Lary Hudas,Support Systems ,and Male-Female Brains

We are, each of us, angels with only one wing, and we can only fly embracing each other."– Luciano Decrescenzo

Just yesterday, I was talking to Larry Hudas. Who is this person? How do I know him? Well, I met Larry a long time ago at Denby high school in Detroit. Larry was a teammate and one of the star players on the 1957 football team who went on to play for the Spartans of Michigan State University. In fact, a number of players from the 57 team went to Michigan State. Ed Budde, Mitch Newman, Jim Haslip along with Coach Rutherford joined Larry.

Larry told me that he had a gathering of the 1961 champion Michigan State team players at his home recently. He also mentioned that he hosted about 50 classmates and teammates from Denby high school as well. It is clear that Larry is well connected and has a good support system. The above quote and Larry illustrate prescription 3. “Enrich your life by making friends, sharing interests, learning about others by becoming part of the new group” found in my book.

Last week I presented some information about being right brained or left brained. Some of you may wonder about male and female brains and ask are there any dominance differences? The left hemisphere of the brain is more language oriented than the right hemisphere which is more visual-spatial oriented. In general, women have better language skills and men better visual and spatial skills. Women seem to have better developed left hemisphere the “social” brain with better language and “personal perception” of social behavior. An example of that would be better recognition of facial emotional expression. Men on the other hand, have a better developed right hemisphere coupled with greater relative mechanical and spatial abilities. This is translated as follows.

There are some differences in cerebral dominance between men and women: boys and men have slight overall advantages in the following: 1. Target-directed gross motor skills like throwing a ball 2. Visual-spatial skills 3. Navigating through a route 4. Complex University-level mathematics. Girls and women have slight overall advantages in: 1.Most types of language skills 2. Fine motor tasks 3. Empathy for others 4. Social interactions.

To oversimplify, it is pretty difficult, at times, for a man to win an argument with a woman. How often has a man been told that he lacks empathy? And, you have to admit that women are pretty slick when it comes to human interaction. As for the men, we do throw a ball pretty well; we are pretty good at finding our way around the world; and we are pretty good at mathematics. I may talk more about these differences tomorrow.

I want to go back to Sunday when Tony told me he was going to run up” Training Hill”. For those of you that do not know about Training Hill, it is steep and long. If that’s not brutal enough, just do it on a real hot day like Monday. This is what Tony told me “I was tired and really did not want to run up this monster Hill but I have to do it because I told you that I would”. So in other words, he did it because he didn’t want to deal with hearing me call him a wimp. Do you think a female would have handled Tony’s problem differently?