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Across societies, music can be found in tandem with infant care, healing, dance, and love (among many others, like mourning, warfare, processions, and ritual), as found in 315 societies and 118 songs from 86 cultures, coming from 30 geographic regions.

See also the graphs at the bottom of the page. "Perhaps the biggest collection of words ever assembled has just gone online: 500 billion of them, from 5 million books published over the past four centuries... The words make up a searchable database that researchers at Harvard say is a new and powerful tool to study cultural change... You can, for instance, type in a word or a short phrase, and the database produces a graph - a curve that traces how often an author used those words every year since 1800."

more detail from Harvard about how to use N-gram

Black Americans have long contributed to the ways in which the English language is used, and now a new research project aims to compile the first Oxford Dictionary of African American English. The research project is a collaboration between Harvard University's Hutchins Center for African and African American Research and Oxford University Press.

This article explains how words we use to describe addiction can actually greatly affect people's willingness to receive treatment. Certain words or phrases continue to stigmatize the illness.

This article gives us an inside look into why we yell, and what parts of our brain react to it.

Brain-imaging studies have shown that music activates many diverse parts of the brain, including an overlap in where the brain processes music and language. Brains of people exposed to even casual musical training have an enhanced ability to generate the brain wave patterns associated with specific sounds, be they musical or spoken, said study leader Nina Kraus, director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University in Illinois. Musicians have subconsciously trained their brains to better recognize selective sound patterns, even as background noise goes up. In contrast, people with certain developmental disorders, such as dyslexia, have a harder time hearing sounds amid the din. Musical experience could therefore be a key therapy for children with dyslexia and similar language-related disorders. Harvard Medical School neuroscientist Gottfried Schlaug has found that stroke patients who have lost the ability to speak can be trained to say hundreds of phrases by singing them first. Schlaug demonstrated the results of intensive musical therapy on patients with lesions on the left sides of their brains, those areas most associated with language. Before the therapy, these stroke patients responded to questions with largely incoherent sounds and phrases. But after just a few minutes with therapists, who asked them to sing phrases and tap their hands to the rhythm, the patients could sing "Happy Birthday," recite their addresses, and communicate if they were thirsty. "The underdeveloped systems on the right side of the brain that respond to music became enhanced and changed structures," Schlaug said at the press briefing.

Short exerts from multiple different experiments involving music and the brain.

Learn how to remove filler words from formal speeches to present with confidence.

Doctors at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, are treating stroke patients who have little or no spontaneous speech by associating melodies with words and phrases. "Music, and music-making, is really a very special form of a tool or an intervention that can be used to treat neurological disorders, said Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, associate professor of neurology at Beth Israel and Harvard University.

The Importance of Dinner Time There is an old saying that you are what you eat. Turns out how we eat may be every bit as important for our children. Studies from the University of Minnesota, Harvard, and Rutgers have all shown that the family dinner is not just something that went out with scenes by Norman Rockwell.

I found this really interesting while researching for my field research project. It talks about how humans have the ability to read words that are spelled incorrectly.

Joshua Greene, Harvard psychologist, posits that we have two competing moral circuits in our brains: a utilitarian, rational, cost-benefits circuit and an emotional circuit. Both circuits battle for dominance in the brain's ventromedial prefrontal cortex. When dilemmas produce vivid images in our heads, we tend to respond emotionally, due to our natural wiring. Take away the pictures - the brain goes into rational, calculation mode. In another experiment, Greene and a colleague, Amit, also found that people who think visually make more emotional moral judgments, whereas verbal people make more rational calculations.

Although it has a genetic component, most believe perfect pitch - or absolute pitch - is a primarily a function of early life exposure and training in music, says Takao Hensch, professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard. Hensch is studying valprioc acid, a drug which might allow adults to learn perfect pitch by re-creating this critical period in brain development. "It's a mood-stabilizing drug, but we found that it also restores the plasticity of the brain to a juvenile state," Hensch says. Valprioc acid allows the brain to absorb new information as easily as it did before age 7. Hensch's findings have potentially valuable implications for other critical-period-related developments, language being one. So the sci-fi question: in the future, can we come up with a way to reopen plasticity, [and] paired with the appropriate training, allow adult brains to become young again?