Announcing The 2006 "More Likely To Be Killed By a Terrorist Than Marry Retraction" Award to Louann Brizendine, for "The Female Brain"

This summer Newsweek Magazine retracted its twenty year old story predicting that educated women over thirty were more likely to be killed by a terrorist than find a man who would marry them. Terry Martin Hekker ("Ever Since Adam and Eve") retracted her 1979 advice that women wrap themselves in Saran and greet their hubbies with a cold martini after her husband left her eligible for food stamps and is now working on a new piece of advice, "Ignore Previous Book." The woman who invented Sequencing ("Sequencing") is now recommending sticking it out. To paraphrase Fiddler On the Roof, "Retractions! Retractions!"

Despite the retractions, terrible methodology and hostility to women's aspirations combine to create an apparently unlimited market for books that punish ambitious women. Every day I turn on my TV and see another such volume or report. So I have decided to create a prize. I will restrain myself to giving it only once a year, although the competition will be keen. It's the "More Likely to Be Killed By a Terrorist Than Marry Retraction" Award for the dumbest, most obviously concocted, damaging suggestion in the area of women's lives, which, after two decades of terrorizing the women it purports to help, is absolutely guaranteed to generate a belated retraction, sort of like pulling out the emptied fang of a spent rattlesnake.

This year's winner is the transparently nonsensical "Female Brain" by self-proclaimed (honest, it's on her book publicity) "pioneering neuropsychiatrist" Louann Brizendine. In The Female Brain, Brizendine, a San Francisco Bay area psychiatrist, who runs a clinic she started to help women who think their mental problems are caused by their hormones, describes the life cycle of a contemporary American educated, neurotic, urban, privileged professional in a culture in which science is just another option, as if she had discovered Lucy, the mother of all mankind. Behavior familiar to many of us only from the wonderful bad Heather literature is presented as hard-"wired" ( the abuse of the term "wired" has already attracted the fury of the neuroscientist, Caltechgirl, not usually known for her liberal opinions, on her blog) into the female brain. Brizendine's description of the hard-"wired" cervix and brain-softening, uncontrollable urge to mate with one's newborn baby, which makes wholesale desertion of the work place is as irresistible as the law of gravity, is the closest thing to soft porn I've seen emerging from the San Francisco Medical Center in a long time. For the many women who would find Brizendine's transparently autobiographical description of the stages of a woman's life almost entirely unfamiliar, the possibility that the book is false seems immediately obvious. If it were true, The Female Brain would be a scary book indeed. But of course it's not.

Insecure readers might coubt their own sanity when reading the thing, because the short book is supplemented by mind-numbing pages of citations to scientific journals. But happily as far as I know the articles Brizendine cites bear essentially no relationship to the propositions in the text of the book. As the only real academic to look at it reveals, she might as well have cited to passages in "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." The methodology is the all-too-familiar incredible assertions supported by a Million Little Pieces of unrelated footnotes.

"Science" books with faux citations are a problem. But perhaps a worse problem is that not a single book reviewer in the country took the time to go to the local university library and see whether Brizendine's "sources" actually said what she said they said. Even Robin Marantz Henig, of the staggeringly self-justifying, endlessly publicly edited and allegedly tansparency-seeking New York Times, was content to whimper that the closed sourcing of the scientific journals Brizendine's cites made it impossible for her to check their truthiness (thank you, Stephen). The insurmountable barrier of a (no transfer) subway ride from the Times offices in Times Square to the Columbia University library was apparently too much for this dauntless investigative reporter from the Newspaper of Record.

Blessedly, Mark Liberman, the Trustee Professor of Phonetics, Department of Linguistics and Professor, Department of Computer and Information Science, at the University of Pennsylvania, was intrigued enough by Brizendine's unlikely assertion that "A woman uses about 20,000 words per day while a man uses about 7,000" to try to run down that one building block of her Mars/Venus "neuropsychiatry." He reports on his blog first, that there was absolutely no legitimate source whatsoever for the factoid and speculating that some marriage counselor must have made it up, then, that metasurveys revealed no such thing, and finally, doing his own test found that men use more words than women do!

