According to a (mostly) knowledgeable friend, women on average can hear very low level (low volume not low frequency) sounds right on the threshold of audibility, considerably better than men. This was supposedly developed as a result of the evolutionary neccessity to hear babies and children in distress and respond if necessary. Any truth to this?
Additionally, according to this friend there was supposedly some research a few years ago backing this up that determined gay women could not hear low level sounds as well as non-gay women because certain inner ear stuctures were more “masculinized” and less sensitive and approximate aural sensitivity was that of a heterosexual man.
However, that won’t keep me from posting. I would think it would be the opposite of the way stated in the OP. Babies are loud, small game is quiet. If there is a difference, I think it would be in favor of the male. That is just a WAG mind you.
Not babies. They were usually carried around my mom. Young children, on the other hand, were often out of sight. Distance, not volume, would make hearing acuity important in case of danger to the child. The women would then yell at the men “Git your asses over here”. Just like now.
The only reason men run the world is because we got bigger muscles.
Peace,
mangeorge
Slightly off-topic–I read somewhere lately that they (yeah, I know, “they” :rolleyes: ) tested the sound frequencies of babies crying, and found that it exactly matches the frequency of an ambulance siren. They said this proves why sirens get your attention so fast, but at the time I thought, “It also proves why a baby’s crying gets your attention so fast.”
P.S. To quote some comedian (Paula Poundstone?), “If men run the world, how come they can’t stop wearing ties?”
Of course all married women would say they can hear better than men, and they base their arguments on who gets up in the middle of the night when the kid cries. Or on what they said to you three days ago, at a time when you were intensely concentrating on something completely different.
Most married men would attribute this selective deafness to a uniquely masculine survival instinct…
I never quire understand this but it happens no matter what the nationality so it might have some genetic significance,
I’m in a public place – for example, sitting in a pub - having a conversation with a female friend. It’s a little noisy from the throng and perhaps some piped music. After the conversation has meandered a while she’ll suddenly say “wow, that’s interesting”. I, of course, assume she’s talking about our chat but equally ‘of course’ she’s not.
It never ceases to amaze me that women can be seemingly immersed in a conversation when, in fact, they’re also monitoring all the multiple conversations on surrounding tables and filtering those conversations for juicy titbits and through a wall of background noise and while contributing to the topic at hand. Assume it’s some sort of built in radar antennae attuned to ‘gossip frequency’.
Never fully grasped why our Governments spend all that money on global monitoring when all they really need to do is send out a few experienced gossip mongers to bring in the dirty laundry.
Here’s a nice little article on audio engineering thanks to google.com. Under part B there’s a small mention about frequency limitations between the sexes with lots of footnotes you can read up on.
Slightly off-topic–I read somewhere lately that they (yeah, I know, “they” :rolleyes: ) tested the sound frequencies of babies crying, and found that it exactly matches the frequency of an ambulance siren. They said this proves why sirens get your attention so fast, but at the time I thought, “It also proves why a baby’s crying gets your attention so fast.”
[QUOTE]
Even further off the topic, I remember a news item suggesting that those wailing type sirens were certainly good at attracting peoples attention, but were poor in their ability to allow people to detect the direction of travel of the emergency vehicle concerned. They suggested white noise interspersed with the usual siren was significantly more successful. I’ll look for a link, but it was a few years. ago
Men are ‘action’ listeners, they listen to action! So if a wife can’t get his attention to get him to do the dishes, she should talk to him like a football play by play to get him to do them.
