It's Monday! YOU Do the Math!

This is a new blog series I will be starting for Mondays. Don’t worry; it isn’t going to involve you doing any specific math equations. I simply use math in the title to refer to the numbers that will be present in each entry in the series. Each entry will revolve around statistics of some sort—typically some interesting statistics I might have happened across recently and wanted to share. I suppose if you CHOOSE to do some math with the statistics I provide, that’s up to you!

I love statistics! Probably why I really enjoy research. Statistics interest me. They give me something to think about; however, I’m always cognitive of the idea that statistics can be misleading, skewed, discrediting, as well as made to look just about ANY way you want them too. And having said that, I want to warn here in the beginning that even as a lover of statistics, I am going to go against the first rule of being a statistician and say that some of the stats I will use in the entries of this series very well might not be from some of the most credible sources. Having said that, I will do my best to always provide WHERE I get the statistics from; therefore, allowing YOU to be the judge of how valid and reliable the information is.

Now, having explained the series let me begin with the first addition to the series…

This week I want to share something I read in a small “article” in the September 2006 edition of “O: The Oprah Magazine.” The article is on page 262 and is entitled, “Why We Think the Way We Do: A new book explains female intuition, long phone calls, love at first sight.” The title in its self got my attention and encouraged my read! But what it shared was snippets from the neurologist, Louann Brizendine’s, new book: “The Female Brain.” Below were some of the snippets that I found interesting…

Although male brains are larger by about 9 percent, women have the same number of brain cells packed more densely into a smaller skull.

Men use about 7,000 words a day, women about 20,000.

“Connecting through talking activates the pleasure centers in a girl’s brain…[providing] a major dopamine and oxytocin rush, which is the biggest, fattest neurological reward you can get outside of an orgasm.”

Men have two and a half times the brain space devoted to sexual drive as women do, as well as larger brain centers for action and aggression.

“Rejection, it turns out, actually hurts like physical pain because it triggers the same circuits in the brain.”

Men notice subtle signs of sadness in a face only 40 percent of the time; women pick up on them 90 percent of the time.

“Our brains size up a potential partner, and if he fits our ancestral wish list, we get a jolt of chemicals that dizzy us with a rush of laser-focused attraction.”

This was just a few of the snippets adapted, or quoted from “The Female Brain” by Louann Brizendine that were shared in this “O” magazine piece. The book sounds pretty interesting to me. Let me know if you’ve read it and if the whole book is as interesting as these bits and pieces.

What can I say, the female brain IS intriguing to me!