How Is Your Brain Like a Zebra?: A New Human Neurotypology

By Judith L. Lauter

Intended for the general reader as well as specialists, this book presents a fascinating new theory that posits three major brain types created by sex hormones before birth-Polytropic, Middle, and Focal. A brief scientific background is given first, and then the theory is illustrated with vivid anecdotes about real cases. The author argues persuasively (and sometimes startlingly) that brain types influence many human traits and differences, such as personality, special skills, learning disabilities, and a whole host of medical conditions. This unique approach promises new (and practical) insights into such puzzling issues as hyperactivity, autism, nicotine addiction, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and dyslexia. Read this book to find out which kind of "zebra brain" you have and discover unique insights into you and everyone you know.

For more information, please visit www.zebrabrain.net and www.neuroscene.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 10, 2008
• ISBN: 9781450069984

Judith L. Lauter

Judith Lauter was born in Austin, Texas. When she was nine, her family moved to Michigan where she later met her husband, the poet Ken Lauter, in a poetry-writing seminar at the University of Michigan taught by Donald Hall (US Poet Laureate, 2006-7). The couple has subsequently lived in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Oklahoma, and now make their home in Nacogdoches TX. Judith holds a BA in English literature, three master's degrees (creative writing, information science, and linguistics), and a PhD in communication sciences (Washington University in St. Louis). She taught and directed human neuroscience laboratories at major universities for more than three decades, before retiring in 2012 and returning to her first love, poetry. In addition to scientific articles, chapters, and books (including How is Your Brain Like a Zebra? Xlibris, 2008, www.zebrabrain.com), she has published poems in a number of journals, and won two Hopwood Awards for poetry (University of Michigan), an Academy of American Poets prize (University of Denver), and the Norma Lowry Memorial Prize (Washington University). She has two previous books of poetry with Xlibris, both 2013: A Year of Haiku, and Light from the Left; poems on paintings by Rembrandt (www.LightFromTheLeft.com).

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Copyright © 2008 by Judith L. Lauter, PhD.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008906192

ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-4363-5661-9

Softcover 978-1-4363-5660-2

Ebook 978-1-4500-6998-4

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

PART ONE THE SCIENCE OF BRAIN TYPES

Chapter One

Zebras, Brains, And Fingerprints: The History Of Human Types

Chapter Two

How Brains Work: The Importance Of Being Well Connected

Chapter Three

How To Grow A Brain: From Hormone-Free To High T

Chapter Four

Meet The Brain Types: Up Close And Personal

PART TWO BRAIN TYPES Q & A

Epilogue

Source Notes

References And Related Readings

Appendix

Questionnaire: What Is Your Brain Type?

PREFACE

Recently in my Human Neuroscience Laboratory at Stephen F. Austin State University, I tested a ten-year-old, a sweet boy who spoke politely and did what was asked of him, but who had trouble sitting still for very long and found it difficult to describe the contents of a simple paragraph. When I met with his mother several days later to show her what my tests revealed—how patterns in his brain predicted his problems in school and staying still—I showed her the technical data in the form of numbers and graphs. She seemed satisfied, but I could tell she was more than a little mystified. I’m sure my assessment would have meant much more if I could have handed her this book.

Over the years, I’ve talked with many parents about their kids as well as with adults who were tested. For everyone who has patiently wrestled with my graphs and listened to my explanations, this book is for you. Lynette, this is for you. Tom and Toni, this is for you. To all the moms, dads, teachers, and clinicians I haven’t yet met, but who want badly to understand what’s happening with their kids, their clients, and themselves, this is for you. The main message I hope you will take away is that brain patterns are firmly based in biology. It’s not all in your mind—it’s in your brain.

These patterns are readily comprehensible and can provide practical guidelines for improving your quality of life. Moreover, these patterns, which I call brain types, are all about the individual and, in many ways, resemble the patterns of color in an animal’s coat—rings on a cat’s tail, dapples on a horse’s coat, stripes on a zebra. Surprisingly, you don’t need expensive testing to unlock the secrets of brain types. They can be recognized in numerous ways, including direct observation of personality, skills, and even height and coloration.

Sometimes easy to see, sometimes harder, they are always there, waiting to be discovered with a little detective work. In that sense, this book is a kind of training manual to turn you into a brain detective. My aim is to give you enough basic information that you can figure out the brain type of nearly anyone you know—and what that might mean, both for them and for you.

I would like to express my gratitude to members of the Sociology Reading Group at Stephen F. Austin State University, along with graduate students from the Educational Psychology program, for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this book, and to Dr. Michael McKaig, not only for reading the manuscript, but also for engaging in frequent discussions about many of these issues.

