[craig-faber]

This one's actually a discovery. I was psychology major in college and had been reading about research on gender differences in language. People seemd to intuit that there was something behind the stereotypes about women talking more, and a difference did show up in brain imaging - men process language in areas one hemisphere, usually the left, women did some secondary processing in corresponding areas of the non-dominant hemisphere. Feminists had written about this too. But over and over word counts, comprehension tests, vocabulary tests had found nothing.

One day, I was at a small party that had started to break up. The remaining guys were in one room, and the two girls had drifted to the kitchen and were chatting excitedly about something. I had gotten bored with what the guys were talking about, and wondered what the girls were so excited about. But I couldn't understand them because they were talking on top of each other. Then it hit me: They can understand each other! Women can talk and understand simultaneously, we can't. They can use the secondary areas in the non-dominant hemisphere as back-up language comprehension areas. Men just use areas in one hemisphere so we have to switch back and forth between speaking and listening, we can't do both at the same time. It's blatantly obvious if you stop to think about it, but in all the research i'd been reading, nobody had stopped to think about it.

The feminist take on language and gender made sense too. If you assume that men could listen and talk at the same time if they wanted to, comments that guys make, like "Hey, shut up a minuit would you, I want to say something" and "Hey wait a minuit, I'm still talking" do seem domineering.