The Male Brain
Likewise, when Zoe and her friends talked endlessly about movies, fashion, and other girls, their combined voices just sounded like humming and buzzing to Jake's ears. For him and the other guys, following the girls' rapid musical banter was practically impossible. The best they could do was nod their heads and pretend to be listening.
Boys can't understand why girls like to talk and text so much or why they need to share every minute detail. Jake and his friends were more likely to send ultrabrief messages about something "important," like the score of a football game or an estimate of the hot substitute teacher's measurements.
Even though older male and female teens in college have been shown to say about the same number of words a day, researchers found that they're interested in talking at different times and about different topics--boys about games and objects and girls about people and relationships. And these differences, too, may be primed by hormones. James Pennebaker at the University of Texas found that as males were undergoing testosterone treatment over a period of one to two years, in their written communications they began using fewer and fewer words about people and more and more words to talk about objects and impersonal topics. When boys are Jake's age, with their high levels of testosterone, they may not talk much about personal topics. And when it comes to talking to adults--especially his parents--a teen boy's motto is "Give nothing away."
LOOKING GOOD AND SAVING FACE
If you peeked in from the back of his classroom, all the guys in Jake's English class would look about the same. You could hardly tell them apart--their clothes a few sizes too big, sloppily hanging off their bodies, their hair purposely left messed up, their faces marked by unshaven facial hair and pimples. Slouched at their desks with expressions of boredom or disdain, they'd look as though they'd just rolled out of bed--and they had. Everything about a teen boy says he couldn't care less about what other people think of him or how he looks. But in reality, just the opposite is true.
Teens are painfully sensitive to the subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, feedback they get from their peers. Even though Jake's face didn't show it, it was clear to me that he had become more and more obsessed with what his classmates thought about him. At his next appointment, he proudly told me that one of Zoe's girlfriends told him Zoe really liked his hair since he'd let it grow long. And he angrily told me that he wasn't going to attend his usual Friday night poker game, because one of the guys had criticized him for taking so long to play his cards. Neither the compliment nor the criticism would have jiggled his brain circuits at all before puberty. Nowadays, every socially relevant comment or look painfully pierced him, or at least his rostral cingulate zone, or RCZ, an area that acts as the brain's barometer for social approval or disapproval. This "I am accepted or not by others" brain area was in the process of a massive recalibration. Now his friends' approval trumped that of his parents. Evolutionary psychologists theorize that brain circuits like the RCZ developed in primitive societies to keep people from making social mistakes that could result in being ostracized by their clans or tribes. Social acceptance could make the difference between life and death. To teenagers, disapproval from peers feels like death. Fitting in is everything.
SHOW OF STRENGTH
When Jake felt dissed or challenged, he couldn't rest until he somehow evened the score and regained some respect. Ever since Dylan shoved him at the game, he daydreamed about beating him up. Dylan had a size advantage, so Jake didn't want to pick a real fight with him. But he felt compelled to best him at something. And until he figured out what that was, he'd just have to play it cool. A teen's self-confidence is directly proportional to how he looks in front of his peers. If he can't be on top, the next best thing is pretending not to care. Thus, Jake was now practicing the posturing techniques that men use to get respect. For males, displaying signs of dominance and aggression is an important way to establish and maintain social hierarchy. Even if Jake really didn't feel all that confident, he wanted to look as though he was in charge and not afraid to fight. But as most men know, a show of anger is just as often only a bluff.
Still, with their high testosterone, increased irritability, and this new urge to be dominant, some teen boys do end up physically testing their place in the dominance hierarchy. So it's not unusual for them to have a face-off with an authority figure--even one of their parents, as I found out. My son and I had our toe-to-toe showdown when he was just shy of his sixteenth birthday. I was awakened at two A.M. on a school night by what sounded like rocket blasts, launched by his gaming-computer. It woke me up from a dead sleep, and I was livid. I stomped downstairs in my pajamas, pounded on his bedroom door, and yelled, "Turn off that computer and give me the power cord now." As he opened the door, he puffed up his chest and leaned toward me with his six-foot frame. "There's no way I'm giving it to you," he said. Surprised by how intimidated I felt, I knew I had to stand my ground. In the firmest voice I could muster, I growled, "Either give me that power cord, or you can forget about getting your driving permit next week." He knew I meant business, so he begrudgingly turned over the cord. For the moment, I had won. But as with Jake, his fight for independence was just beginning.
WINNER TAKES ALL
That fall, Jake's mother called me after a few weeks of football practice to report that Jake's attitude at home had improved dramatically. But when the actual season started, Kate reported that he'd become hard to live with. Researchers have found that testosterone levels increase before a competition, so before a game, Jake's neurochemicals--dopamine, testosterone, cortisol, and vasopressin--were cheering him on and making him feel that his team couldn't lose. He was excited and confident. This prefight high happens not only with athletic events but with any competition that the male brain is participating in or even just watching. The more testosterone Jake's body made, the more dopamine and vasopressin his brain made, and the more pumped up he felt, especially when his team was winning. Studies show that winning releases more testosterone than losing, even in sports spectators. Winning is a natural high that acts in the brain a lot like drug addiction because it's such a huge rush. But the minute that something goes wrong, the feel-good chemicals bottom out as hopes of victory are dashed.
