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With the spread of mobile technology, it's become much easier for more people to maintain constant contact with their social networks online. And a lot of people are taking advantage of that opportunity. One indication: A recent Pew Research survey of adults in the U.S.

Here are seven random numbers. Sort of like a telephone number, but arranged vertically. Take a glance - just a glance - then pause, take out a piece of paper and see how many you can recall. Done? According to the French neurologist and mathematician Stanislas Dehaene, about 50 percent of English speakers can remember all seven numbers.

Yay for Wellesley College, my alma mater! Ravi Ravishanker, Chief Information Officer at Wellesley College, and his team developed an app that allows characters in other languages to be printed on diplomas. Thirty-two students took part in the pilot with nine languages (Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Vietnamese, Hebrew, Korean, Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, and Japanese) represented. "The diploma will have both the English and the alternate alphabet," Ravishanker explained, adding that the goal is to make this available to anyone who wishes to take advantage of the program next year. "We are the first liberal arts college to provide this service," he said.

"They scanned a total of 79 trainees, just before they started to learn the "All-London" Knowledge [memorizing "25,000 streets and 20,000 landmarks and places of interest"], which can take between two and four years to complete. ... those who had attempted the Knowledge had increased the size of the posterior hippocampus - the rear section of the hippocampus which lies at the front of the brain. ... this advantage appeared to come at a price, as the non-cabbies outperformed them in other memory tasks, such as recalling complex visual information." The full study: http://www.pnas.org/content/97/8/4398.full.pdf+html

"If the word of the year is supposed to be an item that has actually shaped the perception of important events, I can't see going with anything but occupy. ... The word itself can take credit for a lot of its success - this isn't an item like "debt ceiling," that just happened to be hitched to a big story. But give props to the magic of metonymy ... And talking about "the one percent" has its advantages. It seems to put things on an objective basis and strips away the vagueness and the emotional overtones that go with talking about "the rich.""

A new speed-reading app, Spritz, premiered in March 2014. Its makers claim that Spritz allows users to read at staggeringly high rates of speed: 600 or even 1,000 words per minute. (The average college graduate reads at a rate of about 300 words per minute.) Spritz can do this, they say, by circumventing the limitations imposed by our visual system. The author of this article argues that your brain has an even more superior "app": expertise, which creates a happy balance between speed and comprehension. In their forthcoming book, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, researchers Henry Roediger III and Mark McDaniel (along with writer Peter Brown) liken expertise to a "brain app" that makes reading and other kinds of intellectual activity proceed more efficiently and effectively. In the minds of experts, the authors explain, "a complex set of interrelated ideas" has "fused into a meaningful whole." The mental "chunking" that an expert - someone deeply familiar with the subject she's reading about - can do gives her a decided speed and comprehension advantage over someone who is new to the material, for whom every fact and idea encountered in the text is a separate piece of information yet to be absorbed and connected. People reading within their domain of expertise have lots of related vocabulary and background knowledge, both of which allow them to steam along at full speed while novices stop, start, and re-read, struggling with unfamiliar words and concepts. Deep knowledge of what we're reading about propels the reading process in other ways as well. As we read, we're constantly building and updating a mental model of what's going on in the text, elaborating what we've read already and anticipating what will come next. A reader who is an expert in the subject he's reading about will make more detailed and accurate predictions of what upcoming sentences and paragraphs will contain, allowing him to read quickly while filling in his alrea

For decades, psychologists cautioned against raising children bilingual. They warned parents and teachers that learning a second language as a child was bad for brain development. But recent studies have found exactly the opposite. Researchers now believe that when people learn another language, they develop cognitive advantages that improve their attention, self-control and ability to deal with conflicting information.

Raising bilingual children is actually good for them. They develop a better ability to concentrate and deal with conflicting information. This could indicate that nurturing a child's brain can increase their language capabilities.

The past 15 years have witnessed an overwhelming amount of research on the bilingual mind, with the majority of the evidence pointing to the tangible advantages of using more than one language. Going back and forth between languages appears to be a kind of brain training, pushing your brain to be flexible.

