“You don’t listen.”

Chances are you hear that phrase on a fairly regular basis if a) you’re a man, and b) you spend a significant amount of time around a woman. Men seem to miss important facts and sometimes entire conversations directed at them by the fairer sex all the time, at least if women are to be believed.

Many women seem inclined to chalk up this lack of conversational attention on the part of the men in their lives to laziness, selfishness, and a willful refusal to actively listen to them. Many of them put it more succinctly and simply call it “being a man.”

For their part, men actively work to bridge the communication gap by looking for excuses to explain why they don’t seem to hear half of what women say to them. Now science has provided a significant boost to the art of male excuse-generating by examining the way the male brain processes speech recognition.

They have produced solid evidence that the female voice is (like everything else about women) complicated for men to decipher and interpret.

Researchers at the University of Sheffield in England studied the brains of a dozen men as they listened to taped voice recordings and found a startling difference in the way the male brain processed male and female voices.

Male voices were processed at the back of the brain in an area sometimes called the “mind’s eye,” a place where we compare experiences to ourselves. That means that the recognition process for the male voice is pretty straightforward.

It turned out to be a whole different story when the test subjects listened to female voices. Those sounds were processed by the auditory section of the brain, the part that deciphers more complex sounds such as music. The researchers concluded that the male brain has to work a lot harder to make out what a woman is saying than it does when the conversation is with another man.

Furthermore, it’s not our fault that male and female voices are treated so differently by our brains. Due to differences in the size and shape of a woman’s throat and vocal cords, her voice actually produces a more complex range of sounds than her male counterpart.

And so the hapless male, through no fault of his own, is forced to engage in difficult sound-processing activity just to try and keep up with what women are saying.

I think the comparison between women’s voices and music is quite appropriate.

Most men enjoy the way a woman’s voice sounds but often don’t hear all of, or most of, what she says. It might be fair to say that women provide a sort of background music for men when they talk. We hear them “singing,” but we don’t always remember or pay much attention to the “lyrics.”

As such, women might find that they get important points across to men more effectively by repeating them over and over and over, as if they were the chorus in a song.

That’s the part of the song one is most likely to remember as it is heard so many times, often repeated in quick succession.

So the next time a household chore needs doing, women might try repeating their request over and over, in a pleasant voice, like this: “Take out the trash, darling. Take out the trash, darling. Take out the trash, darling.”

Eventually your message just might get through. But please keep the volume at a reasonable level. Background music can be grating if it gets too loud.