Women who have filed for divorce because their spouses don’t ‘listen to them’ may want to consider this. A study, by researchers from the University of Sheffield in England, has found that men respond differently to the voices of women and other men. This was because different parts of a man’s brain were used to understand a female voice from a male one. While the female voice was deciphered through a complex mechanism, the male one was understood through a simpler process.
“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.
When a man hears a female voice the auditory section of his brain is activated, which analyzes the different sounds in order to ‘read’ the voice and determine the auditory face. When men hear a male voice the part of the brain that processes the information is colloquially known as the 'mind's eye',” said Dr Michael Hunter, lead author of the study, while explaining why men’s voices are easily understood by other men as compared to women’s voices.
“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 to determine gender. Voices allow the brain to determine various factors about a person's appearance, including their sex, size and age. It is much more complex than most people think and is an extremely important tool for determining someone's identity without having to see them,” he added.
Under the study, Dr Hunter and his colleagues studied the brain activity of 12 men who were made to listen to tapes of different voices. They found major differences in the way the subjects responded to male and female sounds.
The findings, published in
NeuroImage also explain why mentally disturbed people who hallucinate report hearing male voices, as the brain finds it more difficult to whip up the complicated female voice and against a male one.
“Psychiatrists believe that these auditory hallucinations are caused when the brain spontaneously activates, creating a false perception of a voice. The reason these voices are usually male could be explained by the fact that the female voice is so much more complex that the brain would find it much harder to create a false female voice accurately than a false male voice,” Dr Hunter said.
Even though the female voice is more complicated, it comes across more clearly that a male one, because it is decoded in the auditory part of the brain, the study found.