My deepest thanks go to my husband Ken, for his consistent open-mindedness and intellectual vigor, his unflagging patience and enthusiasm, and for the many hours he has contributed to reading and editing drafts of this book. Ken is definitely my principal zebra wrangler, and his generosity in sharing his own experiences of human diversity has helped shape my views on the many ways of being human.

INTRODUCTION

Color patterns in animal coats have always fascinated me—two cream brushstrokes along the chocolate back of a chipmunk; turtle-shaped patterns on the neck of a giraffe; the snowy throat of a Canada goose like a kerchief around her neck; or the stripes-on-stripes of a grazing zebra family.

Sometimes, the patterns in an animal’s coat are difficult to see. Our Siamese cat had what seemed to be a solid brown tail, but when she was sleeping in the sun, you could see circles around it, like the wild ring-tailed cats from South America. When I finally had a horse of my own, I was delighted one summer to find dapples hidden in the depths of her glossy black coat. If you looked closely at her side with the sun at the right angle, you could see dapples scattered across her hips, ghosts of a design from far back in her genetic past, long before horses took up life on short-grass prairies when dapples were needed for camouflage to mimic the dappled sun-and-shade of a leafy forest.

I began my education, not in science, but as a literature major reading Dickens and Dickinson, writing poetry, delighted most of all by poets who blended art and science like the metaphysicals of seventeenth-century England. But a parallel fascination with science proved to be too strong—in a second go-round as a graduate student, I put aside books of poetry and started reading about the brain. One of the many wonders I soon discovered was a collection of photos showing visual patterns created by populations of brain cells—and I found those same animal coat patterns staring back at me. One photo looked exactly like the irregular squares on a giraffe’s shoulder, another resembled the spots of a leopard (or the dapples on my black mare), and a third was indistinguishable from the stripes of a zebra.

At first, this seemed like a coincidence. I could see no real reason that populations of neurons should make such patterns. I later learned that patterns in the brain and animal coats are created by what are called activator-inhibitor systems, obeying a rule that accounts for many types of patterns in biology and physics. Thus the similarity of stripes and spots in the brain and in fur are just another an instance of the many types of repeated forms that scientists have found in nature—galaxies spiraling like water going down a drain, wiring diagrams that work well in one direction for drainage (whether blood vessels or continent-spanning river systems), and in the other for increasing points of contact with a surrounding medium (whether the branches of hundred-foot trees or the treelike dendrite branches of microscopic brain cells). But brain-cell populations like zebra stripes—that seemed wonderful!

However, it was not until years later that I returned to that image as a memory kept, a favorite quilt folded and put away in a cedar chest waiting for the right moment to be taken out and used. And in fact, the zebra-stripe pattern has turned out to be an ideal image to describe what I have found over and over again in my research on the brain and human behavior, a combination of features that jumped out at me from the results, time after time, experiment after experiment: individual differences and groups of individuals.

To answer the question posed in the title of this book, then, your brain is like a zebra in two ways: (1) every brain is unique—like the fingerprint pattern of stripes on individual zebras; and at the same time, (2) there are metapatterns of stripe fingerprints which can be used to group individuals—species and subspecies for zebras, other types of groups for humans.

* * *

The search for ways to explain individual differences and groups of individuals is called typology. As we’ll see, the history of typology goes back thousands of years—to astrology systems developed around the world, the writings of the philosophers of classical Greece and Rome, and in more recent classifications, based on modern medicine and general mammalian biology. This book, however, is about a new typology, updated to include the newest findings about the forces that shape all animals, including humans. Because it’s a typology based on the brain, it’s called a neurotypology.

There are many details to this story, and I’ve written numerous research papers about how individual differences in the brain show up again and again, no matter what test method scientists employ—positron-emission tomography (PET), evoked potentials (EPs), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), etc. In writing this book, therefore, I’ve drawn on my own work as well as that of numerous other observers—parents and teachers living on a day-to-day basis with their kids, clinicians experiencing the diversity of people who come through their clinic doors, scientists using field studies and laboratory research to study humans and other animals.

My conclusions are also based on data drawn from many scientific disciplines, from neuroscience to embryology to animal behavior, but I won’t drag you through a dull review of the literature, dropping names and footnotes as I go (though some references and notes to sources are included in the back). I will provide a brief history of where I’m coming from and which scientific giants I’ve leaned on for their broad shoulders. On the whole, however, this book is about my own ideas. They are derived from my life experiences, my reading in brain and behavior, and more than three decades of work as a research neuroscientist.

Part 1 of the book will provide the scientific background of this new neurotypology. I will describe certain important features of the brain, how sex hormones can have dramatic effects on some of those features both before and after birth, and outline some predictions regarding the results—three major brain types. Note that in both Part 1 and Part 2, for convenience I occasionally use the word testosterone to refer to androgens in general (that is, not just the specific steroid hormone named testosterone). For example, by a high-T woman, I mean one who tends to make high levels of a variety of androgens from whatever sources, including her placenta, adrenal cortex, and ovaries.