When Jake's team lost, he was sullen for days. Even seeing Zoe didn't make him feel much better. Kate said she didn't know what was worse, his doom and gloom when they lost or his cockiness when they won. She said, "When they win, he struts around like a rooster, and when they lose, he waves me off like I'm his servant." Lately, Jake had been staying out past his curfew and ignoring his parents' requests to tell them where he was going. He'd learned the covert art of slipping in and out of the house without seeing or talking to anyone. Consequently, Jake thought he'd become the master of deception. So when he decided to ride into the city on the back of a friend's Harley and told his dad he was catching a movie, he thought he'd adequately covered his tracks. What Jake didn't know was that the teen parent network is faster than broadband. When one of the other mothers saw Jake on the back of a motorcycle twenty miles from home, without a helmet, she immediately called Kate. Jake was busted.
SOCIETY'S PURVEYORS OF NEW IDEAS
Kate was more than disappointed in Jake. She was furious and scared. Where had her parenting gone wrong, she wondered, to make him do something so stupid and dangerous? When they came to my office, Dan told me Jake was merely behaving the way he himself had when he was that age--adventurous and devil-may-care, but Kate was taking his latest stunt personally.
"Jake acts like we're idiots!" Kate blurted out. "Like he's the only one who knows anything. When we try to get him to listen, he just rolls his eyes and says, 'This isn't the dark ages anymore. You have no clue what things are like now.'"
I was well aware of how Kate was feeling. My son often accused me of being from the dinosaur age because, according to him, I knew nothing about today's music, hairstyles, clothes, or Internet sites. In every generation, teens need to reject their parents' ideas in favor of their own. By
the time a boy is sixteen or seventeen, he will desperately seek autonomy from his parents. Every cell in his brain seems to cry: "Leave me alone and let me live my own life!"
Jake's intense need for separation and independence was primitive and primal. You can see the same independent, risk-taking behavior in other male primates when they reach puberty. Researchers observe that when some adolescent male monkeys leave their birth troop, they strike out on their own with bravado. Scientists believe that adolescent bravery has contributed mightily to the success of the human species and that the curious, incautious, and flexible nature of the teen brain makes teens society's purveyors of new ideas in every generation. Jake's brain was primed for exploration and programmed to break new compromising his personal sanity.
ground, even if it meant safety--and his mother's
As I well know, every mother holds her breath and prays that her teenager doesn't do something foolish and end up getting hurt. But according to studies, when teen boys are in a group, their brains experience excitement and emotional euphoria that makes them more willing to do risky things. That's probably why researchers find that when boys are with peers, they have more car wrecks and generally suffer more negative consequences of unsafe, impulsive choices. And although drug and alcohol abuse is reported to increase when teen boys are together, even without those substances, boys take more chances. In a study of teen drivers, the presence of peers more than doubled the number of risks teenage boys took in a video driving game. They concluded that from the teen years through the early twenties, simply being with friends increases risky decision making. Rental car companies, with their age requirement of twenty-five, know what they're doing.
Jake firmly believed he could make his own good decisions and run his life without the interference of adults. He couldn't accept that his brain was not biologically ready to handle independence. Teen boys are certain they have everything under control. But they don't. As I explained to Jake's parents, teens have two distinct systems running their brains.
The activating system--led by the amygdala--develops first. It is impulsive and gets double the stimulation when he's with his peers. It's like a gas pedal. It accelerates. The second system, the inhibiting system--the prefrontal cortex (PFC)--is like a brake. It carefully thinks things through, weighs the risks, and when working smoothly, it stops us from doing things that are dangerous or stupid. Jay Giedd and colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health found that the inhibiting system doesn't mature in boys until their early twenties. Jake's inhibiting system was still under construction, so his brain was operating with a gas pedal but faulty brakes. Bottom line: parental controls required.
When Jake came in the next time, I asked him if he'd thought about what could have gone wrong on his late-night motorcycle ride. Flashing his most charming but "knowing" smile, he said, "Nothing bad happened. Why can't everybody just chill?"
I could see that Jake's parents had their work cut out for them. And I knew one of my jobs with Kate was going to have to be to help her tolerate the experimenting that would be a necessary prelude to Jake's independent survival. I could vividly remember the gut-wrenching maternal fear I had experienced during similar episodes when my son was a teen. But at the same time, as I had, Kate would need to accept that certain aspects of her son's life would forever be off-limits to her. Already, touching had been off-limits since he was twelve or thirteen. Researchers have shown that teen boys begin to be repulsed, not only by the proximity of their mother's body, but also by her smell. The scientists speculated that this may have evolved as a protection against inbreeding. For years now, whenever Kate tried to straighten Jake's collar or fix his hair, he'd bat her hand away. As Jake's brain set up these new physical barriers with his mother, it also established firm boundaries around his privacy. He certainly wasn't going to share the details of the intimate journey he was the most anxious about embarking on.
