Smells like pseudoscience
Topic: Ranting
EE sent me this story today:

Why Men Don't Listen to Women

He really isn't listening to you!
When men and women speak, the human brain processes the sounds of those voices differently, Britain's Mirror and Agence France Presse report of a new study from the U.K.'s University of Sheffield. While most of us actually hear female voices more clearly, men's brains hear women's voices first as music. But it's not music. It's someone giving them a honey-do list. So the brain goes into overdrive trying to analyze what is being said.

Bottom line: Men have to work harder deciphering what women are saying because they use the auditory part of the brain that processes music, not human voices. Men's brains are not designed to listen to women's voices. It's not the pitch of the woman's voice, but rather the vibration and number of sound waves that cause the problem, notes Discovery News.

But guys have no trouble at all hearing each other because men use a much simpler brain mechanism at the back of the brain to decipher another man's voice and recognize it as speech.

"The female voice is actually more complex than the male voice, due to differences in the size and shape of the vocal cords and larynx between men and women, and also due to women having greater natural 'melody' in their voices. This causes a more complex range of sound frequencies than in a male voice," lead researcher Michael Hunter told The Mirror. "When men hear a male voice they process it in the 'mind's eye.' This is the part of the brain where people compare their experiences to themselves, so the man is comparing his own voice to the new voice."

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.

The research findings were published in the journal NeuroImage.

I couldn't believe this story wasn't a hoax. Listening to a female voice is too much work for the male brain because the female voice is so melodious, but other male voices are less complex and therefore simpler to decipher? Can I possibly be reading that correctly? Especially the bit about "Men's brains are not designed to listen to women's voices"?!? My ass, they're not.*

So I went digging around on the University of Sheffield's website, and found their press release, on the study. There goes the hoax theory, unless it's a really elaborate hoax.

Not having read the NeuroImage article in which the study results were detailed, and not really having the appropriate background, I don't really have grounds to question the design of the study itself, but I would be interested to know how legitimate it really is to make sweeping generalizations about men's brains based on a study conducted on 12 subjects. Is this a statistically significant sample for purposes of experiments on the brain? I have no idea.

I'm also curious about the composition of the group of subjects -- race, class, age, sexual identity -- how diverse was this group? And how diverse were the range of voices they were listening to in the course of the study? To what extent might socialization play a role in how people process voices?

I think that socialization was quite likely overlooked in the assertion in the press release that women's voices are more complex than men's due to the "natural" melody in women's voices. I suspect that the female voice's "natural" melody owes something to socialization, in that its more acceptable for women to utilize their higher register than it is for men to do so. Therefore, women have access to a wider range of expressive vocal tones than men. So the extent of the "naturalness" of the complexity of the female voice is up for debate, in my opinion.

Interestingly, nothing in the press release from the university implies that its difficult for men to listen to women because female voices are more complex. In fact, the press release implies that processing women's voices in the auditory center of the brain may actually render them clearer to men:

"This research could also explain why female voices are considered to be clearer then male voices. This could be linked to the fact that female voices are interpreted in the auditory part of the brain, and are therefore more easily decoded."

Where did the distortion creep in? That's what I find more interesting than the study itself. I would love to have the time and resources to trace the development of this story since 12 July, which is when the press release was posted. In just over a month, the study has evolved from an examination of the way that the male brain processes male and female voices differently into a apologia for husbands who treat their wives' conversations as part of the background noise. If I was doing a classic gender studies degree, I'd be tempted to write my thesis on the process by which that distortion happened, because I bet it would be fascinating.


*Which was essentially the reaction that Liz Ciancone had, except she used more words, and less vulgar ones, because she writes for a proper publication.