Part 2 will illustrate the practical implications in the form of a series of a question-and-answer (Q & A) notes about how to apply brain types to everyday life. The notes will discuss things like risk factors and special skills and show how brain types can be used to understand a wide range of individual differences, from the origins of domestic violence to why the first-born child in a family is often so different from the baby.

Finally, my aim for How is Your Brain like a Zebra has been to make it as accessible as possible to a very important person, someone who is often forgotten or ignored in our age of overspecialization and experts—the general reader. I think of this as someone with a high level of innate curiosity about what makes us tick as human beings but who does not necessarily have an extensive scientific background. My obligation to this reader is to keep the technical material to a minimum but without oversimplifying things. This is brain science, after all, and in chapters 2 and 3, we will have to take a few slow, careful steps down a winding path of technical details—but that’s only so that later on, when we get out onto the open plain of the Q & A section, our Zebra can gallop at full speed. Even a metaphorical zebra has to walk before she can run.

PART ONE

The Science of Brain Types

This part of the book outlines the scientific background for a new neurotypology of brain types.

Chapter 1 begins with an overview of typologies of the past, all of which recognize both the fact of individual differences and the equally strong reality of groups. The systems described range from old approaches (such as astrology) to new ones based on prenatal hormones.

Chapter 2 discusses the importance of brain connections. Often when scientists talk about how the brain works, they focus only on the parts; but connections are equally important, and this chapter explains how and why.

Chapter 3 describes the way the brain grows before birth. The chapter presents an account of how sex hormones, before as well as after birth, can have dramatic effects on brain connections. The result is a continuum of individual differences, which can be grouped into three major brain types.

Chapter 4 describes each brain type in detail, showing how multiple aspects of body, brain, and psychology are affected by brain type. The chapter ends with a table of features that summarize the many ways in which the three brain types differ from each other.

CHAPTER ONE

Zebras, Brains, and Fingerprints: The History of Human Types

Everybody’s the Same, Everybody’s Different

Often when someone changes place of residence—and most commonly when the move involves a different country and ethnic group—the newcomer’s first perception of the people around is that they all blend together. You might hear a new arrival, say, with exasperation, they all look alike to me. But with a little experience, the newbies feel the scales fall from their eyes, and they begin to see what they were blind to before, that people in this new country are not all alike, that they share the same range of dramatic differences that was true of people back home. And at some point, the newcomers will take the second step in this process and recognize in their new neighbors the same types they knew from before—people who are kind and loving versus those who are always angry, those who are good with their hands versus others best at abstractions, those who excel at athletics versus people who have an academic bent, etc.

Everyday people are not the only ones who go through this discovery process; scientists can have the same problems recognizing differences and patterns of difference. If someone had asked the first European explorers visiting Africa to describe the massive zebra herds, they would probably have said the animals were all alike—just a lot of stripes, and they would have denied there was anything systematic about the stripes of different individuals.

But as biologists began studying zebras, they found out two things: (1) the stripe pattern of every individual zebra is unique, like a fingerprint; and (2) if they looked at enough zebras over different geographical areas, they could group the animals into species and subspecies according to their stripe patterns. In fact, scientists now separate zebras into three species: mountain zebras, plains zebras, and Grevy’s zebras, and as many as six subspecies. (Mountains have two—Cape and Hartmann’s; plains have four—Burchelli’s, Selous’, Grant’s, and Damaraland.) Each of these groups includes the range of variation of all the individual members of that group, but all the individuals in that group share certain features including a basic stripe-pattern formula.

The history of many sciences can be described in the same way—first, all individuals (or instances of a phenomenon) seem alike, then all appear unique, then the differences coalesce into groupings or clusters that share other characteristics as well. This combination of individual differences along with principles for grouping individuals occurs everywhere in nature: in plants, other animals, humans. For instance, anyone familiar with animals knows that just as with humans, individuals have their own unique natures—two cats, two horses, two parrots, each is a set of rules unto itself. But with enough experience, we also discover that individual members of a species can be sorted into groups—not regarding things as simple as gender or human ethnicity (or in other animals, species and sub-species) but according to more interesting traits like personality, special abilities, general health.

For example, two brothers may have very different skills—one is an outstanding athlete, while another prefers academics. Or one might be outgoing and gregarious, the other shy and withdrawn. One may be robust and never sick a day in his life while the other has asthma and allergies, the least little thing giving him a headache, upset stomach, or a cold.

Modern Science on the Origins of Individual Differences

Scientists have had a hard time describing and accounting for individual differences. One of the oldest scientific arguments is about nature versus nurture. Literally