abc.net.au — Men who are accused of never listening by women now have an excuse - women's voices are more difficult for men to listen to than other men's.The research shows men decipher female voices using the auditory part of the brain that processes music, while male voices engage a simpler mechanism.
Aug 7, 2005 View in Crawl 4
dkleinschmidtAug 7, 2005
"perhaps the reason men process female voices with the same section of the brain as music is probably because they are meant not to convey primarily information but cause emotional stimulation the same way music does. So in a way while we may miss the content of the message we definitely should be able to gage what she wants on a more emotionally complex level. Interesting article."Right on, I was gearing up to make an almost identical comment. Perhaps another explanation of this is that man-to-man communication is primarily to convey simple, symbolic information (i.e., data, or rational bits of knowledge), and the primary purpose of woman-woman (or even woman to man?) communication is to convey information that is better described as "irrational," not able to be neatly divided into chunks. I for one prefer talking to women than talking to men (on the whole, there are definitely exceptions), but I also am a big classical music dork and feel like I experience music in a much different way than most guys do.Also, the natural selection comment made by DavidK above (weird...that's my name too) I think has definite merit: men are better at forming groups, or, on a larger scale, societies and civilizations. Natural selection clearly favors large group forming (at least for people, and at least so far).
ickyelfAug 7, 2005
I prefer listening to female singers. My favorites are Kate Bush and Elizabeth Fraser from the Cocteau Twins.
kgcAug 8, 2005
I guess this notion may explain why I "think" female singers tend to sound like they're mostly just contributing vocal sound to the music, not caring whether or not they're comprehensible; whereas, male voices tend to sound less music-like and more comprehensible.
flogin_mollyAug 8, 2005
but its still are faults but its still a dam good excusewait its god's fault ha!
Closed AccountAug 8, 2005
Men actually use this method for listening to a lot more than just the voices of women. To bad science has to appeal to the media masses with clever tag lines to be interesting. Go Go Tympanic membrane.
beccabugAug 9, 2005
hmm... that's interesting however I think the article is lacking information. The article went into great depth to explain the female voice and I found that very informative, however, I would like to know what makes men's voices more simple Some of you guys need to be slapped!!!!! some of you are completely sexist and as woman i find your comments just plain rude.