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Children aged four and younger who speak two languages or are learning a second have more rapid improvements in inhibitory control, a study by the University of Oregon has said. Inhibitory control is the ability to stop a hasty reflexive response in behaviour or decision-making and use higher control to react in a more adaptive way. "Inhibitory control and executive function are important skills for academic success and positive health outcomes and well-being later in life," said Atika Khurana, the study's co-author and a professor in the Department of Counselling Psychology and Human Services and scientist at the UO's Prevention Science Institute. "The development of inhibitory control occurs rapidly during the preschool years," she said. "Children with strong inhibitory control are better able to pay attention, follow instructions and take turns. "This study shows one way in which environmental influences can impact the development of inhibitory control during younger years."

This advice is really, really helpful. I agree that it's important to focus on something specific that you're passionate about. At the same time, it's hard to expand on this and be detailed/focused throughout the entire essay. I like the advice of being humble and not showing off because the way you write and your topic can tell a lot about who you are as a person.

I think the best bit of information i took from this article, is showing how the struggle of overcoming some great difficulty. On a general sense, if I were to do an essay on some type of failure, I think the best way to continue the essay would be to show how I was able to push past this downfall, and learn from it. It's important to let the reader understand the hardship you went through and show them how you made the best of a seemingly terrible event.

I think this tip sheet really summed up most of the other articles into a concise, helpful article. Overall, I learned that, in terms of the essay, colleges don't really care about any particular achievements. Instead, the colleges are looking at your voice to see what type of person you are. You should stray from writing about others and focus more about your own feelings and thoughts. Finally, college essay readers have seen all of the generic essays before, so there are more pros than cons in taking a risk by saying something controversial.

The priming effect occurs when one is exposed to words or images that subconsciously influence decision-making. For example, seeing pictures of a shower would likely influence you to fill in so__p as "soap." But, seeing pictures of bread, you would probably say "soup." A somewhat controversial study has shown that subjects who were unknowingly exposed to elderly words (like bald, gray, and wrinkle) walked more slowly toward the next experiment than the control group. Another study asked participants to lie via email and another group of participants to lie via voicemail. Those who lied on the email were more likely to purchase soap, whereas the group who lied via voicemail were more likely to buy mouthwash. This wasn't included in the article, but I suspect the reason it's easy to come up with puns is because our brains are primed to think of words within a certain theme. The article mentioned that you can use priming to help you come up with new ideas around a central idea by writing related words in a list, until you think of something appropriate.

Swearing is a motor activity with a strong emotional content. The brain processes swear words and normal words differently. The brain stores swear words that are "emotionally charged" as whole units. The brain relies on the limbic system, which controls memory, emotion, and behavior, and the basal ganglia, which controls motor functions and impulse control, to process the "swear words".

Controlling angry people is challenging, but there are several effective anger management strategies you can use to avoid verbal confrontations and protect yourself or the people you love from angry people.

Excellent study. "While it has long been recognized that certain areas in the brain's left hemisphere enable us to understand and produce language, scientists are still figuring out exactly how those areas divvy up the highly complex processes necessary to comprehend and produce language. ... Two brain areas called Broca's region and Wernicke's region serve as the main computing hubs underlying language processing, with dense bundles of nerve fibers linking the two ... Working with patients suffering from language impairments because of a variety of neurodegenerative diseases, Wilsons' team used brain imaging and language tests to disentangle the roles played by the two pathways. ... The study marks the first time it has been shown that upper and lower tracts play distinct functional roles in language processing."

While the left hemisphere of the brain is where the processing and understanding of language is, different sections of the brain control different parts of language. Two separate areas of the brain control the ability to remember and understand specific words, and the other controls how we construct sentences and make sense of them. If one of these sections is damaged, the other can still work properly, so it is possible to be able to remember words and what they mean but not know how to create sentences.

Can babies learn to read? While parents use DVDs and other media in an attempt to teach their infants to read, these tools don't instill reading skills in babies, a study by researchers at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development has found. In their study, which appears in the Journal of Educational Psychology, the researchers examined 117 infants, aged nine to 18 months, who were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. Children in the treatment condition received a baby media product, which included DVDs, word and picture flashcards, and flip books to be used daily over a seven-month period; children in the control condition did not receive these materials from the researchers. Over the course of seven months, the researchers conducted a home visit, four laboratory visits, and monthly assessments of language development. To test children's emerging skills in the laboratory, the researchers examined the capacity to recognize letter names, letter sounds, vocabulary, words identified on sight, and comprehension. A combination of eye-tracking tasks and standardized measures were used to study outcomes at each stage of development. Using a state-of-the art eye-tracking technology, which follows even the slightest eye movements, the researchers were able to closely monitor how the infants distributed their attention and how they shifted their gaze from one location to another when shown specific words and phrases. No discernible differences were observed between the results of the experimental group vs. the control; yet parents of the infants in the experimental group perceived that their children were, in fact, acquiring words. :-)

In a 2011 survey, Renee Engeln, Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University and a colleague found that more than 90 percent of college women reported engaging in fat talk - despite the fact that only 9 percent were actually overweight. In another, 2014 survey, she canvassed thousands of women ranging in age from 16 to 70. Contrary to the stereotype of fat talk as a young woman's practice, she found that fat talk was common across all ages and all body sizes of women. Engeln notes that fat talk is not a harmless social-bonding ritual. According to an analysis of several studies published in 2012 in the Psychology of Women Quarterly, fat talk was linked with body shame, body dissatisfaction and eating-disordered behavior. Engeln also found that fat talk was contagious. She ran an 2012 experiment where young women, "confederates" secretly working for the researchers, joined two other young women seated at a table to discuss magazine advertisements. The ads started out innocently enough. One was for an electronics store. Another was for a water purifier. But the third was a typical fashion ad showing a model in a bikini. In the control condition, confederates commented on the visuals in the background of the fashion ad, but avoided any mention of the model or her appearance. In the "fat talk" condition, the two confederates (neither of whom was overweight) commented on the model. One said: "Look at her thighs. Makes me feel so fat." The other responded: "Me, too. Makes me wish my stomach was anywhere near flat like that." Then it was our subjects' turn. In the control condition, when neither of our confederates engaged in fat talk, none of our subjects fat talked. But when our confederates engaged in fat talk, almost a third of the subjects joined in. These subjects also reported higher levels of body dissatisfaction and shame at the end of the study than did their counterparts in the control condition.