Alerted to the possibility that Brizendine might have made it all up, and his appetite whetted by the confessed public failure of the avatar of all the news that's fit to print, Liberman rummaged among his books and fired up his online university library system and investigated the citations for Brizendine's assertion that “studies indicate that girls are motivated — on a molecular and a neurological level — to ease and even prevent social conflict.”

Here's what he found:

"My summaries of these articles, in the context of Brizendine's claims [that studies indicate girls are motivated on a molecular and neurologicallevel to ease and even prevent social conflict]:

1. Jasnow 2006: shows that "long-term estrogen treatment in ovariectomized female mice via Silastic capsule implantation [faciliated] both contextual and cued fear conditioning". By "fear conditioning" they mean teaching individual mice to "freeze" in anticipation of electric shocks delivered via a test cage shock floor. Nothing here about social conflict avoidance or preserving relationships or humans of any sex.
2. Bertolino 2005: fMRI of 14 phobic-prone subjects and 14 eating-disorder-prone subjects showed that "phobic prone subjects selectively recruit the amygdala to a larger extent than eating disorders prone subjects". The level of amygdala activity "was also independently predicted by personality style and genotype of the serotonin transporter". In each group of 14, 9 were female and 5 were male, and the results are not differentiated by sex. Nothing here about social conflict or preserving relationships or teenagers of any sex.
3. Hamann 2005: A review article on sex differences in amygdala response. Connects the amygdala to women's "stronger and more vivid memories for emotional events" and to "the greater role that visual stimuli play in male sexual behavior". Male amydala is bigger. Abnormal amygdala response has been observed in depression. Speculates about relation to sex differences in rates of PTSD and voyeurism. Nothing here about social conflict avoidance or preserving relationships or teenagers.
4. Huber 2005: After determining "the distribution of vasopressin and oxytocin receptors in the CeA [central amygdala] using autoradiography on horizontal rat brain sections", they used intracellular recording to "find that vasopressin and oxytocin modulate activity in CeM neurons in opposite ways through the activation of distinct elements of an inhibitory network" and that "can differently affect the integration of distinct afferents to the CeA into a common output to the autonomic nervous system, thus providing a neurophysiological mechanism for their opposite effects on anxiety and fear behavior". Nothing here about sex differences, about social conflict avoidance, about preserving relationships, or about humans of any age or sex.
5. Pezawas 2005: They used "used multimodal neuroimaging in a large sample of healthy human subjects" to explore the basis of "increased anxiety-related temperamental traits, increased amygdala reactivity and elevated risk of depression" in "carriers of the short allele of a functional 5' promoter polymorphism of the serotonin transporter gene". They found "reduced gray matter volume in short-allele carriers in limbic regions critical for processing of negative emotion, particularly perigenual cingulate and amygdala". There were 114 subjects. They don't break their data down by sex, although they correlate genotyping and structural imaging with functional imaging results and also with personality-assessment questionnaires. Nothing here about sex differences, about social conflict avoidance, about preserving relationships, or about teenage girls.
6. Sabatinelli 2005: Looked at "functional activity in the visual cortex and amygdala with fMRI while selected fearful and control participants view a range of neutral, emotionally arousing, and fear-relevant pictures", and found an "individually-sensitive, positive linear relationship between the arousing quality of visual stimuli and activation in amygdala and ventral visual cortex". Subjects were 18 females from an undergrad psych course, half selected for "high snake fear". Stimuli were 60 color pictures showing "complex neutral scenes, neutral people, non-threatening animals, snakes, erotica, and mutilations". You'll never guess: "participants reporting elevated snake fear were more reactive while viewing pictures of snakes than unselected volunteers". Nothing here about sex differences or social conflict avoidance or preserving relationships.
7. Viau 2005: "To explore the nature by which gender differences in HPA [hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal] function emerge we examined in prepubertal (~30-d-old) and postpubertal (~60-d-old) male and female rats HPA activity under basal conditions and in response to 30 min of restraint." They found sex and age differences, and concluded that "gonadal regulation of the HPA axis develops via distinct mechanisms" in male and female rats. Nothing here about social conflict avoidance or about preserving relationships.
8. Wilson 2005: They tested 4 dominant and 3 subordinate female rhesus monkeys, and found that estradiol replacement increased plasma levels of cortisol compared to a placebo and treatment with P4. Because Penn lacks a subscription to this journal, and I was unwilling to pay $30 for a 7-page article, I'm not sure about the details. Unlike the other articles cited, it does have something to do with social interaction, but there's apparently no direct relevance to social conflict avoidance or preserving relationships.
9. Phelps 2004: A review article about how the amygdala and the hippocampal complex interact: "the amygdala can modulate both the encoding and the storage of hippocampal-dependent memories. The hippocampal complex, by forming episodic representations of the emotional significance and interpretation of events, can influence the amygdala response when emotional stimuli are encountered." Discussion of sex differences is interesting but equivocal: "Recent brain imaging studies have suggested that the left and right amygdala could be differentially involved in memory for emotional stimuli depending on the sex of the subject. Specifically, two recent studies have shown that the left amygdala is correlated with later memory for emotional stimuli in female subjects, whereas the right amygdala is correlated with memory for emotional stimuli in male subjects" [...] "However, studies examining emotional memory or physiological responses to emotional stimuli in patients with amygdala damage have failed to find such sex differences. These studies have tended to be consistent with previous studies on hippocampal function showing a material specific involvement of the left and right amygdala for verbal and visual material, respectively." Nothing here about social conflict avoidance or preserving relationships."

