How is *your* brain wired?

For years I’ve been fascinated by the ways in which my brain is wired. Always having a sense of ‘knowing’ mine was different as I always seemed to see things others didn’t, there were many behaviors deemed by others to be different that I desired to be the same: disorganization, impulsive risk behavior, and a constant demand for intellectual stimuli. All that said, the best part was enjoying an ability to make cognitive leaps others couldn’t which I put to good use often.

As someone not educated in brain chemistry and neuroscience — and clearly not able to even self-diagnose my ADD — it wasn’t until I met my bride that my interest in this took a left turn. She had worked in a corporation with significant diversity: race, creed, sexual persuasion and more. This woman helped soften my previously hard line view of the world and the people within it (though she’d argue that this had a simpler explanation, “Men don’t grow up until they hit 40” and I’m now past that!).

Before she and I got married, I’d never knowingly interacted with anyone homosexual. Though I grew up with the typical male bias against homosexual men, I’d often been intrigued with the obvious fact that gay men saw the world differently. The gay men I’d met through her at gatherings were incredibly creative. Their ability to drive a narrative in literature, the theatre, in song, and with design was atypical and seemed to somehow combine the best of both sexes.

So an article I read today in the New Scientist got me thinking about this issue of how God wired our brains. This article about how Gay Men Read Maps Like Women at first struck me as humorous. But as I thought more about it, the study’s hypothesis that, “…homosexual people shift in the direction of the
opposite sex in other aspects of their psychology other than sexual
preference. That is, gay men may take on aspects of female psychology,
and lesbians acquire aspects of male psychology” made me stop and think.

How is your brain wired? Do you even know? What are others researching or thinking about when it comes to neuroscience? I think about the number of aberrant behaviors that are undoubtedly caused by misdiagnosed or untreated neurological syndromes.

Here is some interesting food-for-thought:

• Are top investors’ brains wired for wealth?
• Brains wired for addiction
• Scientist Learning How Music May Prevent Dementia (are brains wired for music better built to last?)
• Sexuality hard wired before birth?
• Babies brains hard wired for words
• Are teens just wired that way?
• Attention Deficit: Not Just Kid’s Stuff (“…it is estimated that anywhere from a third to half of the adult prison population has ADHD”).

This post is not about any particular issue. Instead it’s in the spirit of my blog overall: intellectual curiosity about the “why” behind things I’m observing and how these dots connect. This includes how our brains are wired making outcomes in life potentially our fate if there is no awareness of root cause. That’s the power of understanding and making the connections.