This Is Your Brain, Part 2

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

(Page 2 of 2)

Another good way to see how the different parts of the brain express themselves is for me to take you on a brief visit to my neuropsychiatry clinic. My patients are unique among the medical population. They have disorders that most doctors in my part of Maine don't treat, such as autism, mental retardation, Asperger's syndrome, brain injuries, stroke, dementia, epilepsy, and multiple sclerosis. All of these disorders exaggerate one or more of the brain networks you'll be learning about in this book. In medical school, we were told that cases could be divided into two groups: "horses," or common disorders, and "zebras," out-of-the-ordinary complaints. I had trouble paying attention to ordinary cases. Zebras, on the other hand, sparked my interest. I don't treat horses. I treat zebras.

My clinic is a symphony of eccentricity and uniqueness. At one moment, we might have someone locked in the bathroom, while outside the door, a very normal, horse-like caretaker is saying, "Mary, Mary. Unlock the door. Come out of the bathroom, now!" Inside, Mary is carefully tearing apart the toilet paper and making a neat pile of the individual sheets. At the same time, in the waiting room someone is changing the dial of the radio from easy listening to a rock station that's playing the Rolling Stones' "Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown." In the far corner, a man with fifteen TV remotes stuffed in his pockets is saying to no one in particular, "Honest, I wasn't there when they stole the TVs. I was just watching."

All of these people have wonderful hearts, and I find something to love in every one. Each one has an area of uniqueness — and though it's clearly extreme, it's only an exaggerated form of a behavior that we all have to a degree. Like Mary in the bathroom, we all have an area of compulsivity — something we pay extremely close attention to and want to dissect to pieces. We all have an area of sociopathy, like the guy with the remotes — the small white lies we tell in daily life that help us fit into society. And all of us have our unique music in the brain. In the following chapters, we will explore the symphony of sound in the New Feminine Brain. You'll discover the songs all women share, the unique sounds that are your genius, and the discordant notes that have kept you from fully utilizing your brain's power to adapt to life's changing demands.

Coming to Terms with the Unique Feminine Brain

I first faced my own feminine brain's emotional style around puberty. On the first day of school in the eighth grade, I was fidgeting at my desk. The teacher looked at me and snapped, "Stop fiddling around with things on your desk... you're driving me crazy." I started crying, which really drove her crazy, and she sent me to the guidance office.

I told the guidance counselor why I was crying and he told me, "You're never going to be able to go anywhere in life if you cry like that in public. You've got to be more thick-skinned." (Not all girls and women are like this, of course, but some of us are.) I figured I'd make up for my emotional thin skin by building up my intellect and getting "brain-tough." From the age of seven, I had known I wanted to be a doctor and a scientist. I worked hard and got into Brown University.

During my sophomore year at Brown as a premed student, I was failing organic chemistry, which is known as a course that derails many wannabe doctors. The harder I studied, the lower my test scores were. Those scores went from 60 percent to a 26 percent to an all-time low of 6 percent (yes, out of 100 percent).

To continue in premed, I had to pass organic chemistry. So, I hired a tutor to study for the final exam, which counted toward half of the final grade. My average grade going into the final was so low, I overheard one of the teaching assistants say, "The Mona Lisa is going to smile again in this same class next year." After hours of tutoring, though, the information all magically came together in my mind at the testing, and I got 105 percent on the final. That did make me smile.

This embarrassing situation had actually turned into a learning experience for me. I had noticed that many other people were also failing and the majority of them were women. Then, as now, women tend to approach the learning process in classes differently. No matter how hard I work to learn something, I never learn well "in captivity," that is, in the situation where the teacher lectures and the student listens, takes notes, learns the information, and finally takes the test. As a result, I never did well in any of those large college lecture lab classes. But I learned what I needed to do to master the material.

When I was graduated from Brown, I got a job in a research lab. To my amazement, I found that I excelled at learning in the more "hands-on," practical, learning environment. Working as a scientist, I was able to pay my way through medical school. I created an artificial gonorrhea cell that did nearly everything a real cell does. I was able to publish several papers because I was well suited to designing experiments and learning the scientific principles as they applied to a project as I went along.

