It's official! Listening to women pays off

[Dover]

It's official! Listening to women pays off

Jennifer Viegas
Discovery News
Tuesday, 2 August 2005

No wonder we prefer listening to women. New research shows we process women's voices via a part of the brain geared for sound whereas we process men's voices elsewhere.
The human brain processes male and female voices differently, according to a recent study, which explains why most of us hear female voices more clearly.

The study also explains how we form mental images of people based only on the sound of their voices.

The findings, published in the journal NeuroImage, might also give insight into why many men tire of hearing women speak.

It seems the complexity of female voices requires a lot of brain activity.

"It is females' increased use of prosody, or the natural 'melody' of speech, that makes their voices more complex," says author Professor Michael Hunter...cont'd

http://abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1428081.htm

[etherealtruth]

1. But, of course! n/t

[edbermac]

2. Listen to SOME women pays off...

I'm sure they're not including Ann Coulter and Laura Bush...

[Desertrose]

4. has it been determined that Anne Coulter is truly a female

I must say I wonder sometime.....and Laura...well...poor thing....can you say Stepford?

[intheflow]

3. The original Star Trek said

the reason the computer voice was female was that men listened more closely and sooner to a female voice. So once again, Gene Roddenberry was 40 years ahead of his time and science.

[phantom power]

5. Let's just say...

there are probably other reasons why "many men tire of hearing women speak"

:hide:

[Trillo]

8. Heard the blissful silence lately(?).

I wonder what part of the brain processes the absense of sound?

[phantom power]

9. I get my share of peace and quiet :-)

Anybody who has a family has "those days." Man, woman or child, no doubt.

I do sometimes miss those bachelor days of uninterrupted manly pursuits, but even that gets old eventually.

[Tesha]

12. That would be the John Cage Ganglia. (NT)

[Trillo]

6. I wonder if this is true when listening over the phone.

It's always bothered me that a phone, or even a typical headset supplied with a cordless phone, only uses one ear, not both.

Specific to this test, I wonder if listening womens' brains process mens' voices differently from womens'?

[phantom power]

7. It also clips off the spectrum.

That might also change things, considering these results.

[greyl]

10. I'd love to see more details of the study.

I don't want to pay $30 for it though. The Jennifer Viegas article leaves a lot to be desired. For example, I doubt that Hunter actually said 'these qualities are not related to pitch, but rather to the vibration and number of sound waves'. That doesn't make sense. Was he talking about frequency and amplitude? Is it the voice itself (timbre) or how it's used(melody, inflection, rhythm)?

Compare with the abstract :

In schizophrenia, auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) are likely to be perceived as gender-specific. Given that functional neuro-imaging correlates of AVHs involve multiple brain regions principally including auditory cortex, it is likely that those brain regions responsible for attribution of gender to speech are invoked during AVHs. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a paradigm utilising ‘gender-apparent’ (unaltered) and ‘gender-ambiguous’ (pitch-scaled) male and female voice stimuli to test the hypothesis that male and female voices activate distinct brain areas during gender attribution. The perception of female voices, when compared with male voices, affected greater activation of the right anterior superior temporal gyrus, near the superior temporal sulcus. Similarly, male voice perception activated the mesio-parietal precuneus area. These different gender associations could not be explained by either simple pitch perception or behavioural response because the activations that we observed were conjointly activated by both ‘gender-apparent’ and ‘gender-ambiguous’ voices. The results of this study demonstrate that, in the male brain, the perception of male and female voices activates distinct brain regions.

-The abstract calls "pitch-scaled" voice stimuli 'gender-ambiguous', yet also says that pitch perception has nothing to do with assigning gender to the stimuli. So how could the stimuli be considered gender-ambiguous?
In fact, a pitch-shifted male voice tends to remain easily identifiable as male whether the pitch is raised or lowered, while a pitch-shifted female voice tends to "becomes male" when lowered even less than an octave. But since this study is about the brain and not the difference between male and female voices,

-is it possible the activity in the brain is related to the concepts male and female?

-Were the subjects schizophrenic?

Maybe some more details will be available later.

Finally, I don't see how this study is remotely related to the value of listening to women. Maybe we shouldn't expect more from the MSM when they're reporting science than when they're reporting politics.
;)

[beam me up scottie]

11. More than fluff?

C'mon, that's all John Q. Public wants!

[Orsino]

13. Dang. Have to try that someday.

I kid because I love.

[DireStrike]

14. They only checked men's brains?

It is misleading how the article implies that all human brains work this way simply because the researchers so hypothesize with no experimental evidence.

[renter]

15. Well...

"Eye" 've heard that when men get older they lose some of their higher-frequency hearing, such as women voices. Maybe this is why husbands eventually don't listen to their wives?

[Spock_is_Skeptical]

16. well, of course!!