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 Why Imaginary Voices Are Often Male |
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 Posted by Aelhswith on Thursday July 14, @08:31PM
from the God-told-me-to-do-it dept.
Auditory verbal hallucinations are a symptom of schizophrenia and occur in half of the patients who suffer from this condition. Such imaginary voices are usually middle-aged and carry derogatory messages.
Both men and women experience 71 percent of these subjective voices as male. Dr Michael Hunter's research at the University of Sheffield says that the explanation for this is that male voices are less complex to produce than female.
According to Professor Hunter: The female voice is more complex than the male voice, due to differences in the size and shape of the vocal cords and larynx between women and men, 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. 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.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/4675103.stm
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Re: Why Imaginary Voices Are Often Male
by Andy on Sunday July 17, @02:36PM
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Here's what they actually said in the paper in question -- crucially citing other work, not their own:
"[our results are] compatible with the idea that female voices are acoustically more “complex” than male voices. Although the precise parameters that define this complexity have not been fully described, the idea is suggested by evidence that female voices, compared to male voices, are more difficult to both recognise (Noyes and Frankish, 1989) and convincingly synthesise (Klatt, 1987) using computer technology."
The research the team at Sheffield produced actually shows, for a sample of 12 male participants, that the "auditory cortex is more activated by female than male voices". "More activated" means a higher BOLD signal which, it is thought, is correlated with metabolic activity, so the research supports the hypothesis that the auditory cortex has to work harder to process a more complex signal. This is consistent with the difficulties people have shown implementing speech recognition algorithms, mentioned above, which is an interesting result but perhaps not particularly surprising.
Here's another quote from the paper where they explain the different types of hallucinations people experience:
"The voices of AVHs [auditory verbal hallucinations] are perceived as male 71% (and female 23%) of the time irrespective of the patient's gender. The characteristics of the voices of AVHs are also commonly middle-aged, external to the person, right-lateralised, “BBC newsreader” accent in quality and derogatory in content (Nayani and David, 1996)."
Now I find interesting is how in the BBC article they claim to explain using their data why it's so common to hear a male voice. Their explanation for this particular 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." (From the BBC page.)
This claim, which totally ignores most of the interesting -- and presumably very complex! -- content of auditory hallucinations (i.e. the fact that often a middle aged, BBC newsreader style voice making derogatory statements) doesn't feature in the paper. Instead in the paper they go no further than to say:
"From a clinical point of view, we propose that AVHs will be associated with cortical activation in brain regions related to the perception of the gender of the “speaker” to whom the AVHs are attributed."
Is anyone else thoroughly dissatisfied wit this BBC news articile?
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Re: Why Imaginary Voices Are Often Male
by Roamer on Sunday July 17, @04:54PM
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Is anyone else thoroughly dissatisfied wit this BBC news articile? I think it may be sort of like this, as far as these forums go: If there should be no free, linkable access to complete original papers or less edited news pertaining to them, or such a condition doesn't remain available very long, or an individual with paid access doesn't want to paste wholesale such material in a post, then... in regard to those instances, we may be stuck with pop-science articles or journalistic summaries from universities which anyone passing by can have the capacity to link to. Which isn't necessarily the end of the world if the deficiencies of pop-science articles should provoke enraged readers to audaciously add info from original papers or less filtered news pertaining to them. ;-)
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Re: Why Imaginary Voices Are Often Male
by Nanomid on Tuesday July 26, @08:08AM
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Hear, hear!
Why do they go off into the weeds of structural analysis without appreciating genetic pressures that may have given rise to them?
Over evolutionary population and times, did this 'choice' increase survival, however slight, over any other 'random' choice?
In this case, preferentially listening for human middle-aged male derogatory speech vs. other {speech, sound}.
Perhaps so.
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Re: Why Imaginary Voices Are Often Male
by Ricardo Portolano on Monday August 15, @12:32PM
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I was wondering about the simbolic attachments on a male and on a female voice... Does it count at all?
Does it have anything to do with the fact that on our society males with BBC narrators voices often are 'right' in what they say? And that the voices that schizofrenics 'listen' are often telling them what to do?
I don´t know... I tend to think in Ronald Laing and Wilhelm Reich on all this.
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