Starting points

Interesting, really. I watched a current version of Brain Games and saw a program in which the program's originators began the segment with a reference to Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars.  The reference was to springboard into the segment that promulgated the idea that women's brains and men's brains are wired differently.  The segment continued with a simple test of the idea to show that men are more focused than women and that women are more descriptive than men.  This was followed by a game with a team of two women against a team of two men.  The questions each team had to answer depicted men answering questions requiring focus and the women answering questions requiring description.  It was hardly an experiment... more like an activity illustrating the result of an experiment.

The test and game were based on the premise that evolution played a part in designing the way men and women think. People evolved in a way that caused men to be the hunter of the pair and the women to be the gatherer of the pair.  So, men had to be focused, allowing no distractions, in order to track and slay their prey.  Women had to gather from places that had to be described, then had to describe what they did (prepared) with the berries (or whatever) they had gathered.

This premise has been around for a while in the field of psychology, about 75 years.  Thus, it's not a conclusion that can be dismissed out of hand.  It could be true.  The mitigating factor against this theory, however, is that not enough time has passed for men and women to have developed these kinds of features.  At the very earliest, people with enough mental acumen to describe or to focus need more than the 300,000 years allotted to them to change from Neanderthal to homo homo sapien.  No other mammal or vertebrate has developed along the lines of conscious role development that enriches speech in the case of women and filters out speech in the case of men.

Psychologists would like to leave the subject in the realm of how the mind developed over time without regard to speech, but when they bring in how the brain describes an idea or how the brain blocks speech from happening, then speech is involved more than implicitly.  And, the reason psychologists don't want speech involved is so that they can leave out the linguistic theories that tend to mitigate the approaches taken by psychology.  Linguists and philologists since Lev Vygotsky in the 1920s have been publishing books about speech and thought.  Evolution is not a part of the development of the relationship between speech and thought.

So to watch a show on Brain Games based on an old and impartially supported theory of language is disappointing.  I understand that TV is about putting science into terms and formats that take scholarly ideas and make entertaining and profitable episodes for a TV format to inform the public.  I just wish the ideas TV executives select would be the well established ideas, ones with less debatable evidence, truly illustrating a truth or at least trend.

Psychology and psycholinguistics are often at odds.  Linguists start with what is seen and heard - language - and move to mental causation, whereas psychologists start with possible mental causation and show how that surfaces in language.  The results are different, naturally, because the starting points are from opposite ends.