Why Women Never Forget
an Argument
Understanding our different thought patterns
helps us to better appreciate our partners.
Women's brains are wired to feel and recall
emotions far more intensely than the brains of
men. The process of experiencing emotion and then
storing that emotion as a memory occurs more
readily in a woman's brain than in that of a
man.
Although scientists have not yet been able to
identify the exact neural basis for this
difference, studies consistently indicate that
women tend to have more vivid memories of
emotional events than men. Under stress, during an
argument for example, a woman's mind often becomes
flooded with these memories.
What researchers have discovered is that men
and women store emotional memories in two
different areas of the brain. Men in the right
amygdala and women in the left amygdala of the
brain. The connections that women have between
emotional memories and emotional reactions are
closely associated. For men that same process is
performed in two different hemispheres of the
brain.
Here as in many of the differences between
the functioning of the male and female brains, the
connections that women have between feelings,
thoughts, and actions can be better explained as
examples of whole brain function, whereas males
evidence the compartmentalization of many of these
functions where connections are not clearly
made.
All of this is more easily understood in
terms of males hunting while females performed a
variety of functions back at home, not the least
of which was raising the children. While a male
may focus on one object for hours on end (think
hunting) a female is wired to juggle three
different things at the same time (dinner is
cooking, two of the boys are wandering off from
the encampment, and the two girls are fighting
over a stick.)
The male focus on one particular object or
point to the exclusion of most everything else has
long been considered a possible reason why modern
males enjoy games centered around a moving object:
a baseball, a hockey puck, a golf ball.
Women have the capacity to remember the
negative and the positive things that their mate
did in the past with much greater clarity than a
man will. That doesn't mean that a man will not
remember a hurtful act, but as a rule he will not
be able to recall good and bad moments with the
clear and vivid response that a woman will
have.
Just as men don't like to hear their mates
say, "This is the same mistake you made last
year," they love to hear about times when they did
something kind and pleased their partner. As for
their failures to do that, men tend to filter this
out and leave it forgotten in the past.
Women who expect men to express the same
degree of intensity and accuracy about personal
issues and events are inevitably disappointed.
When a woman lowers her expectations of what she
believes her partner should recall it lessens the
tension between them. She is not lowering her
expectations, she is realizing the difference in
how they both store and recall emotional
memories.
Obviously it is disappointing to a woman that
her partner won't recall a particular moment, but
it's important to remember that we're not living
out a carefully scripted Hollywood romance. In
real life we simply function in our own unique way
with the intellectual capacity that nature has
given us.