Louann Brizedine - The Female Brain (2006)

 

One day, I was doing my usual pursuing of the Powell's technical books building. My girlfriend was selling clothes and I was disinterested in waiting in line with her. Floating around the physics books, I made my way over to the neurobiology section. Suddenly, my phone bleeped. Epinephrine flooded my body as I received the dreaded coup de grace text. I must pick a book now, or leave empty handed. There it was, with a little placard espousing its bestseller status.

Unfortunately, I found the text to be, frankly, unscientific in its wording and presentation. While the introduction was solid and laid a great opening framework for a scientific text, the actual meat and potatoes of the book felt like one long introduction, fraught with undue certainty when it came to its subject matter. I get it though, this is not a hardcore science book. Its a popular science book that is attempting to greatly simplify a vastly complex subject that is still an emerging field. The problem was in the way the simplification was achieved.

While the end of the book had a substantial number of references, individual scientific statements were made without individual citations or footnotes. This just makes me uneasy when reading a science book. How much of the statements are extrapolations of studies from the author? On what foundation is the author standing on? While I could check the back references for many statements, swaths of information did not have backing references.and statements were made that gave such certainty to their validity. While there is much we do understand about how neurotransmitters and different areas of the brain function, there is also a lot that we don't know and good science writers are adept at wording their books to reflect that.

The book forces a very dualistic viewpoint on male-female brain functions and focuses very little on the many ways that they are similar, to an absurd level. The functions of both testosterone and estrogen in the book are greatly simplified, when recent data has shown that both have more complex interactive functions in both male and female anatomy [1] [2]. Finally, at the end of the book, the author endorses acupuncture as a possible alternative to hormone therapy in postmenopausal women. As an aside, I'd also recommend foot rubs, but I wouldn't seriously suggest it in a scientific book about possible alternatives to hormone therapy.

With all its flaws, the best part of the book is the introduction. While its status as a scientific book should be questioned, the anecdotal stories of psychoanalytical tribulations by the author are, at least, entertaining and the book is written fluidly with an obviously unabashed dumbing down of its scientific content for a presumably unscientific audience. If you know anything about neurobiology, pass over this book.

Sources:
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-11/male-sex-drive-depends-on-both-estrogen-and-testosterone.html 
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/science/middle-aged-men-can-blame-estrogen-too.html?_r=0