"Women in general have a lower threshold and lower pain tolerance than men.
"They do say that women have a lower threshold of being able to taste things," says Barton.
But, he added, Google faces a tougher situation in Europe, where courts have a lower threshold for assessing market dominance.
He is concerned that America seems to have a lower threshold for going to war than other members of the Security Council.
"We all have different thresholds in the brain, and synesthetes have a lower threshold," said the study's lead author, Devin Blair Terhune, a neuroscientist at Oxford.
Secretary General Kofi Annan said today that the United States seemed to have a lower threshold for going to war in Iraq than other nations on the United Nations Security Council.
"It's like students living together — you'll always find one will have a lower threshold for doing the washing up and will end up always doing it all," she said.
During a meeting with reporters before he went to the White House, he observed that the United States "does seem to have a lower threshold" for what would trigger war.
Sufferers of the disorder, he believed, have a lower threshold for pain than the average person -- a result of a problem in the T.M.J. sufferer's nervous system -- and feel it in many places at once.
If there is war, America would move to "finish it fast", Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, has stated.Mr Annan is concerned that America seems to have a lower threshold for going to war than other members of the Security Council.
Negative obligations have a lower threshold than positive ones and the burden on the UK and other EU states to meet these negative international obligations from July 2004 has been a high one.
