah, ah." "You didn't put the flag up," she continued. "This isn't going to happen again, is it, Doctor?" she said pointedly. All I could squeak out was a meek, "N-n-no." After that, I realized that the nurses are the ones really in charge.

During those first weeks on the medical floor I realized very quickly which female doctors would survive this hazing and which ones would not. If you tried to be Marcus Welby—to issue orders like one of the male doctors — the nurses would run you into the ground. If, on the other hand, you tried to be empathetic or overly familiar — to bond as one of the girls — they would also cut you down. They could detect a brown-noser a floor away. Yet, in spite of the nurses' toughness, they were also the most tuned in to their patients — the most intuitive — of all the health professionals. I had to learn very quickly how to utilize both my brain and my intuition to master the subtleties of the situation.

Different Women, Different New Feminine Brains

You can see how differently New Feminine Brains are wired by looking at how you and your friends act in different situations. Let's take three women, Norma, Mildred, and Mandy, each of whom decided to redecorate her living room. On Saturday mornings Mandy would phone Norma and suggest that they go pick out a fabric for Norma's couch. Norma would put her off by saying, "I've got to pay my bills," but Mandy would arrive at her door anyway, honking the horn and waving a cup of coffee. Off they'd go to the store, and Norma would pick out swatches and bring them home. For three solid years, they looked at fabrics. Norma would come home, drape the swatches over her couch, and never choose one, because nothing seemed quite right. "Quite right" and "just so" behavior is the sine qua non of an obsessive-compulsive, anxiety-ridden kind of wiring in the brain. Suddenly, one Saturday, Norma found a new couch in a fabric she loved, bought it, and paid in cash. Everyone, including Norma, thinks the couch is perfectly divine.

Mandy, too, had been thinking about decorating for a long time. Then one Saturday night, while she was watching television with her best friend, Liz, she suddenly announced, "Come on, we're going to buy a couch." Off they drove to L.L. Home — a subsidiary of L.L. Bean that is open twenty-four hours — where Mandy ordered an entire living room set in leather. She had never visited the store before or picked out a swatch. Yet at 10:45 P.M. on a Saturday night, she slapped down her credit card and bought an entire suite. Liz thought Mandy was having a psychotic episode, but Mandy loves her furniture, and her cats love it, too—something she had failed to consider in her enthusiasm. And then there's the impulsively incurred credit-card debt that she's still paying off. (Unlike Mandy, Norma not only plans her purchases carefully but never incurs any debt.)

Norma and Mandy represent two extremes. On one end is Norma with her swatches, an example of compulsivity and perfectionism — organizing and planning. These functions occur in one area of the brain and usually lead to the area that governs movement. But Norma takes a long time to get out of one brain area and to the next for movement and execution. Mandy is the other extreme — impulsive. Her brain areas for imagination and perception are very active, but then she skips organization and planning almost completely and goes right to movement — often without thinking through the consequences.

Their friend Mildred is the head researcher in the medical firm for which they all work. She falls somewhere between Norma and Mandy. When Mildred decided to buy a couch, she looked through catalogues for a week or so, then drove calmly (and always within the speed limit) to the furniture store. She had a relaxed, twenty-minute discussion with the salesperson, then wrote out a check and arranged for delivery, after checking her appointment book to make sure she could be at home. Mildred's brain in this circumstance progresses in an orderly way from the area for perception and attention to organization and planning, and then to movement and execution.

Yet, for all her balance, Mildred often has to rely on her friends. Norma, as Mildred's business administrator, lends Mildred her perfectionism and supreme organizational skills. Mandy, Mildred's research partner, has tremendous creativity and isn't held back by convention; she lends Mildred her spontaneity. Together, the three friends have one complete brain.

In this simple example of buying furniture, you can see clearly how three different feminine brains, each with its own unique genetic heritage, approach a task and execute it according to their unique styles of attention, memory, personality, temperament, mood, and anxiety. But while the brain is highly adaptable, the body is less so. One of the important lessons you'll learn in this book is what happens to your body when you ignore or override your brain's unique gifts and challenges.

Keeping Brain and Body Together

I learned this the hard way. After I completed my M.D./Ph.D. program in Boston, I was all set to go south for a residency in neurology. Several days before I was supposed to begin, I blew out two vertebral discs in my neck, which paralyzed my left hand, so I had to postpone the residency. In the interim, I took a job working with Christiane Northrup, M.D., an expert on women's health, well known for her innovative work as an obstetrician-gynecologist at her clinic on the Maine coast. Still, the last place I ever expected to find myself was working with another doctor, especially one like Chris, who had an angel mobile flying over her desk, and ate roasted tofu instead of prime rib. I'm sure people who knew me thought I'd gone soft in my head, because from that moment on, half of my career turned to intuition. I had learned in medical school that I had a talent for medical intuition, but even more important, it seemed that whenever I didn't use my intuition, my own body got sick. So while I took advanced training in psychiatry, I began to do phone consultations as a medical intuitive.

How this works is that a person calls and gives me his name and age, and I describe a specific emotional situation in his life that might predispose him to illness. Then I scan his body intuitively to see where he might be prone to physical challenges. Our relationship isn't that of doctor and patient; my clients are required to sign a consent form before our session acknowledging that. But in our sessions, people learn how their body and brain are uniquely wired for intuition, and how, if they don't listen to their brain intuition about what they need to do with their life, their body intuition will let them know through symptoms of illness.

For a while, I was leading a double life. I was either in the hospital being a medical doctor or I was on the phone being a medical intuitive. I even wrote a book, Awakening Intuition, to teach people how to use their mind-body connections for insight and healing. Then I blew out eight more discs in my spine and had to have surgery implanting a series of steel rods from my neck to lower back. (On an X-ray, my spine now looks like the Brooklyn Bridge standing on end.) Shortly after I recovered, I was at a bookstore signing copies of my book, when an ethereal-looking woman planted herself in front of me and asked, "Do you think that your health problems in your spine are because you're living a split life? They say that if people have two divergent personalities, they snap. Do you think having two separate careers is bad for your body?"

At that moment I had my Sharpie pen poised to write an inscription, and a long line of people waiting to have their books signed. I was in no mood to have some stranger named Ariel telling me about my health or my career. But weeks later, when I went to my doctor after rupturing yet another disc in my neck, he said, "You know, you can't keep doing this. You have to find out why you're blowing all these discs."

I walked out of his office feeling really shaken, because I finally realized that my body couldn't take it anymore. I hated to concede that Ariel was right, but I had to admit, I'm a doctor and I'm a medical intuitive, and separating those two identities in practice, legally, is important. But trying to separate them in my psyche — in my understanding of who I am — could kill me.

Mine is an extreme case — in line with my extremely intuitive and impulsive temperament — but you can see that, if you don't perceive, accept, and appreciate your own unique genius, and adapt your life to it, your body will snap. Maybe it already has snapped to some degree or other. You will learn where your body's vulnerable spots are when you take the body questionnaire later in the book.

Copyright © 2005 by Mona Lisa Schulz, M.D., Ph.D.

About the Author

Mona Lisa Schulz, M.D., Ph.D., is a neuropsychiatrist and neuroscientist and has worked as a medical intuitive for more than ten years. She holds a B.A. from Brown University, an M.D. from the Boston University of Science and Medicine, and a Ph.D. from its department of Behavioral Neurosciences. She lives in Yarmouth, Maine.