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instance, when a boy first learns to read the word run , his brain fires messages to his leg muscles and makes them twitch: He's rehearsing the action of running in order to learn the word. And to read and understand the meaning of the word slug , David's sensation area in the brain for slimy and squishy is activated. Then the movement area of his brain for slow and slithering is engaged, and even the emotional area of his brain for disgust gets into the action. These brain areas are needed for him to completely embody, learn, and remember the meaning of slug . Scientists refer to this process as embodied cognition, because the muscles and body parts he uses to learn a word will stay connected to the meaning of that word . This is true for all our brains but seems particularly significant for boys. It may annoy their teachers, but boys who squirm can learn better than boys who sit still.
    Boys like David are twisting and turning all the time, and scientists believe this may also give them their advantage at spatial manipulation . By age five, according to researchers in Germany, boys are using different brain areas than girls to visually rotate an object in their mind's eyes . The boys mentally rotated the pictures of the objects by using both sides of their brain's spatial-movement area in the parietal lobe. Girls used only one side to do the task. While that in itself is revealing, what I found most intriguing is that this spatial-movement area in the male brain is locked in the "on" position. That means it's always working in the background on autopilot. But in the female brain, this parietal area is "off," waiting in standby mode, and not turned on until it's needed.
    From age five on, mental rotation of objects is one of the biggest cognitive differences between boys and girls . In the boy brain, solving problems that require spatial rotation begins in the visual cortex and goes straight to the already "on" parietal spatial-movement area in both hemispheres. It then fires signals to the muscles that cause them to mimic the shape and position of the object. The researchers concluded that most boys, and also some girls, get a holistic, visceral sense of how an object occupies space--they embody its reality, making it easier for them to grasp its three-dimensionality .
    Curious to find out how this applies practically in the classroom setting, researchers studied students in a grade-school math class to see how girls and boys solved conceptual math problems and how long it took them. The boys solved the problems faster than the girls. But what was most surprising to the researchers was that most of the boys, when asked to explain how they got the answer, gave an explanation without using any words .
    Instead, they squirmed, twisted, turned, and gestured with their hands and arms to explain how they got the answer. The boys' body movements were their explanations. Words, in this instance, were a hindrance.
    What also got my attention about this study was what the researchers did next with the girls. In the following six weeks of the experiment, they taught the girls to explain their answers with the same muscle movements the boys had made without using words. At the end of the six weeks, once the girls stopped talking and started twisting and turning, they solved the problems as quickly as the boys. The male and female brains have access to the same circuits but, without intervention, use them differently .

THAT BOY SMELL
    Around age eleven, the juvenile-pause stage of a boy's life begins winding down. One of the most pungent signs that he is entering the next stage is the new scent he starts to exude. It's not BO yet; it's more like sweaty socks. When my son was this age, we mothers referred to it as "that boy smell": not quite the musk of manhood but no longer the sweet smell of childhood. What we smelled was the male sweat glands under the influence of testosterone giving off small amounts of the pheromone called