Why Men Never Remember and Women Never Forget

What a great title for a book. The author enlightens us to the differences between men and women is such a light-hearted, interesting read. Recommend highly.

I skimmed this at the book store and couldn't put it down. It answered questions I didn't know I had about relating to women. If high school seniors read this book and Women's Reality by Anne Wilson Schaeff, couples would handle relationship drama a lot better.

Marianne Legato, an expert on gender specific medicine, writes how men and women's biological differences account for some psychological differences. Men and women tend to use different portions of their brains more and to release more of different hormones which tends to create differences in how men and women act in various activities. It is important that we understand and appreciate these differences, especially in medical senses as past research has tended to not realize that women have these different reactions. Women are more apt to activate the armygdala section of the brain during stress which causes higher blood pressure and faster heart beats, thus making women more prone to stress. Women also tend to release greater amounts of the hormone oxytocin which motivates one to seek others for assistance. During stress, women are more apt to use both sides of the brain, which allows for more multitasking. Men tend to use one side of the brain and are better at handing events one at a time, which in some circumstances can be more efficient than multitasking. Women, thought, release more estrogen and activate more brain neurons during stress, which indicate they may feel stress more sharply. The structure of chromosomes of females makes them more apt to suffer from depression. These differences in chemical releases may partially explain why, of the 19 million with depression, 12 million are female. The chemical releases that tend to cause depression often occur after childbirth which leads to the little admitted reality that most mothers suffer some degree of depression within 10 days following giving birth. As for bragging rights, men can claim to have larger brains and women may retort their brains are more efficient. Interestingly, male and female brains literally think differently. Females tend to be better at understanding the nuances of verbal communication and understanding the meaning of nonverbal cues such as facial expressions. Women tend to have a higher blood flow to the parts of the brain from which language functions. Thus, women have better recall of conversations. It is important that we understand and recognize these differences. As many past medical studies used more male subjects, we are now learning it is wrong to assume that the responses of women to diseases and psychological experiences are the same as men experience. It is better that we discover what these differences are and we alter our medical and psychological assistance accordingly.

I have to say it's a very good book. Dr. Legato offers a serie of explanations to alot of situations of a woman-man relationship, especially a romantic one. Like she says, this book doesn't only help parters but relationships between mother and son, daughter and father, etc. However, its main objective is to help relationships between you and your husband, you and your boyfriend or you and your lover. At least, that's how I understood it, since it talks a lot about disagreements about understanding and sex. I have to say that after reading this book, I see things between me and my boyfriend from a different perspective than I did before. You'll see that as you read you can't help but think to yourself "Aha! that explains why". You can also relate to many of the examples that Dr. Legato offers about her patients. I give this book a strong recommendation to anyone who wants to know why it is inevitable to feel angered, frustraded, confused or upset in your relationship. Once you read it, you will have a better understanding of why the opposite sex does or does not do the things we expect from them. Like I said, this book will make you understand what exactly causes men to make your blood boil. [email protected]

I never gave much thought to the "real" differences between males and females, other than the obvious physical differences we all learn about in our earliest years, but, somehow, I knew there were more profound differences than I had recognized and, for the most part, had ignored them. Like all males, I have interacted with the opposite sex all my life and merely chalked up the personality-bound dissimilarities between us as the result of socio-cultural influences and the ways in which we were individually treated. Physiological research into the variances between the sexes, other than the visible ones, was not a subject much emphasized nor much discussed. How times have changed! Brain studies, with investigations into the chemistry of hormones, proteins, and the like, plus the explosion of knowledge about genes and their influence on human physiology and behavior, have provided us with new and fascinating insights into the fundamental asymmetries which exist between men and women, regardless of the environment in which they were raised. In her new book, "Why Men Never Remember and Women Never Forget," Dr. Marianne Legato has summarized much of the recent research and used the results to offer a very practical guide for ordinary men and women to use in evaluating gender relationships and for understanding the psychological and social differences between the sexes, based on the biology involved, with the hope that such awareness will help avoid many of the difficulties that occur within marriages, friendships, and other types of associations. And she does all this while entertaining the reader with interesting anecdotes and sidebars, using an easy writing style which is pleasing to both the mind and the eye. This is quite an achievement in a book which contains much technical information gleaned from recent scientific studies within the disciplines of medicine, physiology, biology, and such. She begins her book with an interesting "true and false" feature. "True or false: Sex is determined by our biology." Do you know the correct answer? "True or false: There are significant differences between the brains of men and women." The answer may surprise you! "True or False: The brain has a sex at birth." Some people may be surprised here also. "True or False: Men's brains are bigger." Never thought about this topic before, but now I have; is it true or false? This is just a sampling of the "true and false" feature she has in the first chapter; some of the other topics she tackles are just as provocative and are sure to raise the hackles of some members of both sexes. But, after all, "truth" is truth, and sometimes a bitter pill. Political correctness has no place in the natural and physical sciences. Chapter Two is devoted to the question: "What attracts us to one another and how do we fall in love?" Having been in love many times myself (on various levels, of course!), I often wondered what provided the "essential key" to falling in love with a p