I hesitated to open “The Female Brain,” and grimaced when I saw the introduction titled “What Makes Us Women.”

Flashing in my own cerebral cortex – like a railroad crossing warning – was Stephen Jay Gould’s important book “The Mismeasure of Man.” It explores the long historical abuse of science, chiefly in cranial “research” and IQ tests, to “prove” that white men are smartest.

Louann Brizendine, a psychiatrist, enters the minefield at a different angle, but enter it she does, trying to explain how women’s “innate biology affects their reality.”

The author makes no mention of Gould in her accessible, worthwhile and flawed new book, but she picks up on his point, writing, “Male brains are larger by about 9 percent, even after correcting for body size. In the 19th century, scientists took this to mean that women had less mental capacity than men. Women and men, however, have the same number of brain cells. The cells are just packed more densely in women – cinched corsetlike into a smaller skull.”

Brizendine exhibits a nice explanatory touch, and she peppers her book with fun facts: Women, on average, speak 20,000 words each day; men clock in at a mere 7,000. Notions of sex occur to women about once per day, while men are registering a sexual thought about once a minute.

But do we really need a psychiatrist to point out that women can be chatty and men can be fixated on sex?

Still, I appreciate any doctor who can type “Boy was I wrong” more than once, and who has a gift for teaching, which she has done at Yale, Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley. Brizendine includes an eye-opening, two-page chart that tracks females from fetus to post-menopause, listing the hormonal changes, linked brain circuitry and some of the generalized behavioral consequences.

The best part of “The Female Brain” is its first appendix, which tackles the contradictory state of hormone replacement therapy at menopause. She writes the cleanest version of the debate I’ve read, with practical, italicized questions for women to discuss with their doctors.

As good as the appendix is, it highlights a limitation. Brizendine comes at the female brain as a physician fond of her prescription pad: “I’ve been prescribing testosterone replacement for women since 1994, and the results have been mostly positive,” she writes of goosing fading female libido.

Anyone wanting a discussion of free will or an acknowledgement that a son might be exceptionally intuitive must turn elsewhere. I waited until page 55 for a whiff of caveat – “Of course, a hormone alone does not cause a behavior” – and it evaporated quickly.

As a scientist, Brizendine fails to address how greatly her sample sets of male and female overlap for some traits. Worse, she seems to have allowed someone to dumb down her text. What else can explain this sentence: “By the time the mommy brain takes over, women are fully entrenched in careers, and that means an inevitable tug-of-war because of overloaded brain circuits”?

Whatever that means, it made me wish Brizendine had taken a page from Robert Sapolsky’s “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers,” a more demanding, and therefore more rewarding, book about stress hormones among mammals.

Instead, she serves up several patient stories, giving her book an unfortunate Oprah-esque quality. Several times she teeters into advice mode: “As a parent of teens, you have the job of ignoring much of what they say. Don’t take any impulsive or emotional tirades seriously.”

Well, yes, but maybe no. The intricacies of human relations can’t be boiled down to a tip sheet, especially one dispensed from afar.

“The Female Brain” triggered another response in my own hippocampus, a memory of Mary Catherine Bateson’s book “Composing a Life.” It made me wish that some of the fresh science that Brizendine sets on the table had been balanced with Bateson’s more expansive, open-ended questions about how we women might live.

CM/RB END LONG

(Karen Long is book editor for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. She can be contacted at klong (at) plaind.com.)

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