posted
So, is that why when people have visions they hear a males voice? You know, the loud booming barratone voice of God; is that just because it's easier to hear?
Posts: 2596 | Registered: Jan 2006
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by vonk: So, is that why when people have visions they hear a males voice? You know, the loud booming barratone voice of God; is that just because it's easier to hear?
from the article:
quote: Here's a really bizarre side effect: These findings help explain why people who suffer hallucinations usually hear male voices. It's just too hard for the brain to create a false feminine voice as accurately as it can create a false masculine voice.
I'm curious about how women perceive male vs. female voices; the article only talks about how men hear voices. It doesn't say anything about how women hear male vs. female. I guess it's sort of implied that women hear female voices differently than men do, but there is no explanation.
Posts: 3149 | Registered: Jul 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
Wow. That's just crazy. It always amazes me that people actually think to do those studies. I mean, who thought up the idea "I wonder why men don't listen to women?"
Scratch that, it makes total sense why someone would do this study.
Posts: 1789 | Registered: Jul 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
I'm quite wary of stuff like this reported in the non-scientific press, but if it were true it would explain an awful lot. Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
pH, I'm not saying that's true or not, because I really don't know, but play the scientist. Can both of these things be true?
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
I don't know. I mean, if men have a harder time processing what women are saying, why use a woman's voice to give critical information about airplane-flying, missle-shooting activities?
posted
It's weird but I really do feel that many of my colleages can't hear me when I speak. Neither could my dad or older brother.
But my younger brother could, and certain other guys can.
I think it's much more likely to be cultural conditioning, but if there really is some brain physiology behind it, then it might point the way toward correcting it. Perhaps it means I should write more emails to reinforce what I say.
On the jobsite, though, that won't work.
I wish we could see the primary study. It's probably all nonsense, anyway. Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
I think it's like Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man", thinking through this more clearly.
If there is an effect like they feel they have demonstrated, it likely is a result of the cultural conditioning of many men not to listen as much to what women say, rather than the other way around (the brain difference causing the inability to hear). This may be the technical aspects of how that conditioning (which is primarily social and cultural) plays itself out in the software and hardware.
The brain is something we can have a profound influence on by programming with our actions and during our development. Perhaps this is just the result of some men's prior programming. The brain learns to pay more attention to the things we pay more attention to. This may be more about history than any hard-wiring from birth.
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
Assuming that what was laid out in that very incomplete article were true, I find your scenario highly unlikely as well as inconsistent with what was said.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
In the article abstract (I'd copy it, but I'm not sure if it's legal), it seems that the main purpose for the study was to determine why schizophrenic auditory hallucinations tended to be gender specific. Using an MRI they had the listeners listen to both normal male and female voices, and they changed the pitch of male and female voices, so that you couldn't tell the difference. They found that even with a lower pitch, men still listened to female voices in a different part than men's voices with a higher pitch. So it isn't the pitch of the voice that makes the difference, but some other quality.
Posts: 349 | Registered: May 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Is it bad that I thought this thread was going to explain why men think they're sexually deprived?
Aside from that, I think that's very interesting! And as some others have said, yes, it does explain a lot!
Posts: 7877 | Registered: Feb 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
I wonder what the implications are for someone like me, a woman who teaches engineering to mostly men. Does this mean that most of my male students will have a harder time understanding me than they would if I did exactly the same thing but spoke with a male voice. If so, what can I do to compensate?
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
| IP: Logged |
posted
Lissande, That article is at best tangentially related to the one under discussion and the statement you're talking about is merely a default admission that we don't as yet know how the separate disparity between male/female auditory processing they were talking about came to be.
The main problem that I have with Tat's scenario is that what was talked about is not attention, but rather that men's brains find women's voices more difficult to process and do so in a different part of the brain due to the complexity of women's voices as opposed to men's.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
As a purely anecdotal aside, I often find myself talking with other mothers of male children, and this phenomenon comes up frequently.
