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Here's how to be more emotionally intelligent: 1. Emotions are concepts: They're not hardwired or universal. They're learned. 2. Emotional intelligence starts with emotional granularity: If your doctor came back with a diagnosis of "you're sick", you'd sue the quack for malpractice. Doctors need to be able to distinguish between "chancre" and "cancer." And you need to know the difference between "sad" and "lonely." 3. Emotional intelligence is in the dictionary: You can't feel Fremdschämen if you don't know what it is. So learn new emotion words so you can feel new emotions and increase your emotional granularity, that is, the ability to distinguish the emotions you feel and recognize them as distinct and different. 4. Create new emotions: We could all use a little more "passion-o-rama" in our lives. Name those unnamed feelings you have and share them with others to make them real. In sum, finding specific words to describe the particularities of what you're feeling can lead to greater mental health. The article also discusses the differences that cultures/languages have in re: feelings and emotions we might've previously assumed were universal.

Currently, one-quarter of American children don't learn to read. This not only endangers them socially and intellectually, but cognitively handicaps them for life. One 2009 study of 72 children ages eight to ten discovered that reading creates new white matter in the brain, which improves system-wide communication. White matter carries information between regions of grey matter, where any information is processed. Not only does reading increase white matter, it helps information be processed more efficiently. Reading in one language has enormous benefits. Add a foreign language and not only do communication skills improve-you can talk to more people in wider circles-but the regions of your brain involved in spatial navigation and learning new information increase in size. Finally, research shows that reading not only helps with fluid intelligence, but with reading comprehension and emotional intelligence as well.

This article considers sarcasm to be "the highest form of intelligence" because it symbolizes an individuals flexible and creative mind. Through research done by psychologist and neuroscientists, it has been found that the usage of sarcasm actually requires more brain power to interpret than a literary statement. This is supported by the fact that young children don't understand sarcasm while teenagers are able to fully utilize it.

A start-up, Eterni-Me, is looking at ways of using artificial intelligence to keep us alive virtually - long after we're gone. The company collects data that you've curated from Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, photos, video, location information, and even Google Glass and Fitbit devices., and processes this huge amount of information using complex artificial intelligence algorithms. Then it generates a virtual YOU, an avatar that emulates your personality and can interact with, and offer information and advice to your family and friends, even after you pass away.

Facebook shut down an Artificial Intelligence experiment shortly after developers discovered that the machines were talking in a language the machines made up that humans couldn't understand. The developers first programmed the chatbots so they could talk in English to each other when trading items back and forth. When the chatbots got into a long negotiation, they started talking to each other in their own language. Even though these chatbots were not highly intelligent, it is concerning that they went off on their own so quickly. In 2014, scientist Stephen Hawking warned that Artificial Intelligence could be the end of the human race. Hopefully the Matrix is science fiction, not science prediction.

The more you swear the more intelligent you may be. According to this study, there is a direct correlation between advanced language skills and a high use of swear words.

The urge to converse with animals is age-old, long predating the time when smartphones became our best friends. A new app, is the product of a growing interest in enlisting additional intelligences - machine-learning algorithms - to decode animal communication. The app detects and analyzes cat utterances in real-time, assigning each one a broadly defined "intent," such as happy, resting, hunting or "mating call." It then displays a conversational, plain English "translation" of whatever intent it detects. MeowTalk uses the sounds it collects to refine its algorithms and improve its performance, the founders said, and pet owners can provide in-the-moment feedback if the app gets it wrong. In 2021, MeowTalk researchers reported that the software could distinguish among nine intents with 90 percent accuracy overall. But the app was better at identifying some than others, not infrequently confusing "happy" and "pain," according to the results. Dogs could soon have their own day. Zoolingua, a start-up based in Arizona, is hoping to create an A.I.-powered dog translator that will analyze canine vocalizations and body language. Still, even sophisticated algorithms may miss critical real-world context and cues, said Alexandra Horowitz, an expert on dog cognition at Barnard College. For instance, much of canine behavior is driven by scent. "How is that going to be translated, when we don't know the extent of it ourselves?" Dr. Horowitz said in an email.

This article writes about the variation in speech rate. Some languages tend to have more syllables per a second. For example, French, Japanese, and Spanish speakers tend to have speak more syllables per a second (almost 8/s) than German, Vietnamese, or Mandarin speakers (roughly 5/s). Although stereotypes exist relating to speech rate, there is no connection between intelligence and speech rate. One significant and consistent variable in speech rate is age. Children speak slowly, then speed up until their 40s, then slow down again in their 50s and 60s.