My success at research, not my premed grades, probably got me into an M.D./Ph.D. program at Boston University. Unfortunately for me, medical school classes are frequently taught in the same didactic style as premedical education. So once again I sat for six to eight hours a day listening to teachers lecture. I took notes, studied hard, and failed. Once again, I wasn't alone. By the end of the first year of med school, twelve people were failing at least one class and nine of them were women. Since our medical school class was almost exactly 50 percent women and 50 percent men, I couldn't figure out why a disproportionate number of women was failing. This time, the class I was having problems with was gross anatomy. Since I wanted to do my Ph.D. in neuroanatomy, I was scared and embarrassed.

I went to the head of the anatomy department to get a tutor. I showed Dr. Brown (not his real name) all my diagrams, charts, and notes, and asked him to please tell me what I was doing wrong, why I had failed the exam. I looked at him, he looked at me, and I started to cry, just like when I was back in the eighth grade. I felt like an absolute failure. First, I was an emotional failure, because I couldn't not cry when I was very upset. Secondly, I was an intellectual failure. I was starting to think I was stupid and didn't belong anywhere near a graduate school or a medical school, let alone a patient. As I stood there marinating in self-pity and despair, Dr. Brown said, "I can tell by your notes and charts that you have a different way of learning. You have to see the whole picture before you can understand and demonstrate your knowledge of the details on the exam. Don't worry. This will all come together on the makeup exam."

I thought he was just being nice because I was an "emotional woman" crying in his office. Having nothing left to lose, I said, "You're just being nice because I'm crying." He disagreed, saying he had already told a few students not to bother taking the retest but to instead come back and repeat the whole first year of medical school.

Using Woman's Intuition in a Field Dominated by Men

For the entire next few months, I studied with another failing female medical student, Lynn. We devoted ourselves to the material day and night. Yet we couldn't possibly memorize everything in the textbooks. We simply didn't have enough time. Intuitively, I got a strong sense that we should, however, learn in detail the anatomy of the male and female reproductive systems, especially its "lymphatic drainage."

Both Lynn and I passed the makeup final exam. I got 103 percent. We both nailed the essay, which was worth 30 percent of our score: "Please describe the lymphatic drainage of the uterus, ovaries, penis, and testicles."

Who knew? We had followed our intuition, we were prepared, and we succeeded. This was the first time I successfully used intuition in medicine. And it became clear to me that it was important to use that part of my brain along with the studying and hard work.

The best part of this difficult experience was not successfully passing gross anatomy in the first year of medical school and staying on the path to becoming a doctor. The best, most healing aspect was finding out that intuition matters and having the professor, Dr. Brown, validate that there is merit in my unique style of learning. That's why I know that I can help you learn about your intuition and your own brain's style of dealing with information — and with life!

Two Brains in One: Using Two Brain Styles to Succeed

I eventually figured out that the traditional "mind-set" with which other people approach class material and learn is typical of male brains. I'd listen to the teacher with my native feminine brain style, but learn the information in the male brain style. By also using my intuition, eventually I passed every test and was graduated. It was a lot of work, but it was worth it. I learned to see, think, and act like a man and a woman. But over time, that sort of overwork and overcompensation will wear you down and take its toll on your brain and body. It did for me — and it does for most women.

The world's changing demands on women force us to sprout dual brain types to adapt and accomplish all of our tasks. On top of our inborn feminine wiring, we must develop or sprout new pathways in the brain — new responses, actions, and behaviors, too — to survive in jobs and careers that require a more male, compartmentalized brain style. We have to develop more compartmentalized brain pathways for separating emotion and empathy so that we can make key business decisions. We have to develop a way of walking and talking in the business world that masks our moods and fears. We have to develop attentional pathways and memory pathways that accommodate the huge amounts of information that come at us from the media. And we have to figure out how to gain access to our intuition and use it to survive and thrive.

Developing more masculine brain pathways on top of her inborn feminine brain style comes at a cost to a woman's emotional, intellectual, and physical health. Her brain, the New Feminine Brain, doesn't have all the bugs worked out of it. Women may develop moodiness, depression, nervousness, anxiety, inattention, and problems with learning and memory. If you are emotionally porous, whatever you attempt to compartmentalize or shut down may actually get overloaded and increase your risk for developing certain health problems. The New Feminine Brain's recently acquired brain pathways can create tension with the old brain and body, leaving a woman stuck in the middle, unable to make key decisions about her life, including vocational goals, relationships, or her place in society.

"What should I do with my life?"

"Should I take this job or go back to college?"

"Should I stay in this relationship or get a divorce?"

"Should I have a baby right away, or should I wait?"

We are bombarded every day with too many choices and too many decisions to make.

