Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier Read Free Book Online Page B

not be pleased. He felt smothered by his mother, in all the classic ways. People would tell him, You should read D. H. Lawrence you'll identify with the story of him and his mother! And my father would say, Why should I read about it? I lived it, and that was bad enough.
In lieu of another link to the matriline I offer this enchanting

     

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thought: we have, with our female quilts, with the mosaicism of our chromosomes, a potential for considerable brain complexity. Admittedly, the claim requires a leap of faith and fancy, but let's try it anyway. To begin with, think of the X chromosome as the Smart Chromosome. I suggest this not out of simple chauvinism although I am a female chauvinist sow but because a preponderance of genes situated on the X chromosome seem to be involved in the blooming of the brain. Studies suggest that mutations in the X chromosome are a frequent cause of mental retardation, a more frequent cause than mutations in any of the other twenty-two chromosomes. The corollary of all that retardation is brilliant: if so many things can go wrong with our favorite chromosome to result in mental deficiency, that means it holds an awful lot of important targets genes necessary for the construction of intelligence. When one or more of those genes fail, brain development falters, and when all hum in harmony, genius is born.
Now take this notion of the Smart Chromosome a step further and imagine your brain as a chessboard built of mother squares and father squares. In the mother squares, the maternal X and all its brain genes are active; in the father squares, the pater X rules. You have pieces of your parents scattered throughout that hardworking three-pound organ you are of two minds about it. No wonder you're confused. No wonder nobody can figure you out. No wonder you're so damned clever.
A woman's mosaic brain complicates the work of our modern mind-readers, neurologists and psychiatrists. Women are known to have highly variable expression of some types of epilepsy, for example, possibly because of the patchwork nature of the chromosomes that control their brain cells. Genes that dictate the output of essential brain signaling chemicals those neurotransmitters that allow brain cells to talk to one another also sit on the X chromosome. The result is that a woman's mind is truly a syncopated pulse of mother and father voices, each speaking through whichever X chromosome, maternal or paternal, happens to be active in a given brain cell. Thus, the course of a woman's mental illness, be it schizophrenia or manic-depression, often is more unpredictable and labile than that of a man. Could brain mosaicism also explain why multiple personality disorder (assuming we give it the benefit of the doubt as a genuine psychiatric disorder) so often seems to strike women? Could sufferers indeed be afflicted with internal clashing

     

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commandos, mother-speak and father-speak, cacophonous enough to spin off other fragmentary characters? As Teresa Binstock, of the University of Colorado, pointed out to me, nobody can answer such questions yet, because the idea of brain mosaicism is so new "that most neurologists, neuroanatomists, and cognitive neuropsychologists have not yet thought about it:
Until they do, let us all, scientists and nonscientists alike, do some musing for ourselves. Let us toy with the idea that, say, the legendary female intuition has some physical justification that with our brain mosaicism, we have comparatively more gray-doh to pinch into shape, a greater diversity of chemical opinions, as it were, which operate subconsciously and which we can synthesize into an accurate insight. This is not a notion I plan to live or die by. I have no evidence to back it up. It's nothing more than a . . . hunch. And because in my family it was my father who thought of himself as the intuitive one, my mother who came across as the more rational, mathematically inclined member of the pair, I