You can’t order your brain, says Natalya Radulova

"What are you thinking about?" - I ask a man this question not to hear: “About you and me, dear,” but to have fun. I know that a man staring at one point is not thinking about what will make our relationship deeper and closer. He is thinking about something important. For example: “You know, I’m wondering what will happen if after death my body is sent into orbit. Will I decompose, and if so, at what speed?” Isn't it funny? Five minutes ago he was still whispering: “I’ve already forgotten what it’s like to hug the person you want to hug,” but as soon as he went to the bathroom, he was already standing in front of the microwave, watching the plate of colettes spinning, and imagining his body drifting among space debris.

What about the numbers? Yes, men are obsessed with them. “It’s fortunate that many magazines have a “Numbers” section,” my brother rejoices. “There really is a lot of useful information there, like “80 million bacteria are transmitted by one kiss,” or “9,327 messages are published on Twitter every second,” or “ 46:0. With this score ended the football match between the national teams of Vanuatu and Micronesia at the Pacific Games. "There is something to think about, isn't it?" It seems to me that this column was invented by the same guy who likes to run through numbers like a rosary, but my brother thinks that the information "The word borschts - borscht - contains a sequence of 7 consonants and only one vowel" is something worth thinking about half a day instead of helping my mother and I weed the potatoes.

“I like to fill my brain with an endless number of numbers,” TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson once admitted, “for example, thinking that we revolve around the Sun at 90 miles per second, or that the Sun rushes through the Universe at a million miles a day.” . And people like Jeremy are legion. How does this information help men live? I have no idea. For some reason they just need to “fill their brain with an endless number of numbers,” that’s all.

Maybe that's why men love statistics so much? Therefore, they are always calculating something and filling the Internet with their reports. Baseball fans tell the world, "How often does a batter get hits in at-bats that don't result in walks, hit-by pitches, sack flyes/bunts, and interference calls." Fans of sumo wrestling spend many hours of their lives and come to the conclusion: “Terunofuji, as a sekitori, won all his bouts on the 11th day, but usually lost on the 5th day.” And British scientists are conducting large-scale studies to find out: “44 percent of the adult population of the Earth regularly picks their nose and then eats mucus.”

So if your man is thinking, it is possible that he is wondering how many sausages it will take to pave the way from home to work. Or trying to understand what would happen if all the rivers and lakes of Russia suddenly froze right now, in the middle of summer. However, there is a high probability that he is not thinking about anything at all. “What could be better than having your brain completely empty for a few hours?” writes famous comedian and speaker Mark Gunvor. “A few years ago, the University of Pennsylvania conducted a study and found that men can actually switch off, not think about anything and still breathe . Unlike women." We can't do that, really. We think all the time. And most often - about our relationships. First: “What is he thinking about, I wonder?”, then: “How can he think about such nonsense!”

Natalia Radulova

What do men think about?