Week 5 - Key Differences

 Hey everyone!

This week was probably one of the slowest weeks of my life. I work early mornings and man. It was hard to make it through these weeks. I felt super unmotivated during work and in turn, during classes. I don’t like being tired in class and falling asleep so I’m pretty sure I’m going to change things up in order to avoid that feeling of perpetual tiredness. It also makes me feel super unmotivated. Definitely want to change things up.

Anyways class this week was interesting. We spent the first half of the week on the differences between men and women and the second half on homosexual attraction. To be honest, I want to focus on the first half. Not because I don’t want to talk about the second half, but I might have been half asleep, maybe even ¾ asleep during all of it. (Professor if you’re reading this, sorry.)

I think I’m starting to understand myself a little better through this class. Our first half of the class talked about some key differences between male and female persons. One of the things that caught my attention is the difference between grey matter and white matter composition in the male and female brains. Females typically have a stronger white matter build rather than grey matter, and males have a stronger grey matter build rather than white matter.

To sum up how white matter works in the brain, it strengthens the connections all throughout the brain. What I see in this is that it increases residual memory and subconscious strength. Grey matter, on the other hand, is more focused on the active perceptions and actions of the human brain. More grey matter means a heightened focus and processing ability for more active scenarios.

One way this affects us is how we see things, how we focus on things. Typically, women are more detail-oriented whereas men are more isolation-oriented. Women see things and focus on the details more than men do. More so, those details stay with them for a lot longer.

One conclusion that I came to is that this plays so much into decision making. Being that women have stronger connections in the brain, their minds are more likely to act subconsciously. Many more details are going to come into the picture, actively and subconsciously, that will help determine their course of action. Men are more likely to look at things as individual instances. In that sense, they’re less likely to be influenced by outside occurrences, even if those occurrences are similar. Men will more actively draw on knowledge, choosing what experiences will help make their decision.

Now one of the overarching questions for us to focus on during this time was this: why is it that heterosexual marriages become the focus? We can see that there are differences between men and women, biologically and psychologically. These differences, if utilized properly, complement each other and introduce the other to new ideas and concepts. One can’t act based of instinct all the time and neither can they act on feeling all the time either. Therefore, the strong points of both individual genders complement the other in needful and meaningful ways. That’s why there’s so much emphasis on heterosexual marriages in studies and beliefs.

So my hope with this knowledge is that I can apply them in my own life. I’m not currently married, nor am I in a relationship right now, but I do have hopes and plans for the future. I don’t want to stay alone forever, after all. My hope is that I find someone I can rely on to complete the less favorable parts of me, like poor decision making skills haha. I really hope so.

Well, enough of my rambling. I’m tired so I’m going to finish up and rest for a bit. Thanks for listening and see you all next week!

-Caleb