"Dyslexic brains are organized in a way that maximizes strength in making big picture connections at the expense of weaknesses in processing fine details. ... The other big misconception is that dyslexia is fundamentally a learning disorder which is accompanied only by problems, rather than a different pattern of processing that can bring tremendous strengths in addition to the well-known challenges. ... dyslexic brains are especially good at putting together big pictures, or seeing larger context, or imagining how processes will play out over time"

This article is relevant to the Genie case, outlining the many ways isolation is physically bad for us. Chronically lonely people have higher blood pressure, are more vulnerable to infection, and are also more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease and dementia. Loneliness also interferes with a whole range of everyday functioning, such as sleep patterns, attention and logical and verbal reasoning. The mechanisms behind these effects are still unclear, though what is known is that social isolation unleashes an extreme immune response - a cascade of stress hormones and inflammation. This response might've been biologically advantageous for our early ancestors, when being isolated from the group carried big physical risks, but for modern humans, the outcome is mostly harmful. A 1957 McGill University study, recreated in 2008 by Professor Ian Robbins, head of trauma psychology at St George's Hospital, Tooting, found that after only a matter of hours, people deprived of perceptual stimulation and meaningful human contact, started to crave stimulation, talking, singing or reciting poetry to themselves to break the monotony. Later, many of them became anxious or highly emotional. Their mental performance suffered too, struggling with arithmetic and word association tests. In addition, subjects started hallucinating. The brain is used to processing large quantities of data, but in the absence of sensory input, Robbins states that "the various nerve systems feeding in to the brain's central processor are still firing off, but in a way that doesn't make sense. So after a while the brain starts to make sense of them, to make them into a pattern." It tries to construct a reality from the scant signals available to it, yet it ends up building a fantasy world.

Body language is its own means of communication. It allows individuals to present themselves as a leader or surrender to self-deprecation. The five strategies listed in this article can help anyone use body language to their own advantage!

LAST week, Johnson took a look at some of the advantages of bilingualism. These include better performance at tasks involving "executive function" (which involve the...

SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter.

Talks about the benefits of bilingualism. Was a helpful article to my 2nd quarter field project.

Throughout the world, languages are going extinct at a rapid rate. Many people have been investigating to see if the internet is to blame for language extinction, or if it is simply a reflection of what is happening in real-world. Some linguists even believe that small languages are given an advantage on the internet because it is a place for languages to be expressed.

Students in South Africa are thought to be at a disadvantage since they switch from learning in their native language to learning in english. Researchers, however, believe that it is more advantageous to students to learn in the language in which they feel most comfortable. Switching between the mother tongue at home and English at school is shown to be a struggle for most children. Since the simplicity of the mother tongue has no ties to english, the children are basically learning two different languages at once, trying to apply the two to one another.

Research has proved repeatedly that children undoubtedly achieve much better when they start schooling in a language linked to one they can already use quite well. Using a familiar language for schooling is a big part of such success, which is why the late South African educationalist Neville Alexander advocated for mother tongue based-bilingual education.

Learning a foreign language has many more benefits than you would think. This article highlights many of the cognitive benefits associated with learning a foreign language.

This article gives a rundown on 7 cognitive advantages of bilingualism: 1. You become smarter: speaking a foreign language improves the functionality of your brain by challenging it to recognise, negotiate meaning, and communicate in different language systems. 2. You build multitasking skills. 3. You stave off Alzheimer's and dementia. 4. Your memory improves. 5. You become more perceptive. 6. Your decision-making skills improve. 7. You improve your first language (L1)

The author of this piece simply explains how some languages involve more characters than others. Also, this leaves languages like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc., with an advantage because they are able to express their thoughts through fewer characters.

What does recent research say about the potential benefits of bilingual education? Here are the main 6 findings: 1. Attention: "[Bilinguals] can pay focused attention without being distracted and also improve in the ability to switch from one task to another," says Sorace. Do these same advantages accrue to a child who begins learning a second language in kindergarten instead of as a baby? We don't yet know. Patterns of language learning and language use are complex. But Gigi Luk at Harvard cites at least one brain-imaging study on adolescents that shows similar changes in brain structure when compared with those who are bilingual from birth, even when they didn't begin practicing a second language in earnest before late childhood. 2. Empathy: bilingual children as young as age 3, because they must follow social cues to figure out which language to use with which person and in what setting, have demonstrated a head start on tests of perspective-taking and theory of mind - both of which are fundamental social and emotional skills. 3. Reading (English): students enrolled in dual-language programs outperformed their peers in English-reading skills by a full school year's worth of learning by the end of middle school. 4. School performance and engagement: compared with students in English-only classrooms or in one-way immersion, dual-language students have somewhat higher test scores and also seem to be happier in school. Attendance is better, behavioral problems fewer, parent involvement higher. 5. Diversity and integration: Because dual-language schools are composed of native English speakers deliberately placed together with recent immigrants, they tend to be more ethnically and socioeconomically balanced. And there is some evidence that this helps kids of all backgrounds gain comfort with diversity and different cultures. 6. Protection against cognitive decline and dementia: actively using two languages seems to have a protective effect against age-related demen