Women talk more than men: official

Like heroin addiction, but louder

A "self-proclaimed feminist" psychiatrist has finally thrown in the towel and admitted her fellow females do indeed talk more than men, The Daily Mirror reports.

Dr Luan Brizendine of the University of California, who's published her shock findings in The Female Brain, says the average woman works her way through 20,000 words per day, compared with just 7,000 for the average bloke. She says "women devote more brain cells to talking than men", and cites fundamental differences between male and female brains as the cause.

Brizendine - whose findings are based on her own clinical work and the findings of more than 1,000 studies - reluctantly admitted: "I know it is not politically correct to say this but I've been torn for years between my politics and what science is telling us. I believe women actually perceive the world differently from men.

"Girls arrive already wired as girls, and boys arrive already wired as boys. Their brains are different by the time they're born, and their brains are what drive their impulses, values, and their very reality."

Indeed, Brizendine says said differences "can be traced back to the womb, where the sex hormone testosterone moulds the developing male brain". Specifically, "the areas responsible for communication, emotion and memory are all pared back the unborn baby boy". Accordingly, males "chat less than their female counterparts and struggle to express their emotions to the same extent" - which is hardly news to long-suffering females.

Brizendine elaborated: "Women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion, while men have a small country road."

And when they're not cruising their eight-lane superhighway of emotion, women are getting a quick fix of verbals because "the simple act of talking triggers a flood of brain chemicals which give women a rush similar to that felt by heroin addicts when they get a high".

Men, on the other hand, beat women hands-down in one area: contemplating rumpy-pumpy. Brizendine noted "that while a man will think about sex every 52 seconds, the subject tends to cross women's minds just once a day". To put that in perspective, "men have an international airport for dealing with thoughts about sex, where women have an airfield nearby that lands small and private planes", as the good doctor put it.

Some scientists reckon, however, that Brizendine's conclusions have driven her down a promising-looking dual carriageway only to end at a collapsed bridge of scientific proof. Oxford University linguistics professor Deborah Cameron insisted "the amount we talk is influenced by who we are with and what we are doing".

She concluded: "If you aggregate a large number of studies you will find there is little difference between the amount men and women talk." ®