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Got turned onto this course at the recent "Learning and the Brain" conference in San Francisco, as one of the presenters, Mary-Helen Immordino-Yang, an affective neuroscientist and human development psychologist, is one of the co-developers of this introductory neuroscience course: free, thanks to a generous Annenberg Foundation grant. The course units cover several topics pertinent to Words R Us, including brain anatomy; language, music, and the brain; language and brain damage; emotions, empathy, and behavior; and cognitive functioning and development as it relates to reading and writing. The site also offers lots of embedded course materials, visuals, and videos. Though originally geared towards K-12 teachers, other educators, researchers, and adult learners who want to learn more about current issues in education, students-especially those considering careers in education, psychology, neuroscience, and/or the biological sciences-might find this course useful.

Some people subconsciously display the telltale signs of deception that make their lies relatively easy to spot -- but other liars are much more elusive. Neuroscience has been looking into what happens in the brain to explain this difference.

Interesting follow-up to the handout on reading creating simulations in the brain. The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Reading provides a strong simulation of reality.

Systems Neuroscience Philadelphia, PA (Scicasts) - The exchange of words, speaking and listening in conversation, may seem unremarkable for most people, but communicating with others is a challenge for people who have aphasia, an impairment of language that often happens after stroke or other brain injury.

"I think this is a unique metaphor-it goes back to the idea that the brain is everything. I see this message all the time in these discourses I am looking at: "You _are_ your brain." It's the ultimate dream-through science we can fully know all that there is to know about human nature, and then control it perfectly."

Stephen Porges, psychiatry professor and Distinguished University Scientist at Indiana University, where he directs the Trauma Research Center within the Kinsey Institute, speaks about the importance of safety in relationships. Porges' Polyvagal Theory describes how our autonomic nervous system mediates safety, trust, and intimacy through a subsystem he calls the social engagement system. Our brain is constantly detecting through our senses whether we are in a situation that is safe, dangerous, or life threatening. People's autonomic nervous system are designed to perceive threat: a protective, defensive survival mechanism, but a response that can also get us into trouble if we sense that our safety is at risk, causing us to misread the situation. However, humans also have a mammalian mechanism that mediates those gut-level ANS responses. This social engagement system enables us to interpret linguistic, facial, tonal, intonation, and gestural cues, and the intentionality of others. When our body and mind experience safety, our social engagement system enables us to collaborate, listen, empathize, and connect, as well as be creative, innovative, and bold in our thinking and ideas. This has positive benefits for our relationships as well as our lives in general. The takeaways: 1. Safety is paramount in crucial conversations and conflict-resolution. 2. Learning to deploy cues that display love, trust, and engagement in the midst of conflict can help disarm defensive, threat response mechanisms in other people, help restore safety in our social interactions, and reaffirm bonds.

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.

A Yale-led research team examined the brains of 38 couples engaged in discussion about controversial topics. For the study, the researchers from Yale and the University College of London recruited 38 adults who were asked to say whether they agreed or disagreed with a series of statements such as "same-sex marriage is a civil right" or "marijuana should be legalized." After matching up pairs based on their responses the researchers used an imaging technology called functional near-infrared spectroscopy to record their brain activity while they engaged in face-to-face discussions. Their findings: When two people agree, their brains exhibit a calm synchronicity of activity focused on sensory areas of the brain, such as the visual system, presumably in response to social cues from their partner. When they disagree, however, many other regions of the brain involved in higher cognitive functions become mobilized as each individual combats the other's argument. Sensory areas of the brain were less active, while activity increased in the brain's frontal lobes, home of higher order executive functions. Joy Hirsch, Elizabeth Mears and House Jameson Professor of Psychiatry and professor of comparative medicine and neuroscience, as well as senior author of the study, said that in discord, two brains engage many emotional and cognitive resources "like a symphony orchestra playing different music." In agreement, there "is less cognitive engagement and more social interaction between brains of the talkers, similar to a musical duet."

A Johns Hopkins study found that damage to a key structure in the brain may explain why some stroke patients can't perceive sarcasm. Researchers looked at 24 people who had experienced a stroke in the right hemispheres of their brains. Those with damage to the right sagittal stratum tended to have trouble recognizing sarcasm, the researchers found. This bundle of neural fibers connects a number of brain regions, including those that process auditory and visual information. Sarcasm can be hard to interpret; it's a complex way to communicate. First, the person has to 1. understand the literal meaning of what someone says 2. detect the components of sarcasm: a wider range of pitch, greater emphatic stress, briefer pauses, lengthened syllables and intensified loudness relative to sincere speech "There're a number of cues people use, and it's both facial cues and tone of voice," noted Dr. Argye Hillis, a professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

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.

