It's a shame that exaggerating the extent of brain differences between men and women can be such a boon for book sales. (Call it the Mars and Venus phenomenon.) This publishing truism has been most recently demonstrated by Louann Brizendine, a researcher at UCSF who wrote The Female Brain. But now the backlash has begun. The Boston Globe
ran a nice column dismantling Brizendine's oft cited claim that women use 20,000 words per day while men only use 7,000. It turns she stole that ridiculous fact from a self-help book.
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Today, in another of her cantankerous and directionless "interviews," Deborah Solomon of the New York Times at least got something right.
Clinician Dr. Louann Brizendine is quoted in the New York Times as saying that she doesn't do research because "I don't want to give patients a placebo.
Women have white matter, men have duct tape. Or so implies Louann Brizendine's latest book, the Male Brain, dissected in this post and comments at Language Log:
I often rant about bad coverage of the psychology of sex differences, so it is always satisfying to see an article that really has their facts straight.
Check the comments here