The Female Brain by Louann Md Brizendine Page A

words per day than boys. We know that young girls speak earlier and by the age of twenty months have double or triple the number of words in their vocabularies than do boys. Boys eventually catch up in their vocabulary but not in speed or overlapping speech. Girls speak faster on average, especially when they are in a social setting. Men haven’t always appreciated that verbal edge. In Colonial America, women were put in the town stocks with wooden clips on their tongues or tortured by the “dunking stool,” held underwater and almost drowned—punishments that were never imposed on men—for the crime of “talking too much.” Even among our primate cousins, there’s a big difference in the vocal communication of males and females. Female rhesus monkeys, for instance, learn to vocalize much earlier than do males and use every one of the seventeen vocal tones of their species all day long, every day, to communicate with one another. Male rhesus monkeys, by contrast, learn only three to six tones, and once they’re adults, they’ll go for days or even weeks without vocalizing at all. Sound familiar?
    And why do girls go to the bathroom to talk? Why do they spend so much time on the phone with the door closed? They’re trading secrets and gossiping to create connection and intimacy with their female peers. They’re developing close-knit cliques with secret rules. In these new groups, talking, telling secrets, and gossiping, in fact, often become girls’ favorite activities—their tools to navigate and ease the ups and downs and stresses of life.
    I could see it in Shana’s face. Her mother was complaining that she couldn’t get her fifteen-year-old to concentrate on work, or even a conversation about school. Forget keeping her at the table for dinner. Shana had an almost drugged look sitting in my waiting room while she anticipated the next text message from her girlfriend Parker. Shana’s grades hadn’t been great, and she was becoming a bit of a behavior problem at school, so she wasn’t allowed to go over to her friend’s. Her mother, Lauren, had also denied her use of the cell phone and the computer, but Shana’s reaction to being cut off from her friends was so over the top—she screamed, slammed doors, and started wrecking her room—that Lauren relented and gave her twenty minutes per day on the cell phone to make contact. But since she couldn’t talk in private, Shana resorted to text messaging.
    There is a biological reason for this behavior. Connecting through talking activates the pleasure centers in a girl’s brain. Sharing secrets that have romantic and sexual implications activates those centers even more. We’re not talking about a small amount of pleasure. This is huge. It’s a major dopamine and oxytocin rush, which is the biggest, fattest neurological reward you can get outside of an orgasm. Dopamine is a neurochemical that stimulates the motivation and pleasure circuits in the brain. Estrogen at puberty increases dopamine and oxytocin production in girls. Oxytocin is a neurohormone that triggers and is triggered by intimacy. When estrogen is on the rise, a teen girl’s brain is pushed to make even more oxytocin—and to get even more reinforcement for social bonding. At midcycle, during peak estrogen production, the girl’s dopamine and oxytocin level is likely at its highest, too. Not only her verbal output is at its maximum but her urge for intimacy is also peaking. Intimacy releases more oxytocin, which reinforces the desire to connect, and connecting then brings a sense of pleasure and well-being.
    Both oxytocin and dopamine production are stimulated by ovarian estrogen at the onset of puberty—and for the rest of a woman’s fertile life. This means that teen girls start getting even more pleasure from connecting and bonding—playing with each other’s hair, gossiping, and shopping together—than they did before puberty. It’s the same kind of dopamine rush that coke or