Brain Type

While reading the Amazon.com sample pages from the book Raising a Left-Brain Child in a Right-Brain World, I came across a reference to a psychological test developed by Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, et al from the University of Cambridge, England. The purpose of the test is to determine a person's brain type. Specifically, it is designed to find the degree to which a person is an "empathizer" (one who "identif[ies] and react[s] appropriately to the way another person is feeling") and the degree to which one is a "systemizer" (one who is "drive[n] to analyze the variables and understand the rules governing a system"). These categories traditionally correlate with a person being right-brained or left-brained, respectively. Since I'm apparently like most of my self-obsessed generation and like to participate in the various personality tests available online (e.g., the popular Myers-Briggs test), I took the EQSQ test and received the following score:

Respondent	Average EQ	Average SQ	Brain Type
Males	39.0	61.2	Systemizing
Females	48.0	51.7	Empathizing
Your Score	10	112	Extreme Systemizing

Apparently my empathizing score is abysmally below-average. I can only assume from the website's description of EQSQ theory that I therefore have difficulty caring for others and predicting their behavior (I suppose this is true to a degree). On the other hand, my above-average systemizing score would suggest that I do better at predicting and controlling the behavior of a system and have a drive to construct them (kind of like an engineer, I guess). The difference between the two scores is used to determine your overall brain type; I'm listed as an "extreme systemizer". The website also presents the distribution of brain types as found in Baron-Cohen et al's published studies:

	Brain Types of Experimental Control Groups
Respondent	Extreme E	E	Balanced	S	Extreme S
Males	0%	17%	31%	46%	6%
Females	7%	47%	32%	14%	0%

My wife also took the test, scoring a 56 on her EQ test and a 115 on her SQ test. Although her EQ score is above average, the difference in scores also makes her an extreme systemizer. Apparently, the number of extreme systemizing females was not statistically significant in Baron-Cohen et al's studies. I guess that makes my wife even weirder than I am.