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Short introduction to Urban Neuroscience

by Ing. Enrico Banchi, COO of Scuola di Palo Alto in Milan, Italy

Male and females: are we really different?

I have been teaching and talking about female and male brains since I miserably failed a negotiation with a lawyer in 1996. She was a woman and I was... distracted. My neuroscience expertise comes from 22-years of research, speaking and hundreds of hours talking and sharing stages with neuroscientists, psychologists, endocrinologists and molecular biologists such as John Medina, Martin Seligman and Mario Mancini among others.

Gender differences can be divided into three areas: genetic, neuroanatomical and behavioral. The genetic part is about the tale of the chromosomes. One X for everybody from mom and one Y or another X if we want to go to either the boys or the girls restrooms. These chromosomes have an effect on hormone production and from there the neuroanatomical part gets started.

The behavior part is extremely interesting.

It is important to understand that when science looks for behavioral trends, it looks at populations and not at individuals. Statistics don’t apply to individuals, so we of course will have males and females outside of the statistical norms.

Back to the differences, here is a list of the situations where brain gender plays an important role:

• Dealing with traumatic situations. The research by Larry Cahill demonstrates how female brains report more vivid memories of an emotional situation, positive or negative.
• Verbal communication: the behaviorist Deborah Tannen has talked and researched a great deal about the fact that girls seems to be verbally more sophisticated than boys during their early years.
• Cementing relationships: this is easy to prove, as the description “best friend” is a whole lot more important for girls than boys.

In day-to-day life it is important to understand for example that:

• Men and women process the same emotion differently.
• These differences are both due to nature and nurture so our education system is as important as the genetic part.
• Men and women produce very different kind of hormones, in different quantities and with different timing and cycles. As these hormones are heavily connected to other neurotransmitters, their production regulates many behaviors and characteristics of everyday relationships.

In business, understanding these differences is useful to:

• Better lead an opposite gender team.
• Be better prepared to satisfy male or female customer requests.
• Be a better negotiator depending on the gender of your counterpart
• Raising awareness on the actual differences keeps you focused and helps avoid useless stereotypes.

These are the foundations for a training series called Urban Neuroscience that is changing the way we think about the opposite gender, how they decide and how they buy and sell products and services.

© 2018 Enrico Banchi

Enrico Banchi is an expert on the functioning of the brain, the neuroscience differences between the female and male brains and how it affects relationships in business and private life. He is an executive coach, a strategic consultant and a keynote speaker using his expertise in neuroscience to teach people how to improve their relationships in their professional and private lives and how to improve customer experiences. Enrico can be found on Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter and at paloaltoscuola.it and www.enricobanchi.com. You can contact Enrico at banchienrico@gmail.com.

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