Making balanced decisions every day requires a healthy brain. By that, I mean a brain that can learn and remember and has the capacity for stable emotions. If you have problems with depression, excessive anxiety and panic, attention deficit disorder, or problems with memory, you can get stuck when you try to make decisions. How do you live your life to its fullest and maximize your potential when emotional stress, information overload, or inertia overwhelms you? You learn to keep your brain-body pathways open and healthy.

Women's and men's brains are wired differently for mood, anxiety, attention, and memory. And women's and men's bodies are vulnerable to illness in different ways. How a woman's brain and body have been shaped by emotion, learning, health, and illness determines how her body receives intuitive information. Learning your body's tendency toward symptoms of illness also helps you get in touch with your intuition and use it.

In Chapter 1, you learn how your feminine brain may be wired between its left and right hemispheres. In Chapters 3-8, you learn how your feminine brain circuits are shaped for experiencing feelings that can predispose you to mood problems and anxiety. In Chapters 9, 10, and 11, you learn how your brain is uniquely wired for thought, which may cause you to pay attention, learn, and remember differently. These feminine brain circuits that give you the most difficulty are the very areas of your brain through which intuition can come to you. To put this in a more positive way: what makes you different — your tendency toward moodiness, depression, anxiety, panic, dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, or memory problems — can actually provide you with a unique capacity for intuition. You can learn to appreciate and maintain these natural mood cycles and thought patterns. And learning your personal language of intuition will ultimately help you have a healthier mood and lower, healthier levels of anxiety. It will also help you pay attention, have a sharper mind, and better memory.

This is not a passive book. Don't think you can just sit down and read it. You're going to need a pencil and some paper. You're going to be drawing. You're going to be filling out questionnaires. One questionnaire will walk you through a series of situations from daily life. Your responses will show you how your unique feminine brain works. You can also get your loved ones to answer the questionnaire and see how their unique brains are wired. Then, by filling out another questionnaire, you'll find out how your body speaks to you through symptoms, so that you learn to cultivate your brain's unique genius.

I'll also be telling you about typical cases from my neuropsychiatry clinic, and stories of some of my clients from my practice as a medical intuitive. From the stories of my patients and clients, you will see how various people have learned to cultivate the unique genius of their New Feminine Brains by understanding how their brains are wired and then rewiring those parts that made it harder to handle their lives. And you will learn how to rewire your own brain by learning new behaviors with the help of exercises, nutritional supplements, and — under your doctor's supervision — the latest medications.

In my first book, Awakening Intuition, I wrote about the science that supports intuition and the fact that emotions have very definite physical effects on the body. The New Feminine Brain focuses on how our femaleness is naturally wired into our brain and how to develop and use our feminine intuition in order to understand our brains, bodies, and emotions. We'll start with a look at how our brains work compared to men's.

All of this will help you see how to keep yourself well, prevent illness, and improve your health — because a lot of your health depends on what you do for yourself.

Most of psychiatry — including talk therapy — doesn't work much of the time or for very long. In comparison, in internal medicine, most patients readily respond to treatment because the diseases are much easier to diagnose and treat. If someone has a bladder infection, you can see evidence of disease by reading the patient's vitals and looking at the bacteria in the urine under a microscope. After the patient gets antibiotics, her vitals return to normal, the bacteria disappear, and the patient rapidly gets better.

Treating the psyche is not nearly so straightforward. The most common forms of depression and anxiety cannot be accurately diagnosed with a scan or blood test and the treatments that are available, medicine and psychotherapy, do not have lasting, permanent, dramatic effects that can readily be measured. It's common for many women and men to be in "talk therapy" for years, even decades, without measurable change or improvement other than a sense of "social support." Millions of people take Prozac, Zoloft, Valium, Xanax, or go from medicine to medicine looking for relief and, although they may experience a year or two of improvement, eventually their symptoms return, limiting their relationships, careers, and finances.

What's worse, problems with the psyche don't stay in the psyche. Eventually, chronic depression and anxiety increase your chances of having debilitating health problems including obesity, heart disease, pain disorders, Alzheimer's disease, dementia, and cancer.

This book is going to show you how to get your life on the right track and on the track you want to be. It's going to let you pull together your hopes and your reality. You'll see why you keep going after the wrong goals and the wrong guys. You're going to introduce your right brain to your left brain so you can live in harmony with your body, capture your intuitive genius, and live out your dreams and potential.

Let's start with a look at how our feminine brains work compared to men's.

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.