Ever wonder why most women can juggle the kids, the office, and the kitchen renovation all at once but most men prefer to concentrate on one thing at a time? This is because women naturally have more connections than men do between their right and left brains, allowing them to divide their attention and multitask.

Women have a unique feminine brain. It is different from a man's brain. And it has its own styles of thought. Yet for the last fifty years women have had to fit their brains into a "male" world. We have had to learn how to, as the song says, "walk like a man," and "talk like a man," but stay a woman inside. To accommodate these two divergent roles, our brains have had to rewire themselves.

It's a biological fact that the process of learning any new skill creates physical, structural changes in the brain. Much research has demonstrated learning-induced changes in the brain. A recent study showed that even learning to juggle objects caused physical changes in brain anatomy. When a woman learns to juggle the traditional feminine role with newer, once typically male responsibilities, her brain changes physically and functionally. And as our world has gotten more technologically complex, the task of assuming roles common to both sexes has taken its toll on women's emotional and physical health.

When you were born, you had a traditional female brain that combined the genetic heritage of your parents and the in utero environment in which your mother developed you until you were born. Then, as you grew up in the incubator of your childhood, that genetic heritage was molded and acculturated to life in this society.

The world's changing demands on women force us to sprout dual brain types to adapt and accomplish all of our tasks. On top of our inborn feminine wiring, we must develop or sprout new pathways in the brain — new responses, actions, and behaviors, too — to survive in jobs and careers that require a more male, compartmentalized brain style.

Developing more masculine brain pathways on top of her inborn feminine brain style comes at a cost to a woman's emotional, intellectual, and physical health. Her brain, the New Feminine Brain, doesn't have all the bugs worked out of it. Women may develop moodiness, depression, nervousness, anxiety, inattention, and problems with learning and memory. If you are emotionally porous, whatever you attempt to compartmentalize or shut down may actually get overloaded and increase your risk for developing certain health problems. The New Feminine Brain's recently acquired brain pathways can create tension with the old brain and body, leaving a woman stuck in the middle, unable to make key decisions about her life, including vocational goals, relationships, or her place in society.

(Jag blir ofta så förvirrad när jag läser om nåt nytt, och förstår inte riktigt innebörden, eller vikten av det, sett i ett helhetsperspektiv... Ibland undrar jag nästan om jag är dum i huvudet; jag kan tex. gå i taket av entusiasm över "nåt helt fantastiskt och revolutionerande...", - som sen visar sig vara hur självklart som helst, inget nytt eller märkvärdigt... (och det tycker även jag, efter att ha fått en förklaring till det... ) Nånting som inte kopplar riktigt, där uppe i hjärnkontoret, så jag börjar inse behovet av att "stämma av" med andra...)

As we talk about all of these psychological and biological challenges, we will also talk about the importance of intuition — the ability to make good, beneficial, or correct decisions with insufficient information. Normally, we make decisions based on concrete information that we can see or hear. However, when we can't get enough facts from the outside world — or we are overwhelmed by too much information — we can function effectively by using our intuition. Despite what you've been led to believe, intuition doesn't come to you through tea leaves, tarot cards, a Ouija board, or from another world. Intuition is a natural product of your brain and body.

Our lives as women today are bombarded with greater and greater complexity, so the New Feminine Brain has to exaggerate — to overdevelop — its intuition. We women today need to appreciate our intuition, which has sometimes been denigrated by our culture. We need to understand how it's wired into our brain and body and develop it further. Intuition helps us learn to adapt to what the world demands of us.

All of this input [att vi bombarderas med så mycket störande intryck] affects your perception, attention, and memory circuits. A recent study showed that children who watch too much television too early in their lives have an increased risk of developing attention deficit disorder (ADD). Cartoons in particular feature frequent changes of scenes with manic activity that can "prime" a child's brain to shift quickly from one topic to another instead of learning to focus and maintain attention in the way needed to learn and stay on task in a classroom.

(Eller är hela grejen bara blaha, blaha, "typisk amerikansk sensationshysteri" - och en massa långa utläggningar som egentligen bara rör "vanlig psykologi", eller att de funnit synliga bevis på att hjärnan "jobbar", när man tänker, känner osv...? ...och jag den enda människa på jorden som är korkad nog att gå på det... )

msitua skrev:Just det du frågar om AS kan kompenseras så vet jag inte. Det jag vet är att det rör sig om andra delar av hjärnan. Man brukar tala om att Asperger hänger ihop med limbiska systemet och amygdala - hur hjärnan processar intryck och kopplar samman dem med känslor - ex så kan man tänka på en situation när man känner en doft.