Emoticon language is 'shaping the brain' › News in Science (ABC Science) - 0 views
-
Emoticons such as smiley faces are a new language that is changing our brain, according to new Australian research published in the journal Social Neuroscience.
-
"Emoticons are a new form of language that we're producing," says researcher, Dr Owen Churches, from the school of psychology at Flinders University in Adelaide, "and to decode that language we've produced a new pattern of brain activity.
- ...3 more annotations...
-
Churches wanted to find out if the same applied when we looked at a smiley face emoticon, which is a stylised representation of a smiling human face.
-
The smiley face emoticon first appeared in a post to Carnegie Mellon University computer science general board from Professor Scott E Fahlman in 1982.
-
Since then, the same pattern of activity as evoked by faces has become attached to what was previously just punctuation.