While reading a blog on rappers I was condemning myself for being able to remember all of the words to a rap song by half of the men on the blogger’s list and not the difference between false positives and false negatives; and then I wondered, why is this? I started to think it was just because it is music which may lead into a future blog one day but today I want to focus on the men. Men or essentially, any deeper voice seems to have an affect on memory in humans, especially for females, but why?

In an experiment conducted by Hwajin Yang, Sujin Yang, and Giho Park 165 undergraduate students were tested by listening to voice samples and having to restate what they heard, in any order, based off of memorization alone. Third variables like hearing and tone of voice samples were all controlled. Participants all passed hearing tests, rated their own mood (so the mood of the subject couldn’t affect memory) and the voice samples consisted of 325 male and female actors forced to use either a neutral or angry tone; this way all of the variables are consistent in getting an accurate conclusion. The research found that something about a female’s voice impaired the memory of the human being. For female and male listeners the results were generally the same: when there was a male voice the remember rate was higher, reaching the 50 percentile. When there was a female voice the forget rate reached a high of 40% and the remember rate significantly dropped from high 50s to the 40s, being the highest, and for male listeners in particular, reaching a 20% low. So we can assume that a male voice is easier to remember than a female’s, but why? An article on Cracked presents an interesting potential mechanism.

In Eddie Rodriguez’s article on Cracked called  “5 Seemingly Random Factors That Control Your Memory” the third factor is deep voices. He raises topics like why Darth Vader is a bad ass and Morgan Freeman, Barry White, and more have been so impactful because of their voice despite their looks. It made me consider the advertisements on the radio that you never forget (If you’re from Philly you can recite a club onyx commercial from the radio), television commercials, talk show hosts, and so much more. Rodriguez draws a point of causation due to sex. His article references research done by University of Aberdeen in Scotland and McMaster University in Canada, which conclude that evolution has caused women to remember everything that they find desirable about a man. To very many women a deep voice is sexy, therefore what a deep voice says sticks like glue to us. The researchers conducted a study in which women had a to play computer memory games with objects that were read aloud by male voices of different pitches. When the objects reappeared they had to pick out the ones that they remembered being said, and of course, the ladies picked out way more objects that were read aloud by the deeper voices.

Now I am sure that there could be other reasons for this behavior; for example if someone on street yells banana at you with a Darth Vader voice you will probably remember that moment every time you past that part of the street, and it doesn’t seem sexy at all! But in relation to the other experiment, this sex appeal sort of makes sense. In one of my previous blogs I wrote about sex drive and studies have proven that the male sex drive is significantly stronger than the females, could this be why they struggled to remember the content of what the female voices were saying? Perhaps the men were distracted in thinking of what the women looked like, what she was wearing, if her voice turned him on, and other sexual thoughts; causing a significant impairment on the memory. But what is to say that sexual orientation couldn’t be a third variable? If the mechanism is truly sexual, then do homosexual males remember the deeper voices because they are attractive? If women have evolved to remember everything they find about a man to be desirable, then do homosexual women remember nothing of deep voices because it isn’t attractive to them? The true mechanism of why the gender of the voice affects the memory is still unknown, but based off of the research and the experiments, it is safe to say that we can at best reject the null hypothesis.