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Baron-Cohen has marshaled all this evidence into a grand theory, which he lays out in his book. There are basically two kinds of brains—the empathizing brain and the systemizing brain. If you have an empathizing brain, you're exquisitely good at understanding how someone else might feel, and furthermore you want to alleviate their distress. You're good at identifying people's inner emotions simply by looking at their facial expressions. (Baron-Cohen and his colleagues have catalogued 412 discrete emotions. Oy.) You're good at relationships, and you maintain those healthy relationships by sharing feelings. And you have a flair for language, so you can express all 412 of those emotions.
If you have a systemizing brain, says Baron-Cohen, you're driven to understand systems—anything from plumbing fixtures to the NBA rule book, from patent law to the bond market. Systemizers specialize in events with predictable consequences, so that when you act, you can be pretty darn certain of the result. Such systems can take a long time to learn, but if you have a systemizing brain, that doesn't bother you—you can spend endless hours observing all the details, to the exclusion of everything (and, oops, everybody) else in your life. You're more interested in organizing principles than in the social world. You're good with mechanical things, not people. You cultivate an expertise. And you love sports, because it's a combination of four systems: an organizing system (S-P-U-R-S!), a system of rules ("He was nowhere near the paint!"), a motoric system ("...a 360-degree slam..."), and a statistical system ("...that keeps their playoff hopes alive if the Suns lose, the Jazz win, and the Lakers get lost on the way to the Staples Center!").
In the past, systemizers have been good at tool making, hunting, and trading. Now they're good at engineering, inventing, coaching, computer programming, and leading a corporation along a "critical path" toward "key metrics."
In their daily lives, these people tend to be independent, driven, successful individuals who do well in business because of their expertise and their ability to take decisive action. They do well socially not because of their power to empathize, but because they've reduced the pecking order to a system of rules and know how to manipulate their way through it. If they're men, as they often are, they're very attractive to women—the very same women who, after a few years, wonder why these guys aren't better empathizers.
Sound like anyone you know?
You don't have to be male to have a systemizing brain—but it helps. (Remember, your fetal- testosterone level helped shape your brain.) Baron-Cohen has come up with 60-question tests to identify people as empathizers or systemizers, and from the thousands he's administered to date, he figures that 44 percent of women have empathizing brains, 17 percent have systemizing brains (which accounts for the many brilliant female scientists), and 35 percent have brains that are roughly balanced between the two poles. Four percent exhibit an "extreme female brain" type.
Baron-Cohen says that 53 percent of men have systemizing brains, 17 percent have empathizing brains, and 24 percent are roughly balanced. The remaining 6 percent have an extreme male brain—and these men, he theorizes, exhibit behavior that's labeled autistic.
But just because your brain isn't tuned in to emotional relationships doesn't mean you can blow them off. Rather, it means you have to pay attention to emotions—those of others, and your own. Otherwise, when the chips are down, you'll find yourself sitting at the table alone, with no one to help you and no idea how to help yourself.
The psychologist Ronald F. Levant, EdD, has spent two decades conducting research in the field of men and their emotions. Having grown up in South Central Los Angeles, an area "that was tough and is tough," as he says, he experienced firsthand the ways in which traditional cultures teach men to stifle their emotions. As a researcher, he knew of a clinical condition called alexithymia (uh-lexa-THIGH-me-uh), which literally means the inability to put emotions into words. It was originally applied to the severe emotional constriction of drug-dependent posttraumatic stress disorder patients. But in his counseling practice, he saw a more "garden-variety" form of alexithymia. His male patients often exhibited an inability to know what they were feeling—especially if those feelings were in the tender and vulnerable vein.
As a professor of psychology at the University of Akron, Levant has devoted his research to showing that a mild-to-moderate form of alexithymia is widespread in our society. As he says, "It's normative for many men in our society to be genuinely unaware of some of their emotions."