HOT AND BOTHERED
All week Jake had been trying to screw up the courage to ask Zoe out. They'd been hanging out in the same group for most of the year but never went out alone. Now he was trying to find out from her friends whether she liked him "like that," or not. Hanging out with her in the group was no longer enough. He felt as if he would burst if he couldn't be alone with her.
Girls don't fully appreciate the bravery it takes for a guy to risk rejection by asking them out. But teen girls soon notice the new power their budding figures have over boys' brains. Boys usually feel the first stirrings of sexual attraction when they're just eleven or twelve years old and begin to have fleeting sexual fantasies. But this is years before they're ready to pair off, and it's the age when boys begin frequent masturbation. Studies show that from puberty until men's midtwenties, they may need to ejaculate one to three times a day. Girls this age reportedly masturbate an average of less than one time per day. Scientists believe that this frequent sexual stimulation is biologically required to keep young men primed, fertile, and ready to have "real sex" at the first opportunity.
Jake's sexual-interest circuits had been flipped on years ago, and his brain's visual cortex had become naturally but indelibly fixated on breasts and buttocks. He obsessively collected every detail about sex that he could find, and when he was with Zoe, he was so mesmerized by her breasts that he often missed what she was saying. He also found himself losing the fight to resist taking a peek at the forbidden online porn sites. He was compelled to learn everything he could so he'd know what to do when the time finally came to "do it." Although Jake didn't consciously know it, his mating brain was now in charge.
During the teen years, a boy's brain circuits undergo major changes. Some brain areas grow wildly, pulsing with constant activity, while other areas are cut back or redirected. It's as if a new operating system is being installed on his computer. Some programs are being upgraded and some are being deleted. The transition can be rocky at times, but once the new system has taken over, he can begin to use the full force of his male brain circuits. And where will he try out these new powers? Wherever there are attractive, desirable girls.
THREE
The Mating Brain: Love and Lust
THE INSTANT Ryan laid eyes on Nicole, she had his undivided attention. He was at a sports bar watching the basketball playoffs with some rugby teammates, but one look at Nicole, and he forgot all about the game. A twenty-eight-year-old Web designer, Ryan had enough dating experience to know that women with good looks don't always have personalities to match. But she triggered his brain's "must have" sequence, and without another thought, he was on his feet and moving toward her. He noticed that her friend was attractive too, but it was Nicole who took his breath away.
With long blond hair, a petite hourglass figure, and a face that could easily belong to a model, Nicole was well aware of the power of her sexual attractiveness. She was now twenty-six, and she'd been my patient since her rocky teenage years. Men had been drooling over her ever since she turned fifteen, grew breasts, and had her braces removed.
As Ryan watched Nicole, he was practically oblivious to everyone but her. His brain's sexual-pursuit area, in his hypothalamus, lit up like a slot machine. Suddenly, all he could think about was how to get her attention. Without being consciously aware of it, Ryan was following the commands of his ancient mating brain.
The men alive today have been biologically selected over millions of years to focus on fertile females. What they don't know is that they've evolved to zoom in on certain features that indicate reproductive health. Researchers have found that the attraction to an hourglass figure--large breasts, small waist, flat stomach, and full hips--is ingrained in men across all cultures. This shape tells his brain that she's young, healthy, and probably not pregnant with another man's child. Like all men's, Ryan's number-one mate-detection circuit was visual. A male's visual cortex comes prewired to notice women who are shaped like Nicole. Men don't really have one-track minds, but when their brains enter "mate-pursuit mode," they can seem to.
FLIRTING IS A "CONTACT-READINESS" SPORT
When Nicole gave me a detailed recap of their first meeting, it was clear that somehow Ryan had charmed her. If we could have watched the play-by-play of Ryan's nonverbal body movements we would have seen him walk casually but deliberately toward Nicole, hoping she'd look up. Once she did, we'd see him tilt his chin and raise his eyebrows ever so slightly, smiling as he took a step closer. Next, Nicole tipped her head toward him, returned the smile, and leaned back just a little. Her body was saying, I'm interested, but cautious. Ryan's mating brain read Nicole right. While still smiling, he took a half-step back.
While Ryan didn't have that chiseled GQ look that Nicole found most attractive, he was cute and looked harmless enough. His smile and the twinkle in his hazel eyes disarmed her, and she could feel her own smile widening as she looked down to coyly break eye contact.
In scientific lingo, these nonverbal flirting signals that Ryan and Nicole were displaying are called contact-readiness cues. Without saying a word, they were signaling interest to the other's brain. I still smile at the memory of my scientist husband trying to flirt with me and hanging on my every word at the business lunch where we first met. Flirting is a contact-readiness sport, and men who do it best score the most.