In today’s excerpt – there are some ideas that people are so ready to believe that they become widely held with little or no basis in data. One such item was the 2006 assertion by Louann Brizendine that women speak 20,000 words a day and men speak only 7,000:

“In 2006, Louann Brizendine published a book that tapped straight into readers’ intellectual id. And no, ‘intellectual id’ is not an oxymoron. There are some things that people seem desperately eager to believe, and they’re delighted to find those things ‘confirmed’ by a piece of scholarly-seeming work. Brizendine’s The Female Brain was just such a hit.

“In the book Brizendine claimed, among other things, that women spoke 20,000 words a day, while men utter just 7,000. It was all part of her larger thesis that women’s brains work differently from men’s. And it was just what many people … wanted to hear. The British Daily Mail wrote, ‘It is something one half of the population has long suspected – and the other half always vocally denied.’ A journalist blogging at The Washington Post wrote, ‘Women talk too much, and men only think about sex … you need a Ph.D. to figure that out?’ (Brizendine has an M.D.) The claim was touted prominently on the book jacket and was an Internet sensation.

“Something didn’t sound right to Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, though. Women speaking three times as much as men? Though his field is phonetics, Liberman also keeps a popular blog, Language Log, where he and about a dozen other linguists regularly post on general-interest language topics that crop up in the news.

“Had Brizendine done some new research? Or had Liberman missed some past research that found this huge disparity in men’s and women’s speech? He looked in the back of Brizendine’s book – one-third of the text is footnotes, lending it a weighty air – and found only one reference for the 20,000-word claim: a self-help book called Talk Language: How to Use Conversation for Profit and Pleasure, by Alan Pease and Allan Garner. Pease and Garner had not done any original fact-finding research on the subject themselves, nor did they cite anyone who had.

“Liberman dug around further. Had anybody else done the research on how much women and men talk? Sure enough, he found that they had. Unsurprisingly, there’s a huge amount of variation in talkativeness. Some people, male or female, never shut up, and some rarely talk at all. But as for average differences between the sexes, Liberman found that studies found either no difference at all or a small one – in favor of men. Yes, according to some studies, men talk (on average) slightly more than women. Liberman has not yet found any study showing women talking significantly more, though he’s asked his blog’s readers to send him any, promising to publish the results. None has shown up.

“Confronted with this, Brizendine hedged. She claimed that the Pease and Garner self-help book in her footnotes was meant to be ‘further reading,’ not a scholarly citation. She claimed an unfair backlash against her ideas: ‘It’s very politically incorrect to say there are any gender differences.’ She backtracked to say that women produced more ‘communication events’ – gestures, facial expressions, and whatnot – than men. But in the end she promised to take the bit about female logorrhea out of future editions of the book. Well she might. A study published in Science the next year, 2007, was the first to track a large number of people (210 women, 186 men) throughout the day in both the United States and Mexico. Both sexes used about 16,000 words a day, though on average, in this study, the women used 3.5 percent more words, a statistically trivial difference. Brizendine had said women talk 185 percent more than men.

“Of course, Brizendine’s dud ‘fact’ was already out of the gate, racing around blogs and book reviews. As the book went into multiple translations, foreigners latched on as fast as English speakers have. (‘Warum gebrauchen Frauen 20 000 Worter am Tag, wahrend Manner nur 7000?,’ as Das Weibliche Gehirn’s German publisher touted the claim on Germany’s Amazon.de.) It is likely that, despite Liberman’s efforts, it will become one of the early twenty-first century’s favorite factoids, something that everyone ‘knows.’ ”

Author: Robert Lane Greene
Title: You Are What You Speak
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Date: Copyright 2011 by Robert Lane Greene
Pages: 54-56

I found this book excerpt, and it is an important reminder of the importance of bonding, intimacy, etc in our relationships with our spouse and children.

In today’s excerpt – Valentine’s Day tidbits. Where to we find enduring love? Answer: Oxytocin. Infidelity? Testosterone. Heartbreak? Low serotonin and endorphins. In fact, our loved ones are actually present in our brains – neurochemically – and when lost it results in chemical trauma for the brain:

“An American study of over four thousand men found that husbands with high testosterone levels were 43 percent more likely to get divorced and 38 percent more likely to have extramarital affairs than men with lower levels. They were also 50 percent less likely to get married at all. Men with the least amounts of
testosterone were more likely to get married and to stay married, maybe because low testosterone levels make men calmer, less aggressive, less intense, and more cooperative.

“The desire to commit to someone is strongly linked to … oxytocin. … Oxytocin is released by the pituitary gland and acts on the ovaries and testes to regulate reproduction. Researchers suspect that this hormone is important for forming close social bonds. The levels of this chemical rise when couples watch romantic movies, hug, or hold hands. Prairie voles, when injected with oxytocin, pair much faster than normally. Blocking oxytocin prevents them from bonding in a normal way. This is similar in humans, because couples bond to certain characteristics in each other. This is why you are attracted to the same type of man or woman repeatedly. In general, levels of oxytocin are lower in men, except after an orgasm, where they are raised more than 500 percent. This may explain why men feel very sleepy after an orgasm. This is the same hormone released in babies during breast-feeding, which makes them sleepy as well.

“Oxytocin is also related to the feelings of closeness and being ‘in love’ when you have regular sex for several reasons. First, the skin is sensitized by oxytocin, encouraging affection and touching behavior. Then, oxytocin levels rise during subsequent touching and eventually even with the anticipation of being touched. Oxytocin increases during sexual activity, peaks at orgasm, and stays elevated for a period of time after intercourse. … In addition, there is an amnesic effect created by oxytocin during sex and orgasm that blocks negative memories people have about each other for a period of time. The same amnesic effect occurs from the release of oxytocin during childbirth, while
a mother is nursing to help her forget the labor pain, and during long, stressful nights spent with a newborn so that she can bond to her baby with positive feelings and love.

“Higher oxytocin levels are also associated with an increased feeling of trust. In a landmark study by Michael Kosfeld and colleagues from Switzerland published in the journal Nature, intranasal oxytocin was found to increase trust. Men who inhale a nasal spray spiked with oxytocin give more money to partners in a risky investment game than do men who sniff a spray containing a placebo. This substance fosters the trust needed for friendship, love, families, economic transactions, and political networks. According to the study’s authors, ‘Oxytocin specifically affects an individual’s willingness to accept social risks arising through interpersonal interactions.’ …

“What happens in the brain when you lose someone you love? Why do we hurt, long, even obsess about the other person? When we love someone, they come to live in the emotional or limbic centers of our brains. He or she actually occupies nerve-cell pathways and physically lives in the neurons and synapses of the brain. When we lose someone, either through death, divorce, moves, or
breakups, our brain starts to get confused and disoriented. Since the person lives in the neuronal connections, we expect to see her, hear her, feel her, and touch her. When we cannot hold her or talk to her as we usually do, the brain centers where she lives becomes inflamed looking for her. Overactivity in the limbic brain has been associated with depression and low serotonin levels, which is why we have trouble sleeping, feel obsessed, lose our appetites, want to isolate ourselves, and lose the joy we have about life. A deficit in endorphins, which modulate pain and pleasure pathways in the brain, also occurs, which may be responsible for the physical pain we feel during a breakup.”

Author: Daniel G. Amen, M.D.
Title: The Brain in Love
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Date: Copyright 2007 by Daniel G. Amen, M.D.
Pages: 64-68