Brain sex

As a writer, I’m always looking for new ways to define and explore character, and this Sex I.D. test from the BBC is a cool one. Its enticing web site offers: Get a brain sex profile and find out if you think like a man or a woman. See if you can gaze into someone’s eyes and know what they’re thinking. Find out why scientists are interested in the length of your fingers.

So if course, I did it — for myself this time (kind of fun: as it turns out, I’m very empathetic but not much of a systemizer). But it’s also a great way to get inside the heads of your characters. If you sit down and take this test as your character, you’ll get all sorts of insights into who this fictional person is: how well does your character read others’ emotions? Does he/she prefer feminine or masculine faces? How does he/ she feel about money?

The test takes fewer than thirty minutes, and each of its six portions are timed — but you can stop at any time and return to it later. You’ll probably want to know a good deal about your character before taking this on (i.e., it’s not very useful for trying to dream up a new character but rather for deepening your understanding of one) — and there’s one segment that requires you to measure the length of your fingers (you could try to make that part up, but the results might be very odd). Still, because we as writers spend so much of our time trying to figure out how people’s minds work, it’s a great exercise — and you never know what sort of new info you’ll learn about the characters inhabiting your stories.