Larger voices callin’...
Southern Cross
Crosby, Stills and Nash – 1982
If there’s one thing that can be blamed for creating endless trouble both comic and tragic between men and women, it’s got to be this vast chasm, this gulf, in their core thinking styles. In a nutshell: men consider women illogic, while women see men as emotionally retarded to varying degrees. That’s the baseline of opposing viewpoints that underlies all romantic differences of opinion, really.All the specifics that you can dream up – her shitty sense of time and direction, a desire to rely on hunches and intuition to guide her, impulsiveness and shopping addictions, the notion that she can read your mind (or even worse, that you’re supposed to be able to read hers!) Etc. Etc. – form a tapestry that always screams ILLOGICAL to the ordinary male. And they have a similar one for us, full of items such as ‘forgets anniversaries’ or ‘checks out other women when we’re in public’ and things of this nature. These ideas are ingrown and form the battlelines of all conflicts.
However, the real similarity between these dueling gender lists isn’t that they’re merely pet-peeves – it’s the fact they both stem from thinking
proclivities that many scientists now believe to be genetically hardwired. There’s no escape from them, in other words! The evidence is slowly being uncovered as researchers sort through the enormous galaxy of data produced by the Human Genome Project, a multi-million dollar / multi-national effort to openly unravel the human blueprint of life.
Researchers went through and methodically recorded the untold billions of code sequences in typical human DNA and created a basic, unbiased “reference library” of this raw information for the first time ever. Other scientists are able to sift through this data in search of evidence to support their own pet projects. And some of these projects can be rather intriguing.
One of these lines of investigation was laid out in a very interesting book I read a while ago called, The God Gene (Dean Hamer, Doubleday 2004, ISBN # 0-385-50058-0, hardcover). The over-riding central idea which the author of this book explored was something he called self-transcendence. This is a
personality-cognitive quality of the human mind that attempts to place a
measurement on an individuals’ tendency to either accept or reject the possibility of supernatural events holding sway over their life.
For instance, are you what could be considered a cold realist – or someone who stubbornly clings to a sense that there’s something more to reality than can be detected by our senses, or measured by Science? Hamer calls this
supernatural bias a person’s Transcendental Quotient or TQ.
As I read through it, this book began to put a few fascinating thoughts into my own head concerning the nature of the female mind. The following set of ideas is completely speculative in nature, but damn intriguing, and I offer them in that vein.
First let me quickly outline for you how this transcendental quotient theory was developed. In the university study that initially produced this entire body of thought, the baseline TQ for a variety of different people was first established. This was done by giving them questionnaires that sought to assign a numeric score to three distinct qualities of their personality: Self-forgetfulness,
Transpersonal Identification, and Mysticism. Here’s what this all means:
Self-forgetfulness (SF) is a quality that can best be described as a
tendency to become so lost in a familiar task that you completely lose track of the passage of time. You may think of it as “zoning out” or even a form of mild
absent mindedness. Self-forgetfulness is about watching your ego disappear into a comfortable activity like a hobby, meditation or even a good book. There’s can even be a component of boundary loss with another person – a feeling of being so in love with someone, for instance, that you almost seem to merge into a single entity with them. Spiritual people score high for this particular TQ aspect.
Low SF people, on the other hand, are very different sorts of animals. They tend to remain acutely aware of themselves and their environment at all times and have a more difficult time shutting off the critical processing operations of their mind. They are more task-centered, self-focused, judgmental and proudly
consider themselves highly logical in terms of their thinking style and general approach to life. People like this can be those types who view spirituality as a form of organized silliness and don’t just get it.
On the other hand, High SF people are more likely to be the dreamers, artists and creative types of the world – individuals who will happily lose
themselves in a daydream whenever the mood strikes them. This is what carries along a musician lost in the act of creating his art for hours on end... or a workout freak zoning into a ten mile run.
Transpersonal Identification (TI) describes an emotional quality of connectedness to the universe, a feeling that you are somehow interwoven into the fabric of life, as opposed to being distinct or (especially) superior to it. High TI people take a more Buddhist or Zen approach to life... they care for animals and nature – don’t believe in hunting or possibly even eating animals (vegans are usually High -TI). People of this ilk are concerned about the environment and many even consider the planet a kind of organism (Gaia) to be responsibly cherished and protected. The Hi-TI type is far more likely than the Low -TI
personality to contribute to causes like Greenpeace or to volunteer his time to an animal shelter. Generally considered fuzzy-thinking idealists by the Low-TI crowd, they have a high capacity of kindness and selflessness. So let’s not be too quick to judge them. It takes all types to run the world properly.
The final quality to be considered in building our TQ profile is Mysticism,
which is a deeply seated belief in the existence of some invisible dimension
unmeasurable from our present position here in “reality”. These are the sort of people who buy heavily into things like ghosts, ESP, past lives, the sixth-sense, a Second Coming and the like. While usually not possessing an outright disdain for the rational and scientific, they believe that the totality of reality is not
completely described by things we can deduce via reasoning power and observation alone. That there exists some other component of reality lying beyond absolute proof of its existence. In fact, they often don’t require absolute proof to believe in anything they “sense” could be (or must be) real. They enjoy doing this mostly to make the logical tear their hair out I believe ;-).
People with High TQ’s score strongly in all three of these categories, while the more logical-type thinkers tended to score much lower across the board. In fact, after giving these tests to a huge cross section of people and crunching the numbers, researchers discovered that there was actually quite a gender based difference as well. It turned out that women scored about 18% higher in self- transcendence than did men. Ah-ha! We tend to disparage girls as being ditzy or childish, but now I’m beginning to wonder if we might be observing a
fundamental cognitive difference that could be neurologically locked-in, and therefore not subject to a lot of change. Interesting stuff to know about our “prey”, don’t you think?
Understanding subtle differences based on TQ can help you in finding a long term partner with a logical-spiritual bias compatible to your own. This could either mean similar or different however, depending on how you happen to define compatible for yourself. If you value quiet contentment then you’ll probably be after a woman who’s TQ is similar to your own. Whereas if you’re more the emotional thrill-seeker, then you can’t beat a relationship with someone who’s living on the opposite end of the TQ scale for conflict potential! This can help you take the selecting of a life partner beyond the usual realm of hit-or-miss.