#1. Couldn’t you use post-menopausal hot flashes to warm up cold people? Hot flashes are better warm-uppers than, say, heaters because they happen from the inside. Something in you lights up and you become radioactive; you glow, you emit. I won’t tell you why I was thinking about that because some of you get snide. But couldn’t you bottle whatever triggers that and take it along on your next camping trip to the Arctic?
The trigger isn’t lack of estrogen — even though hot flashes happen after estrogen drops and estrogen pills relieve hot flashes — because women with and without hot flashes have similar estrogen levels. In fact, their body temperatures, measured in every known orifice, didn’t change either, hot flashes or not. Then an enterprising researcher asked women to swallow radiotelemetry pills, and found that yes, during hot flashes, what he called their core temperatures rose. And where normally the range between sweating and shivering – a comfortable state called thermoneutrality – is wide, in hot-flashing women it’s vanishingly narrow. Narrowed thermoneutral ranges are known to be caused by a chemical called norepinephrine and, sure enough, the same researcher found women having hot flashes had higher levels of a metabolite of norepinephrine. Hot flashes = more epinephrine. OK! I’ll invent a timed-release norepinephrine patch! Notify the venture capitalists! I’ll call the Arctic Explorers’ Club. Why has no one thought of this before?
You’re going to tell me why, aren’t you: norepinephrine also triggers the complex, whole-body fight-or-flight response. Next question.
#2. Why, since everybody knows that women are more socially responsive than men, don’t I see a lot more smiley, burbling girl babies than bored, look-the-other-way boy babies? Surely, if social responsiveness is as hard-wired as everyone says, the differences should be there from birth. I live in a densely-populated, friendly neighborhood and over the years must have talked to a thousand babies. Some do the baby-equivalent of talking back, some don’t. Some connect, some don’t and I’ve never noticed connectedness varying with baby gender.
Psychologists circle the subject. Some researchers showed babies pictures of both a woman’s face and a mobile; girls looked at the face longer, boys looked at the mobile longer. “The results of this research clearly demonstrate that sex differences are in part biological in origin,” the researchers wrote, thereby setting a record for making a summer out of two swallows. Other researchers asked mothers to show their babies toys or to talk to them; girl babies and boy babies responded equally to the toys; girls responded more to talking. Still other researchers, reviewing the literature and running their own length-of-looking-time experiment with toys and mothers, found previous researchers contradicting each other and their own research showing that the difference between genders is smaller than the difference between babies. They suggest that in babies, “gender differences may either be extremely small or absent.” I couldn’t find research that tested what I saw, a stranger talking to a baby and the baby responding or not, depending on gender.
So I give up on infant psychologists and request, politely and enthusiastically, the experience of your inner scientists: when you talk to girl and boy babies, can you see a difference in their responses? Thank you.
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Photos: Adam Jones PhD; FrankGuido