This weekend was the first time I didn’t have a cram packed couple of days, and could actually put away my business assignments (even if it was only for two days..), switch my brain off from work and ignore the digital marketing world until Monday. We had a few things planned, stopping by at the VW convention, visiting the gun store and surfing – not your typical weekend, not for me anyway.
I started reading Why Men Don’t Listen And Women Can’t Read Maps: ‘How We’re Different And What To Do About It’ written by Pease, Allan and Barbara and it has by far been my best read yet. In 2012, I left England for 6 months to live 6.5k from the beautiful Surfers Paradise, on the Gold Coast in East Australia to study at Griffith University as part of the Erasmus exchange during my degree. I studied Psychological Science and Society, Cognitive and Biological Psychology, Human Behaviour and Consumer Psychology. Pretty far from Business and Marketing, don’t you think?
Granted – only one of these course directly tied into my career in marketing, however I found myself immersed in psychology and neuroscience books during my first year of my degree after studying a module on the semiotics in advertising and referenced psychologist such as Freud. This was my opportunity to explore psychology at an academic level, at a prestige medical school whilst still graduating with a relevant degree for my future.
I found this book sitting in my room amongst a million others, my nan had given it to me a couple of years ago and recommended it as a good read. She always takes books from a red phone box in her town, which people use as a book swap (however, I think she forgets to return them – sorry to the people of Cornwall!) It built dust, but I came across it a few months ago and the back cover intrigued me, I struggled to put it back down again.
Allan Pease is the world’s foremost expert on body language. His acclaim book Body Language sold more than four million copies in 36 languages and his top-rating TV series was watched by more than 100 million viewers. His new book observed the difference between the way men and women think, collating and illustrating the dramatic findings of new research on the brain, investigating evolutionary biology, analysing psychologist and studying social change.
Uncovering some of the worlds most asked questions:
- Why men really can’t do more than one thing at a time?
- Why women make such a mess of parallel parking?
- Why men should never lie to women?
- Why women talk so much, and men so little?
- Why men love erotic images and women aren’t impressed?
- Why women prefer simply to talk it through?
- Why men offer solutions, but hate advice?
- Why women despair about men’s silence?
- Why men want sex, and women need love?
“This is a must-read for all men and women who love each other, hate each other, or simply co-exist. You will learn as much about yourself and how to improve your relationships, as you will about the opposite sex. You should never leave home without it.” – Dr Dennis Waitley, The Psychology of Winning
An extract:|
The Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that the centre for thought lay in the heart while the brain helped cool the body. This is why the heart is the object of many of our expressions of emotion. It may seem ridiculous to us now, but many experts, as recently as the late 19th Century, still agreed with Aristotle.
In 1962 Roger Sperry won a Nobe l Prize for identifying that the two hemispheres of the brain’s cerebral cortex are responsible for separate intellectualfunctions. Advanced technology is now allowing us to see how the brain operates, but our real understanding of brain function is still very basic. We know that the right hemisphere, which is the creative side, controls the left side of the body, while the left hemisphere controls logic, reason, speech and the body’s right side. The left brain is where language and vocabulary are located, particularly for men, and the right brain stores and controls visual information.
People who are left handed have a bias towards the right hemisphere, which is the creative side of the brain. It is for this reason that there is such a disproportionate number of left-handers who are artistic geniuses, including Albert Einstein, Leonardo Da Vinci, Picasso, Lewis Carroll, Greta Garbo, Robert De Niro and Paul McCartney. There are more left-handed women than men and 90% of all people are right-handed. Most men are very capable with their right arm and hand but are not as good with their left. For males, the right arm needs to be accurate at throwing objects at a moving target and to defend the front of the body from attack. This right-handedness for men appear s to be located somewhere in the genes and explains why, if a man is going to attack, more than 90% of the time his first move will be a right side, over-arm blow.