We tell them to puttheir shoes on 20 times, but they don't hear us until we a) shout, b) throw shoes at them or c) make their father tell them.
They really do ACT like they don't hear us, then get miffed when we raise the volume. "You don't have to shout."
Yes, we do. It is so frustrating that I tell them six times to do something and get ignored, then poke my oblivious husband and say, "Tell them to get their shoes on."
He says, "Get your shoes on, boys" without even looking up from his laptop, and they scramble.
Now I know it's because they can't tell my voice for elevator muzak.
It may not be true, but it feels true.
Posts: 9293 | Registered: Aug 2000
| IP: Logged |
posted
Here is a link to the actual scientific study. link
It may be too technical for some but its quite interesting. The authors do not make any conclusions in this paper about the relationship of their findings to male/female communication. At least that's not mentioned in the paper. The objective of the paper is to determine factors that allow us to recognize gender in speech. In the paper, they did not report anything about female brain response to male or female speech. It's not clear whether this was not studied, or simply isn't reported in this paper.
Even though the paper does not address communication, it is a very interesting question that is raised by the paper. It would be very interesting to do a follow up study in which they looked at differences in comprehension of spoken words and whether this was function of gender.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
| IP: Logged |
quote: men's brains find women's voices more difficult to process and do so in a different part of the brain due to the complexity of women's voices as opposed to men's.
This study never addressed the question of whether men's brains find women's voices more difficult to process. That is a conjecture made in the new report and not in the study. The study simply finds that men process women's voices in a different part of the brain -- there is no evidence in this study as to how this effects comprehension.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
| IP: Logged |
posted
Also, there's no evidence as to how the difference came about. The brain changes its reponse based on what we pay attention to. For instance, a pianist has a larger portion of her brain allocated to finger control than average. Another example is a child who was born with no arms, whose brain had large regions devoted to detailed control of her feet and toes, and she was able to diaper a baby using her toes, and do other extraordinary acts. Both during development (largest effect) and in adulthood (smaller effect) we train our brains to respond differently based on what we pay attention to. Since this is well established, it's no stretch at all to hypothesize that the differences shown in the study are due to training during development, or afterward. There's no evidence presented in the study that would tend either to prove or disprove this hypothesis.
As for what we can do, Rabbit, you probably have developed strategies as have I. Most of my colleages are guys, so it affects me as well. What sorts of ways do you use to communicate better with your students?
quote:Since this is well established, it's no stretch at all to hypothesize that the differences shown in the study are due to training during development, or afterward.
Yes, it is. You're not talking about increased sensitivity in a concentrated on area. You're talking about a migration of processing from one area to another. This can totally happen based on environmental learning, but it's rare and extraordinary, and in this case there's a compelling explanation based on an established mechanism (i.e. more complex sounds being dealt with in a different area).
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
Now I wish I'd paid more attention in my tech class so that I could record men's and women's voices myself and analyze their structure on my own.
quote:Since this is well established, it's no stretch at all to hypothesize that the differences shown in the study are due to training during development, or afterward.
Yes, it is. You're not talking about increased sensitivity in a concentrated on area. You're talking about a migration of processing from one area to another. This can totally happen based on environmental learning, but it's rare and extraordinary, and in this case there's a compelling explanation based on an established mechanism (i.e. more complex sounds being dealt with in a different area).
Mr. Squicky, Rabbit already refuted this assertion in her post from 3:27.
Posts: 1658 | Registered: Sep 2003
| IP: Logged |
quote: wonder what the implications are for someone like me, a woman who teaches engineering to mostly men. Does this mean that most of my male students will have a harder time understanding me than they would if I did exactly the same thing but spoke with a male voice. If so, what can I do to compensate?
I think the best way to compensate would simply to speak less and write more. I would assume that engineers are more visually oriented anyway, so that might be a more effective way of teaching all your students.
