Apparently there is some education specialist from Flint, MI named Dan Hodgins traveling around the US giving lectures to education groups, claiming that there is an area of the brain called the "Crockus" (which looks a lot like Broca's area -- traditionally thought to be responsible for spoken language) that is four times larger in girls than in boys, and is responsible for the alleged fact that "girls see the details of experiences... boys see the whole but not the details." Has anyone else heard about this? Has he given a lecture near you?
The maintainer of the Language Log website (Mark Liberman, a U. Penn linguistics prof) has been trying to track down the details of this claim, with remarkably little concrete results. (There is no area of the brain commonly called the Crockus, and there has been some difficulty in locating its alleged discoverer, Dr. Alfred Crockus, and his alleged institution, the Boston Medical University Hospital.) The page about all this that I have linked to below has a long discussion of the matter, but it enters the discussion in the middle. To get the basic background, scroll down a little bit to the paragraph that starts "If you're new to this discussion, you should read, in order;" followed by five or so links to earlier posts on the topic. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004943.html (By the way, the "Shatner's Bassoon" story is good as well. Some British comedian has convinced a number of British celebrities (including an MP) to do public service announcement against a new (bogus) "street drug"called "cake" (among other things) that targets a (bogus) part of the brain called "Shatner's Bassoon.") Best, -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada 416-736-5115 ex. 66164 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.yorku.ca/christo/ ====================================== ---
