Why don't men understand women?

Men might have found themselves an excuse not to listen to women. New research suggests that men have twice more difficulty reading emotions in women than in men. This may not sound surprising, but evidence that men have trouble understanding women is, at best, scarce.

Being able to guess someone else’s thoughts, feelings and intentions is an instinctive social skill that develops in early childhood. We might take it for granted, but people who struggle or are unable to read other people, like people with autism spectrum disorders, have serious problems in communicating and interacting socially. This important ‘mindreading’ trait, so far thought to be unique to our species, recruits a complex brain network. Different, but partially overlapping, brain regions are activated when we perceive mental states like beliefs, intentions or desires (mentalizing) and when we ‘feel’ the emotions of another person (empathy).

In a new PLoSONE study, Boris Schiffer’s research group at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, investigates whether there are differences in neural activation when men recognise emotions in women when compared to men.

The researchers asked 22 healthy adult men to do a modified version of the ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes’ (RME) test while their brain activity was measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The RME test has been used in countless studies to measure mentalizing and empathy (you can take the test here). In this study, each participant had to guess what either a man or a woman in a photo was thinking or feeling from looking only at his or her eyes. For each of the 36 pairs of eyes, there was a choice of two mental states, for instance ‘terrified’ or ‘upset’. The participants performed better in the test when the eyes belonged to men, suggesting that men have greater difficulty in recognising mental states in women than in their own gender. But the question is… why? The fMRI readings shed some light into this.

Schiffer and colleagues predicted that recognising mental states in male or female eyes would activate brain areas involved in mentalizing and empathy, and this is what they found. But there was more. Some areas were more active when the participants were guessing emotions in men, and others when they were recognising emotions in women. It isn't clear what these results mean though. As these differently activated brain regions have in one way or another previously been involved in memory, the authors speculate that they are recruited to retrieve either autobiographical emotional memories (when the participants look at male eyes) or memories of past encounters with women (when they look at female eyes). But this doesn’t explain why men have more difficulty in perceiving women’s emotions. There was, however, another clue in the fMRI readings. Just looking at male eyes, without having to do any particular task, activated the amygdala, which is a brain region associated with processing of emotions and empathy.

The authors suggest that when men respond to their own gender, emotion and empathy brain networks are recruited (because men can more easily relate to other men), and this might enhance their ability to perceive mental states. A few studies support this idea. For instance, one study showed that men are better than women at recognising angry faces in men. Schiffer and colleagues further speculate that in evolutionary terms, ‘it makes more sense’, they claim, that we should be better at mentalizing about people that are most similar to us. This would have been particularly important for men in the ‘ancient times’, the authors add, as men were hunting and fighting for territory and it was advantageous for them to predict the intentions of their male rivals. But while this is an attractive hypothesis, it remains rather speculative.

And what about women? The main lingering question from this research is perhaps whether women are also better at reading mental states in individuals of their own gender. According to the authors, the prediction is that they should. So men should not be too quick to blame their gender for not understanding the opposite sex- this may backfire.

Reference:

Schiffer B., Pawliczek C., Müller B.W., Gizewski E.R., Walter H. & Krueger F. (2013). Why Don't Men Understand Women? Altered Neural Networks for Reading the Language of Male and Female Eyes, PLoS ONE, 8 (4) e60278. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0060278.g003

This article was published in Lab Times on 15-05-2013. You can read it here.

Brain waves used to create music

Science and art often go hand in hand. M.C. Escher played with geometry in his famous prints of impossible realities, and anatomist Gunther von Hagenst captivated millions of people with a display of preserved human corpses and body parts. More recently, a popular installation at the London Barbican Gallery offers art lovers the unique experience of walking in the rain without getting wet. 

Science lets art push boundaries, and so is increasingly used by modern artists to shock and awe. But this is a two way street.

Researchers from the University of Electronic Science and Technology in China have now used recordings from brain scans to create music, and they hope that listening to the brain will give new insights into how it works.

EEG-fMRI music from two subjects (Credit: Lu et al 2012 PLoS ONE)

This unusual way of blending science and art was first introduced in 1965 by the American composer Alvin Lucier in the piece Music for Solo Performer, but it was not until the 1990s that 'brainwave music' boomed with the development of powerful computers. Scientists and musicians now use computational models to convert data from brain scan technology into music played by electronic synthesizers.

In the new study published in PLoS ONE, Jing Lu and colleagues developed a new method to combine readings from electroencephalograms (EEGs) and functional MRI (fMRI) brain scans to produce music that better mimics contemporary classical music. The amplitude and the frequency of the EEG signal were used to create the pitch and the duration of each musical note. This was then remixed with an fMRI signal, which set the intensity of the notes played. 

Functional MRI imaging (Credit: Wikipedia)

The authors acknowledge that the sources of the two signals are however unrelated. "There is something a little arbitrary about putting EEG and fMRI together in this way" says philosopher Dan Lloyd from Trinity College, Connecticut, who was the first person to create music from fMRI scans. "But you have to start somewhere, learning scales before you play a sonata, and this is a good start" he adds.

EEGs measure the electrical activity of the brain. Brain cells, or neurons, communicate with one another through electrical signals. During an EEG, electrodes are attached to the scalp and plugged into a computer that converts the electrical signals to waves. EEGs are currently used to diagnose epilepsy and sleep disorders for instance.

fMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging, on the other hand measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow, and is mostly used in research. Neurons need oxygen to make energy, so when a brain area is more active, oxygen-rich blood surges. The pattern of brain activity across the brain is then represented in a color code.

The authors of the study plan to improve their EEG-fMRI method so it may be used for clinical diagnosis, for example, if the music could produce audible differences between healthy and sick brains. Lloyd says

"With the proper sonification [conversion to sound], something like a 'brain stethoscope' could be developed as a clinical tool for detecting clues to a variety of brain conditions". 

But there are skeptics. David Sulzer, a neurophysiologist at Columbia University and jazz musician, thinks that brainwave music can only detect very significant changes in brain activity, such as an epileptic seizure. He says "If you cannot diagnose an illness through a chart recorder readout, I do not understand how it can be done sonically". 

Sulzer believes music made from brain activity is an art and a science didactic tool. For instance, he uses The Brainwave Music Project to teach the public about brain function before his performances of brainwave music.

Whether brainwave music will be useful for science or medicine remains an open question, but it can surely be said that it has become an art form of its own. It might not be for everyone's taste but brainwave music certainly causes an impression, which is the very definition of modern art.

Source: 

Lu J, Wu D, Yang H, Luo C, Li C, et al. (2012) Scale-Free Brain-Wave Music from Simultaneously EEG and fMRI Recordings. PLoS ONE doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0049773. 

Listen to the authors' EEG-fMRI brainwave music here and here.

This article was published in The Munich Eye on 22-11-2012. You can read it here.