Posts: 349 | Registered: May 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
I would say that you should not take any actions to compensate, Rabbit. Part of going to college is learning how to survive and deal in the world. That will include being able to listen to and comprehend women. If they have a harder time understanding you, maybe it will teach them to focus more closely and pay more attention when you're speaking. That will serve them well later, particularly if they end up with a female boss someday. In fact, I would consider male engineering students who have at least some female professers better educate than not, if this is true, all other aspects of their education being equal.
Posts: 7954 | Registered: Mar 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
I'm curious as to whether they tested to see if females reacted differently to male and female voices.
Posts: 1547 | Registered: Jan 2004
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by MrSquicky: You're not talking about increased sensitivity in a concentrated on area. You're talking about a migration of processing from one area to another. This can totally happen based on environmental learning, but it's rare and extraordinary, and in this case there's a compelling explanation based on an established mechanism (i.e. more complex sounds being dealt with in a different area).
I'm sorry MrSquicky, but this isn't what the study reported. The study found:
quote: Male voices activate the precuneus more than female voices. Female voices activate the right anterior superior temporal gyrus more than male voices.
The data from this study do not show migration of the function from one area of the brain to another, they show differences in the level of activation in two regions of the brain. Such differences could easily be the result of environmental factors rather than fundamental biology.
What's more, the study did not address "comprehension" or "communication". The goal of the study was to determine what regions of the brain are involved in gender identification. While the results of the study might have interesting implications for male/female communication, this study never addresses this subject. It would be an interesting follow up study, but it is premature to conclude that the differences in brain activation observed in the study are the cause of male/female communication patterns.
This illustrates some of the big problems with popular media reports of science. The science has to be simplified in order for lay readers to understand the work, but simplification often leads to misunderstanding. Lay writers and readers often draw conclusions that are not actually supported by the work that has been done. They often completely miss the point of the study.
This is a classic example. The Netscape article describes the relationship of these results to auditory halucinations as "a bizarre side effect", when in fact understanding auditory halucinations was the goal of the research and is a primary focus of the scientists involved.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
| IP: Logged |
posted
Rabbit, If you'll notice, I only talked about comprehension in regards to the original article, under the shaky supposition that it at least correctly described that focus and broadly the findings of the article. I didn't mention it at all in the part you quoted, and instead talked about acivation of different areas of the brain.
When you posted the article, I looked at the abstract, but couldn't access the whole thing because I don't have access to ScienceDirect. The article was somewhat vague on the exact differences, but the language used, most specifically in the title and concluding sentence - "Male and female voices activate distinct regions in the male brain" - suggested to me that the were regions of the brain activated in one case that weren't in the other and vice-versa. Now this may not gibe with what the actuall full article says, but it was the only thing in the space Tat and I were working from.
Tatiana was suggesting that the different areas being activated was due to social condition, such that without this conditioning, there would be no distinct activation pattern. Working under the idea that there were different regions activated in the two cases, that would mean that the cultural conditioning affected a transfer of processing speech (most likely of women) away from one area and to another. This is a very unlikely thing to happen, especially in light of the offered explanation that the activated area in regards to women's speech was one that dealt with complex sounds and that women's speech is significantly more complex than men's.
I really don't like popular reporting of science either, but another thing I also really don't like is people forcingtheir preconceptions onto data that doesn't fit them, which is what I saw being done here. Tatiana started with the idea that this must be due to cultural conditioning, even though what was not consistent with what was presented.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
MrSquicky, I intended no offense. Please don't take my post as a personal attack. Given the data you had, the conclusion you drew was reasonable.
My point was simply that a closer look at the facts, made your conclusion far less reasonable. Popular media reports of scientific studies are generally insufficient evidence for drawing anytype of conclusion. Everyone should be very cautious in interpreting any scientific results that are reported in the popular media.
Given the extremely limited detail of the report, Anne Kate's speculation that these differences could be due to environmental rather than genetic effects was completely fair. The data collect in this study does not point to either genetic or environmental effects and as such it is completely reasonable to ask the question Anne Kate asked.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
| IP: Logged |
Printer-friendly view of this topic
![[Wink]](wink.gif)
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