He gives one quick example: In his practice, he saw a man who had been caught cross-dressing—by his grown children. So the man came to a therapy session with his wife. Levant asked him how he felt at the moment he was discovered. And the man turned to his wife and asked, "How did I feel?"
Levant believes we experience emotion on three different levels: the neural, biochemical level, expressed in heartbeat and breathing pattern; the physical and behavioral level, revealed in facial expression and body language; and finally the level of conscious awareness. Typically, alexithymic men lack the third level, and may even lack an awareness at the second level.
Whether this emotional checkout is hardwired or pounded into you, it can be crippling. Levant believes that the cost of repressing your emotions—or, worse, dissociating from them completely—leads to alcohol abuse, anger and aggression, thrill-seeking behaviors, and psychosomatic illness. To avoid these fates, it isn't required that you become a master of emotional fluency; awareness by itself is sufficient.
But this is not just about making sure you don't wind up in a wheelchair. If you know how to feel, you know how to act. "It helps us live better lives," says Levant. "It enables us to respond more quickly and more appropriately to events that arise in our lives, both at work and at home."
In my own marriage, I suspect that my wife uses emotions to avoid action. (I told her that. You can imagine how well it went over.) I suspect a lot of guys think of emotions that way, as the opposite of action.
Wasn't that Hamlet's problem?
But emotions are not useless. They can motivate us to action. Did you see Tiger Woods—a few months after the death of his father—annihilating all challengers in the final nine holes at Hoylake at this year's British Open? On the last fairway, with victory nearly secured, his caddy said to him, "This one's for Pops." And Tiger was wracked with big, gutsy sobs. Then, more to the point, he blubbered in the arms of his beautiful blonde wife.
Remember, Hamlet didn't get the girl or the claret jug. But Tiger did. Be glad it's 2006. Emotions are now part of the manly formula for success: acting with head and heart and hands. Or, in the words of Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, PhD, "Emotion is a compass that tells us what to do."
You have a lot to cram into these next few hours. If you're going to nourish your rich personal life, you have some ground to cover. At any given moment tonight, the average guy will be juggling the following:
Friends. As men, we commonly base our friendships on shared activities. It's a pattern established in late boyhood, when we made friends on the basis of common interests, such as skateboarding or heavy metal. It's how we do intimacy. It's good fun, and it's good for our health: In his 2000 book Bowling Alone, Harvard University political scientist Robert Putnam lists the many health benefits of having friends and concludes that not having a posse is as big a health risk as smoking.
Parents. If you've gotten closer to your parents recently, you're not alone. According to the US Family Caregiver Alliance, up to seven million are caring for elderly people, and the number of men providing the primary care may be on an upswing. One report documents the number of males becoming primary caregivers as rising 50 percent between 1984 and 1994. With the aging of the boomers and the parents who sired them, that number can only be rising.
Children. By their early 40s, 78 percent of American men have fathered at least one child, according to the 2002 US National Survey of Family Growth. And among men ages 15-44 who haven't had children yet, another 78 percent say it would bother them at least a little if they never had a child. Clearly, children are important to us—so important that, in the same study, more men than women say a man's kids should come before his career! And, for many separated men, their kids are their only family. (Ditto gay divorced cowboys, like Heath Ledger's character in Brokeback Mountain.) Sociologist Paul Amato, PhD, of Pennsylvania State University, has analyzed 63 studies dealing with divorced dads and their kids. He found that if the kids felt close to their fathers and if the dads provided authoritative parenting, the children did well in school and were less likely to get into trouble after school.
Wives—or girlfriends who might one day become wives. By age 35, 70 percent of us have gotten married. So marriage is important to most of us. Unfortunately, marriage is becoming less important to women. The latest evidence comes from the same survey. The 12,000 men and women who participated were asked to agree or disagree with the statement "It is better to get married than go through life single." Two-thirds (66 percent) of men agreed—but only 51 percent of women did. In other words, one in two women thinks marriage isn't such a sweet deal for her. Maybe your wife.
» Sex archive
Men's Health Philippines - December 2006 Issue
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