The Male Brain (7 page)

In the male hierarchy of primates and humans, the angry face
is used to maintain power
. And the angriest faces typically belong to men with the
highest testosterone, according to research
. A study of teen boys in Sweden found that the ones with the most testosterone
reacted more aggressively to threats
. These boys with the highest testosterone also reported
being more irritable and impatient
. And in another study, testosterone levels rose in response to seeing an angry face, thus dialing up
the brain circuits for aggression
. So angry faces--real or imagined--ignite the male fighting spirit. As Jake and Dylan had experienced in their shoving match, this sudden anger can trigger a knee-jerk reaction--often surprising even to the fighters. If these two boys had lower testosterone and vasopressin, they would not have been so fired up to fight and wouldn't have felt compelled to even the score. But as it was, this hormone cocktail was keeping an irritable and sometimes irrational fire smoldering.

The teen male not only sees faces differently than he did as a boy; he also begins to perceive voices and other sounds differently
than he did before adolescence
. And his changing hormones can make him hear things differently than girls his age. In Portugal, researchers found that during puberty, estrogen surges in females and testosterone surges in males increase the hearing differences
between girls' and boys' brains
, but the main difference is that some simple sounds, like white noise, are processed differently in the male brain. Liesbet Ruytjens and colleagues in the Netherlands compared the brain activity of seventeen-to twenty-five-year-old males and females as they processed the sound of white noise and as
they processed the sound of music
. The female brains intensely activated to both the white noise and to the music. The male brains, too, activated to the music, but they
deactivated
to the white noise. It was as if they didn't even hear it. The screening system in their male brains was automatically turning off white noise. Scientists have learned that during male fetal brain development, testosterone affects the formation of the auditory system and the connections within the brain, making it inhibit unwanted "noise" and repetitious acoustic stimuli more
than the female brain does
. I tease my husband that his brain's acoustic system seems to automatically shut down when I start repeating myself--it's registering in his brain as white noise.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.