(This article was by my college friend, Quinn Eastman, who's a trained scientist and science writer for Emory University.) Listening to metaphors involving arms or legs loops in a region of the brain responsible for visual perception of those body parts, scientists have discovered. The finding, recently published in Brain & Language, is another example of how neuroscience studies are providing evidence for "grounded cognition" - the idea that comprehension of abstract concepts in the brain is built upon concrete experiences, a proposal whose history extends back millennia to Aristotle. When study participants heard sentences that included phrases such as "shoulder responsibility," "foot the bill" or "twist my arm", they tended to engage a region of the brain called the left extrastriate body area or EBA. The same level of activation was not seen when participants heard literal sentences containing phrases with a similar meaning, such as "take responsibility" or "pay the bill." The study included 12 right-handed, English-speaking people, and blood flow in their brains was monitored by functional MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). "The EBA is part of the extrastriate visual cortex, and it was known to be involved in identifying body parts," says senior author Krish Sathian, MD, PhD, professor of neurology, rehabilitation medicine, and psychology at Emory University. "We found that the metaphor selectivity of the EBA matches its visual selectivity." The EBA was not activated when study participants heard literal, non-metaphorical sentences describing body parts. "This suggests that deep semantic processing is needed to recruit the EBA, over and above routine use of the words for body parts," Sathian says. Sathian's research team had previously observed that metaphors involving the sense of touch, such as "a rough day", activate a region of the brain important for sensing texture. In addition, other researchers have shown t

How different parts of our brain deals with and analyzes written fictional stories and how fiction actually helps us make connections to the things we find in everyday life. Fiction evokes thoughts and feelings with the type of word choice used.

Memrise is a British technology start-up that makes vocabulary learning into a fast, effective, and fun game. A million people are already learning on the platform and, with monthly active users growing at 30 per cent month-on-month, it is one of the fastest growing learning tools in the world. Free online learning and teaching site, with an associated mobile app. The language learning modules combine neuroscience principles, fun online-gaming-style leveling-up and leaderboards, and a social community. You can learn a bunch of different languages--200, in fact--from Chinese to Finnish to Arabic to French (Macedonian or Xhosa, anyone?), as well as content in other subjects: math and science, arts and literature... I'll keep you posted on whether it works by trying to learn a new language or several. I did check out the Chinese language component, and it seems legitimate so far... There's also a unit on "Brain and Mind" that would be of use to WRU students.

"Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific information. ... The neuroscience information had a particularly striking effect on nonexperts' judgments of bad explanations, masking otherwise salient problems in these explanations."

This National Science Foundation Special Report provides a handy overview of many topics covered in Words R Us, including the physiology of speech, neuroscience and language, dialects, Creoles, sign language, L1 vs. L2 learning, endangered languages, and language evolution.

This article talks about a critical period in the human life for the development of language.

Think you haven't got the aptitude to learn a foreign language? New research led by Northwestern University neuroscientists suggests that the problem, quite literally, could be in your head.

When driving, don't talk to your car - or your phone. That's the underlying message of new neuroscience published Thursday that raises new questions about the safety of voice-activated technology in many new cars. The technology, heralded by many automakers, allows consumers to interact with their phones and their cars by issuing voice commands, rather than pushing buttons on the dashboard or phone. However, research found that the most complicated voice-activated systems, and the vocal and auditory tasks associated with them, can take a motorist's mind off the road for as long as 27 seconds after he or she stops interacting with the system. Even less complex systems can leave the driver distracted for 15 seconds after a motorist disengages. See the article for an embedded .pdf of the full study. But good news: apparently listening to the radio or audiobooks don't pose much distraction.

Musical training improves the brain's ability to discern the components of sound - the pitch, the timing and the timbre. "To learn to read, you need to have good working memory, the ability to disambiguate speech sounds, make sound-to-meaning connections," said Professor Nina Kraus, director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University. "Each one of these things really seems to be strengthened with active engagement in playing a musical instrument."