Women talk three times MORE as much as men !

It is something one half of the population has long suspected - and the other half always vocally denied. Women really do talk more than men.

In fact, women talk almost three times as much as men, with the average woman chalking up 20,000 words in a day - 13,000 more than the average man.

Women also speak more quickly, devote more brainpower to chit-chat - and actually get a buzz out of hearing their own voices, a new book suggests.

The book - written by a female psychiatrist - says that inherent differences between the male and female brain explain why women are naturally more talkative than men.

In The Female Mind, Dr Luan Brizendine says women devote more brain cells to talking than men.

And, if that wasn't enough, the simple act of talking triggers a flood of brain chemicals which give women a rush similar to that felt by heroin addicts when they get a high. 

Dr Brizendine, a self-proclaimed feminist, says the differences can be traced back to the womb, where the sex hormone testosterone moulds the developing male brain.

The areas responsible for communication, emotion and memory are all pared back the unborn baby boy.

The result is that boys - and men - chat less than their female counterparts and struggle to express their emotions to the same extent.

"Women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion, while men have a small country road," said Dr Brizendine, who runs a female "mood and hormone" clinic in San Francisco.

Men are clearly frustrated by women's need to communicate -- nearly as 

much as women are frustrated by the silence of men! So why do
women talk so much?

A female brain can, and will, effortlessly, put out 6,000 to 8,000 

spoken words a day. A man's maximum spoken verbage lies between 2,000 to
4,000 spoken words daily -- and if watching my dad and husband is any
indication, it's not without great effort. All of this has its roots
in our survival as a specie.

Men evolved from hunters who didn't do much talking. (If you've ever seen your grandpa and uncles hunt and fish, you know this to be true.Hours and hours go by, and no one speaks.) While there is evidence to support that communication was needed among early hunters, most of it was done prior to setting out to hunt, leaving little for discussion during the hunting trip itself. This was practical. Too much noise (conversation) would alert the prey -- at best scaring it away; at worst turning hunter into hunted.

On the other hand, women went out-and-about not to hunt, but to gather. 

As they did this activity in groups, they would keep up a stream of
conversation in order to make sure no one had fallen behind or prey to
animals. For a woman, conversation was literally life itself!

The many life-saving conversations among our female ancestors consisted 

of sharing the details of the day's work with other members of the
group. This is also practical, since gathering is all about the
details. You have to know each leaf pattern and shape, and not just
what color, but what shade it is; because eating the wrong plant or
picking the berry at the wrong time could mean death. What better time
to educate the younger or newer members of the group than to with show and
tell? These detailed training conversations are still alive among
gathering societies today -- be it 'primitive' cultures or women
'gathering' at the mall.

When you look at these detailed life saving conversations, it's easy to 

see why we women use twice the number of words of our male
counterparts.