CHAPTER 02

"MAKING PERFECT SENSE"

Women as Radar Detectors:
It is obvious to a woman when another woman is upset or feeling hurt, while a man would generally have to physically witness tears, a temper tantrum or be slapped around the face before he'd even have a clue anything was going on. For, like most female mammals, women are equipped with far more finely tuned sensory skills than men. As child-bearers and nest-defenders, they needed the ability to sense subtle mood and attitude changes in others. What is commonly called 'women's intuition' is mostly a woman's acute ability to notice small details and changes in the appearance or behaviour of others. It's something that, throughout history, has bewildered men who play around - and are invariably caught.

The Eyes Have It:
The eye is an extension of the brain that sits outside the skull. The retina at the back of the eyeball contains about 130 million rod-shaped cells called photorecep- tors to deal with black and white, and seven million cone-shaped cells to handle colour. The X chromosome provides these colour cells. Women have two X chro- mosomes which gives them a greater variety of cones than men and this difference is noticeable in how women describe colours in greater detail. A man will use basic colour descriptions like red, blue and green, but a woman will talk of bone, aqua, teal, mauve and apple green. Human eyes have noticeable whites which other primates lack. This allows for the movement of the eye and the direction of the gaze which are vital to human face-to-face communication. Womens' eyes display more white than mens' eyes because close-range personal com- munication is an integral part of female bonding, and more white allows a greater range of eye signals to be sent and received in the direction that the eyes move. This type of eye communication is not critical to most other species of animal and so they have little or no whites and rely on body language as the main form of communication.

"Women have wider peripheral vision, men have tunnel vision."

a man needed vision that would allow him to zero in on, and pursue, targets in the distance. He evolved with almost blinkered vision so that he would not be distracted from targets, whereas a woman needed eyes to allow a wide arc of vision so that she could monitor any predators sneaking up on the nest

Men and Ogling:
Wider peripheral vision is the reason why women rarely get caught ogling men. Almost every man has been accused at some time or other of ogling the opposite sex, but few women receive the same complaint from men. Sex researchers every- where report that women look at men's bodies as much as, and sometimes more than, men look at women's. Yet women, with their superior peripheral vision, rarely get caught.

Why Men Can't Lie to Women:
Our Body Language research reveals that, in face-to-face communications, non-verbal signals account for 60-80% of the impact of the message, while vocal sounds make up 20-30%. The other 7-10% is words. A woman's superior sensory equipment picks up and analyses this information and her brain's ability to rapidly transfer between hemispheres makes her more proficient at inte- grating and deciphering verbal, visual and other signals. This is why most men have difficulty lying to a woman face-to-face. But, as most women know, lying to a man face-to-face is comparatively easy, as he does not have the necessary sensitivity to spot incongruen- cies between her verbal and non-verbal signals. Most men, if they're going to lie to a woman, would be far better off doing it over the phone, in a letter or with all the lights off, and a blanket over their head

Why Boys Don't Listen:
Boys are often chastised by their teachers and parents for not listening. But as boys grow, particularly approaching puberty, their ear canals undergo growth spurts that can cause a temporary form of deafness. Female teachers have been found to reprimand girls dif- ferently to boys and seem intuitively to understand male and female hearing differences. If a girl refuses to keep eye contact while the teacher berates her, a female teacher will continue the reprimand. If a boy refuses eye contact, many female teachers intuitively understand that he probably either can't hear or is not listening, and will say, 'Look at me when I speak to you'. Unfortunately, boys are equipped for effective seeing rather than hearing. For an easy demonstration of this, just count the number of Fs in the following sentence. Finished files are the result of years of scientific research.
Boys score better than girls at seeing that there are five F's. If the statement is read aloud however, girls are better than boys at hearing the correct number of F's.