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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tags: chatterbox, talkative, behavior, gender studies
Contrary to the commonly accepted urban myth that claims that women talk more than men, a recently published study has instead found that men talk as much as women do, and both sexes speak about 16,000 words per day.
Originally, the researchers…
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. It's cruel." The interviewer pushes her on the issue, pointing out that in the long term, controlled studies are necessary in order to determine…
Two science books cheap (Kindle version, two bucks):
The Male Brain: A Breakthrough Understanding of How Men and Boys Think
Dr. Louann Brizendine, the founder of the first clinic in the country to study gender differences in brain, behavior, and hormones, turns her attention to the male brain,…
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.
Amanda Schaffer and Emily Bazelon, writing in Slate, have an excellent article reviewing Louann Brizendine's The Female Brain and Susan Pinker's…
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