I mentioned during MBW that women have more connections between neurons than men. And the band of fibers connecting the right and left hemispheres of their brain is much larger in women. It gives women a greater awareness of their surroundings, and empathy has a great deal to do with awareness. One negative aspect of this trait is that they often "care too much" and seem to be worried about how everyone in their lives are doing, including animals. The positive, of course, is that they bond with their partners much more quickly, and understand the value of the POJA more readily than men.

There are exceptions, however. Some of the couples we see consist of a husband with greater empathy than a wife. So it's not true that all women are more empathetic than men. And some men have a greater lack of empathy than the average man.

Men with a long history of thoughtlessness struggle with the changes that make them compatible with a woman. They usually feel that they are making progress by taking one small step at a time, while the woman in their life usually feels that the progress is way to small and too slow.

We'll try to speed things up in your case, but it will leave your husband feeling like a failure most of the time. He seems to lack the empathy you feel, but that doesn't mean that his behavior can't become thoughtful.

"It's kind of like weight training," Weng says. "Using this systematic approach, we found that people can actually build up their compassion 'muscle' and respond to others' suffering with care and a desire to help."

Compassion training was compared to a control group that learned cognitive reappraisal, a technique where people learn to reframe their thoughts to feel less negative. Both groups listened to guided audio instructions over the Internet for 30 minutes per day for two weeks. "We wanted to investigate whether people could begin to change their emotional habits in a relatively short period of time," says Weng.


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Compassion, like physical and academic skills, appears to be something that is not fixed, but rather can be enhanced with training and practice. "The fact that alterations in brain function were observed after just a total of seven hours of training is remarkable," explains UW-Madison psychology and psychiatry professor Richard J. Davidson, founder and chair of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds and senior author of the article.

Adam Carolla penned a book a few years ago entitled In Fifty Years, We'll All Be Chicks!

It appears the scientific community cares not to wait that long!