random brain waves

First thing this morning, I read an article on how women are NOT more talkative than men. The stereotype is that women talk incessantly and men are quiet. Commonly cited numbers are 20,000 words a day for women vs. men's paltry 7,000. Apparently, these numbers - as well as others pointing to a similar magnitude difference between men and women - have been cited up, down, right, and left by magazines, books, talk show hosts, marriage counselors, and psychiatrists for perhaps a couple decades, but I haven't run across a citation to an actual study (and neither have others who have been looking far harder than I have). The notion, however, has given rise to the concept of a "word budget" for the day, where a man's budget is smaller than a woman's. "At the end of the day.... A man has spent nearly all his words.... A woman, however, is just warming up. She has thousands of words left to speak, and since her husband's word count is depleted, the conversations often wind up sounding like nothing more than question-and-answer sessions." How clever. Some guy came up with a "scientific" way of explaining why he doesn't want to talk to his wife at the end of the day! (His name is Gary Smalley.)

I'm glad to run across a study that debunks the stereotype. A flaw in the study is that they only sampled university students. Perhaps with age or entrance into the work force, a difference emerges between men and women in their chattiness - though I want to believe the results of this study, and I've seen that a couple other studies have come to the same conclusion.

Then I cruised to a recent article discussing a new study on IQ and birth order. A Norwegian group found that first borns have, on average, a 3 IQ point advantage over the next youngest sibling. Further, they claim that this difference mostly likely arises from some aspect of family dynamics, as children who were born second, but whose older siblings had died (presumably very young), had average IQ scores similar to first born children. The average difference found across families, which can be confounded by a multitude of factors not all of which can be controlled for, also holds up when directly comparing siblings within a family.

Now, I am the baby in a family with 3 children. So I take this a little personally. True, the oldest of us is far older and therefore I might only be as disadvantaged as a second child. But frankly, my older sister Julie did score higher - and probably in the vicinity of 5 points higher - than I did on a fifth grade IQ test. I wonder whether other people's anecdotal evidence goes along with these findings as well?

Last, but not least, I'm constantly on the look out for little essays and such written by "famous" novelists. I guess it is my way of making myself feel more well-read and cultured. Today, I ran across an essay on thinking by William Golding that is worth a read. And if you subscribe to the New Yorker you should read the book review by John Updike.