This article explains the new system created for air traffic controllers and pilots. AcListant is a system that will listen to air controllers' radio conversations to help make suggestions for commands that fit the situation. The system can filter through basic greetings like "Hello" and "Good Morning" and focus on commands instead. AcListant can help with better communication especially with pilots who speak very fast or with an accent.

Researchers at the University of Washington developed a play-based, intensive, English-language method and curriculum and implemented the research-based program in four public infant-education centers in Madrid, Spain. Based on years of UW's I-LABS (Institute of Learning and Brain Science) research on infant brain and language development, UW's pilot bilingual education method utilized the following brain-research principles: 1. social interaction 2. play 3. high quality and quantity of language from the teachers. 4. Use of "infant-directed speech", or "parentese": the speech style parents use to talk to their babies, which has simpler grammar, higher and exaggerated pitch, and drawn-out vowels. 5. Active child engagement. The country's extensive public education system enabled the researchers to enroll 280 infants and children from families of varying income levels. Babies aged 7 to 33.5 months were given one hour of English sessions a day, using the UW method, for 18 weeks, while a control group received the Madrid schools' standard bilingual program. Both groups of children were tested in Spanish and English at the start and end of the 18 weeks. Children who received the UW method showed rapid increases in English comprehension and production, and significantly outperformed the control group peers at all ages on all tests of English. By the end of the 18-week program, the children in the UW program produced an average of 74 English words or phrases per child, per hour; children in the control group produced 13 English words or phrases per child, per hour. This 3 minute video succinctly captures the study: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HE5fBAS6gf4

Theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking, ALS patient, uses an Intel microprocessor which enables him to speak. Hawking irreversibly lost speech function in 1985 as a result of a tracheotomy. Since his hands are too weak to type, Hawking uses a single cheek muscle to control the device. The device uses an adaptive word predictor from London startup SwiftKey which allows Hawking to select a word after typing a letter. Intel worked with SwiftKey, incorporating many of Hawking's documents into the system, so that, in some cases, he no longer needs to type a character before the predictor guesses the word based on context. The new version of Hawking's user interface (now called ACAT, after Assistive Contextually Aware Toolkit) includes contextual menus that provide Hawking with various shortcuts to speak, search or email; and a new lecture manager, which gives him control over the timing of his delivery during talks. It also has a mute button, a curious feature that allows Hawking to turn off his speech synthesizer.

"Web addicts have brain changes similar to those hooked on drugs or alcohol, preliminary research suggests. ... Dr Hao Lei and colleagues write in Plos One: 'Overall, our findings indicate that IAD has abnormal white matter integrity in brain regions involving emotional generation and processing, executive attention, decision making and cognitive control.' ... Prof Gunter Schumann, chair in biological psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College, London, said similar findings have been found in video game addicts. ... further studies with larger numbers of subjects were needed to confirm the findings." Link to the actual study: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0030253

On some level we already know that language shapes the way we think. We're automatically more afraid to fight a guy named Jack Savage than somebody named Peewee Nipplepuss, even if we've never seen either of them before. It's totally illogical, but you probably run into an example of that every day, and don't notice it.

And for more on spatial orientation and color perception differences, read Guy Deutscher's _Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different Through Other Languages_. Referencing the first point that the author of the article makes, that English speakers are more apt to blame others, it's interesting how certain languages, like English, stress agency: someone/something causes an event, whereas languages like Hawaiian, are indeed, more apt to characterize situations in the passive: the event simply happened.

Interesting connections between language and the subconscious mind

Developing language skills appears to be more important for boys than girls in helping them to develop self-control and, ultimately, succeed in school, according to a study led by a Michigan State University researcher. Language skills -- specifically the building of vocabulary -- help children regulate their emotions and behavior and that boys lag behind girls in both language skills and self-regulation. The researchers noted that while girls overall seemed to have a more natural ability to control themselves and focus, boys with a strong vocabulary showed a dramatic increase in this ability to self-regulate -- even doing as well in this regard as girls with a strong vocabulary.

"An array of electrodes receiving input from a non-tactile information source (a camera, for instance) applies small, controlled, painless currents...to the skin at precise locations according to an encoded pattern. The encoding of the electrical pattern essentially attempts to mimic the input that would normally be received by the non-functioning sense. ... When the encoded pulses are applied to the skin, the skin is actually receiving image data." "After training in laboratory tests, blind subjects were able to perceive visual traits like looming, depth, perspective, size and shape."

"What you're seeing here is, we've selected the pathways in the brain of a chronic pain patient. This may shock you, but we're literally reading this person's brain in real time. They're watching their own brain activation, and they're controlling the pathway that produces their pain."

Prof. Jeff Zachs: "When they're reading the story, they're building simulations in their head of events that are described by the story... language itself is a powerful form of virtual reality, that there's an important sense in which when we tell each other stories that we can control the perceptional processes that are happening in each other's brains."

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