The Female Brain

Tyler Cowen feels that "there are way way way too many books on gender differences," and "most of them just string together the usual well-known templates," but he read every page of The Female Brain with interest. Two factoids from the book:

New mothers lose an average of seven hundred hours of sleep in the first year postpartum.

In one study, mother rats were given the opportunity to press a bar and get a squirt of cocaine or press a bar and get a rat pup to suck their nipples.... Those oxytocin squirts in the brain outscored a snort of cocaine every time.