Word: verbalizations
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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First, Ojemann tested his patients' verbal intelligence using a written exam. Then, during neurosurgery -- which was performed under a local anesthetic -- he asked them to name aloud a series of objects found in a steady stream of black-and-white photos. Periodically, he touched different parts of the brain with an electrode that temporarily blocked the activity of that region. (This does not hurt because the brain has no sense of pain.) By noting when his patients made mistakes, the surgeon was able to determine which sites were essential to naming...
Several complex sexual differences emerged. Men with lower verbal IQs were more likely to have their language skills located toward the back of the brain. In a number of women, regardless of IQ, the naming ability was restricted to the frontal lobe. This disparity could help explain why strokes that affect the rear of the brain seem to be more devastating to men than to women...
Intriguingly, the sexual differences are far less significant in people with higher verbal IQs. Their language skills developed in a more intermediate part of the brain. And yet, no two patterns were ever identical. "That to me is the most important finding," Ojemann says. "Instead of these sites being laid down more or less the same in everyone, they're laid down in subtly different places." Language is scattered randomly across these cerebral centers, he hypothesizes, because the skills evolved so recently...
...between men and women for at least some mental skills has actually started to shrink. By looking at 25 years' worth of data from academic tests, Janet Hyde, professor of psychology and women's studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, discovered that overall gender differences for verbal and mathematical skills dramatically decreased after 1974. One possible explanation, Hyde notes, is that "Americans have changed their socialization and educational patterns over the past few decades. They are treating males and females with greater similarity...
Turner did not confine his pugnaciousness to his home. As a skipper, he occasionally struck crew members who made mistakes. He abruptly ended his Playboy interview with Peter Ross Range in 1983 by smashing Range's tape recorder. At the office his bursts of violence were verbal, but almost all his top executives say they have felt them. After one tirade, says Gerald Hogan, the former president of TBS Entertainment Networks, "he had me, not in tears, crying, but at that point my eyes had welled up, I was so angry...