Bradley Hayes, a post-doc student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has invented @DeepDrumpf, an amusing bit of artificial intelligence. DeepDrumpf is a bot trained on the publicly available speech transcripts, tweets, and debate remarks of Donald Trump. Using a machine learning model known as a Recurrent Neural Network, the bot generates sequences of words based on priming text and the statistical structure found within its training data. Created to highlight the absurdity of this election cycle, it has amassed over 20,000 followers and has been viewed over 12 million times -- showcasing the consequences of training a machine learning model on a dataset that embodies fearmongering, bigotry, xenophobia, and hypernationalism. Here's a sample tweet: "We have to end education. What they do is unbelievable, how bad. Nobody can do that like me. Believe me."

"A small research arm of the U.S. government's intelligence establishment wants to understand how speakers of Farsi, Russian, English, and Spanish see the world by building software that automatically evaluates their use of metaphors."

This article talks about how reading can affect your cognition/brain activity, and it also talks about how various genres have the ability to affect you. It also goes over what "intelligence" means, as well as the different types of intelligence.

"Lexicalist uses artificial intelligence to analyze the web and figure out who's talking about what. The result is a demographic picture of language in actual use today."

In 2010, then CIA Director, Leon Panetta, urged renewed focus on the critical need for Americans to master foreign languages at a national summit that brought together policymakers, members of Congress, Intelligence Community officials, and leading language educators from across the country. "For the United States to get to where it needs to be will require a national commitment to strengthening America's foreign language proficiency," Director Panetta said. "A significant cultural change needs to occur. And that requires a transformation in attitude from everyone involved: individuals, government, schools and universities, and the private sector." He urged schools and universities to reach beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic to "the fourth R": the reality of the world we live in. Language skills are vital to success in an interconnected world, he said, and they are fundamental to US competitiveness and security.

Common misconceptions about swearing are that the user is lazy with his words or uneducated, but Benjamin Bergen, Professor of cognitive sciences at UCSD, says otherwise.

This is about the "Mozart effect" and if it does indeed help babies become more intelligent by listening to classical music at a young age.

This BBC article notes how media totally misconstrued the modest results reported by the original UC Irvine study, which found that students who listened to Mozart did better at tasks where they had to create shapes in their minds. These students had stronger performance on spatial tasks: specifically, looking at folded up pieces of paper with cuts in them and predicting: how they would appear when unfolded. This effect, however, was sadly temporary: about fifteen minutes. A subsequent meta-analysis of sixteen different studies confirmed that listening to music does lead to a temporary improvement in the ability to manipulate shapes mentally, but the benefits are short-lived and it doesn't make us more intelligent. In 2010 a larger meta-analysis of a greater number of studies again found a positive effect, but that other kinds of music worked just as well, provided that listeners enjoyed what they were listening to. The article concludes that what's crucial in performance is "cognitive arousal": getting your brain more alert, whether it's through music, a Starbucks frappacino, or shooting hoops.

Just in case you were under the misimpression that artificial intelligence will be taking over the world shortly, this article suggests that digital assistants really can't even handle the sort of everyday linguistic interaction that humans take for granted. Still, it is interesting to find out how product engineers are designing the assistants to become "smarter" at comprehending your words and requests. Machine learning algorithms can help devices deal with turn-by-turn exchanges. But each verbal exchange is limited to a simple, three- or four-turn conversation.

This MIT Technology Review article notes that while Artificial Intelligence has experienced many sophisticated advances, one fundamental capability remains elusive: language. Systems like Siri and IBM's Watson can follow simple spoken or typed commands and answer basic questions, but they can't hold a conversation and have no real understanding of the words they use. In addition, humans, unlike machines, have the ability to learn very quickly from a relatively small amount of data and have a built-in ability to model the world in 3-D very efficiently. Programming machines to comprehend and generate language is a complex task, because the machines would need to mimic human learning, mental model building, and psychology. As MIT cognitive scientist Josh Tenenbaum states, "Language builds on other abilities that are probably more basic, that are present in young infants before they have language: perceiving the world visually, acting on our motor systems, understanding the physics of the world or other agents' goals." ­ If he is right, then it will be difficult to re-create language understanding in machines and AI systems without trying to mimic human learning, mental model building, and psychology.

Learning the intricacies of human languages is hard even for human children and non-native speakers - but it's particularly difficult for AI. Scientists have already taught computers how to do simple tasks, like translating one language to another or searching for keywords. Artificial intelligence has gotten better at solving these narrow problems. But now scientists are tackling harder problems, like how to build AI algorithms that can piece together bits of information to give a coherent answer for more complicated, nuanced questions. "Language is the ultimate frontier of AI research because you can express any thought or idea in language," states Stanford computer science professor Yoav Shoham. "It's as rich as human thinking." For Shoham, the excitement about artificial intelligence lies not only in what it can do - but also in what it can't. "It's not just mimicking the human brain in silicon, but asking what traits are so innately human that we don't think we can emulate them on a computer," Shoham said. "Our creativity, fairness, emotions, all the stuff we take for granted - machines can't even come close."

This author of this article explains that using filler words like, 'like,' can actually be a sign of intelligence