Inspired by Liberman, I did a little snooping into the vita of the self-proclaimed UCSF Professor and found that she is in fact not an academic professor, but a clinical professor, running a clinic she herself founded treating women's psychiatric problems from a hormonal standpoint, at $180 a session.

Now clinical professors do good and important work in many institutions, but this does mean that she has not had to undertake and meet the rigorous competition for an academic position at a leading medical school. Just as well. During her fourteen years as a "Professor," prior to the 2006 Terrorist Retraction Prize winning "Female Brain," Brizendine was an author on exactly seven papers, the most recent one published four years ago in 2002. According to PubMed, a service of the National Library of Medicine and National Institutes of Health, which is cited on Brizendine's own academic bio webpage, she was not even the first named researcher on any of the seven. Just to put her accomplishments in context, her colleague in the psychiatry department at UCSF, Associate Professor Steven P. Hamilton, has published twenty-four papers since 1994, first listed author on eleven.
I guess it depends on what "pioneering neuropsychiatrist" is . . . is.

A quick web search for other Brizendine contributions to medical science turned up report that she told the audience at a fund-raiser that "the World Health Organization has projected that by 2003, depression will be the number one disease in the world, surpassing diabetes, heart disease and others." I guess it depends on what "number one disease" is, but I would be surprised if the WHO thought depression was a worse threat to human well-being than, say, malaria or AIDS.

The book stores are full of loony books that look at first glance like science, so it is probably too much to ask that the publisher withdraw its endorsement of The Female Brain, as publishers did in the cases of the fake memoir "A Thousand Little Pieces" and the plagiarized "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life." But I venture to guess that if a book about anything except why women should behave in old-fashioned and traditional ways contained this staggering percentage of misrepresentation and error, someone beside a blogging linguistics professor would have picked it up long ago.

And so, to Louann Brizendine, that self-described pioneering neuropsychiatrist of no apparently significant academic publications and false or unrelated data points, the First, Annual "More Likely To Be Killed By a Terrorist Retraction Award" for 2006.