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zkaan15

A psychophysiological evaluation of the perceived urgency of auditory warning signals. - 0 views

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    One significant concern that pilots have about cockpit auditory warnings is that the signals presently used lack a sense of priority. The relationship between auditory warning sound parameters and perceived urgency is, therefore, an important topic of enquiry in aviation psychology. The present investigation examined the relationship among subjective assessments of urgency, reaction time, and brainwave activity with three auditory warning signals. Subjects performed a tracking task involving automated and manual conditions, and were presented with auditory warnings having various levels of perceived and situational urgency. Subjective assessments revealed that subjects were able to rank warnings on an urgency scale, but rankings were altered after warnings were mapped to a situational urgency scale. Reaction times differed between automated and manual tracking task conditions, and physiological data showed attentional differences in response to perceived and situational warning urgency levels. This study shows that the use of physiological measures sensitive to attention and arousal, in conjunction with behavioural and subjective measures, may lead to the design of auditory warnings that produce a sense of urgency in an operator that matches the urgency of the situation.
Lara Cowell

Westerners Aren't Good At Naming Smells. But Hunter Gatherers Are : Goats and Soda : NPR - 0 views

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    For decades, scientists thought perhaps smell was a diminished human sense and less valuable than other senses - like our glorious eyesight. "In the West, people came to this conclusion [through] the fact that we don't seem to have a good ability to talk about smells," says Asifa Majid, a professor of language and cultural cognition at Radboud University in the Netherlands. But Majid found that isn't universally true. Certain language speakers can name odors as easily as English speakers name colors, and the key difference may be how they live. Majid worked with speakers of four different languages: English and three from the Malay Peninsula. Two of these languages, Semaq Beri and Jahai, are spoken by hunter-gatherer groups. The other one, Semelai, is spoken by farmers. In order to test the ability of these language speakers to classify odors, Majid and her colleagues gave asked them to smell pen-shaped contraptions each filled with a different scent like leather, orange, garlic or fish - and then asked them to identify the smell. She also asked the participants to identify colors using different color chips. The farmer Semelai, like English speakers, found colors relatively easy to name and agreed with one another that the red chips were, indeed, red. When it came to identifying odors, the Semelai failed as miserably as the English speakers on the same tests. But both hunter-gatherer groups were much better at naming smells than the Semelai. In fact, they were just as good at identifying smells as colors. "That says something about the hunter-gatherer lifestyle," Majid says. There's a scarcity of English words that objectively describe odors, Majid says. Given that, readers of this article - written in English - may wonder how it's possible to describe a smell without leaning on other senses like taste (words like "sweet" or "sour") or emotional words like "gross." In English, most of our attempts to describe smells come from individual sources. You
Lisa Stewart

Figures of Rhetoric in Advertising Language - 9 views

  • the discipline of rhetoric was the primary repository of Western thinking about persuasion
  • The principal purpose of this paper is to contribute a richer and more systematic conceptual understanding of rhetorical structure in advertising language
  • Rhetoricians maintain that any proposition can be expressed in a variety of ways, and that in any given situation one of these ways will be the most effective in swaying an audience.
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  • the manner in which a statement is expressed may be more important
  • a rhetorical figure occurs when an expression deviates from expectation
  • With respect to metaphor, for instance, listeners are aware of conventions with respect to the use of words, one of which might be formulated as, words are generally used to convey one of the lead meanings given in their dictionary entry. A metaphor violates that convention, as in this headline for Johnson & Johnson bandaids, "Say hello to your child's new bodyguards," accompanied by a picture of bandaids emblazoned with cartoon characters (from Table 2)
  • listeners know exactly what to do when a speaker violates a convention: they search for a context that will render the violation intelligible. If context permits an inference that the bandaid is particularly strong, or that the world inhabited by children is particularly threatening, then the consumer will achieve an understanding of the advertiser's statement.
  • every figure represents a gap. The figure both points to a translation (the impossibility in this context of translating "Say hello to your child's new petunias" is the key to its incomprehensibility), and denies the adequacy of that translation, thus encouraging further interpretation.
  • metaphors that have become frozen or conventional: e.g., the sports car that "hugs" the road.
  • an important function of rhetorical figures is to motivate the potential reader.
  • Berlyne (1971) found incongruity
  • (deviation) to be among those factors that call to and arrest attention.
  • "pleasure of the text"--the reward that comes from processing a clever arrangement of signs.
  • Berlyne's (1971) argument, based on his research in experimental aesthetics, that incongruity (deviation) can produce a pleasurable degree of arousal.
  • Familiar examples of schematic figures would include rhyme and alliteration, while metaphors and puns would be familiar examples of tropic figures.
  • Schemes can be understood as deviant combinations, as in the headline, "Now Stouffers makes a real fast real mean Lean Cuisine."
  • This headline is excessively regular because of its repetition of sounds and words. It violates the convention that sounds are generally irrelevant to the sense of an utterance, i.e., the expectation held by receivers that the distribution of sounds through an utterance will be essentially unordered except by the grammatical and semantic constraints required to make a well-formed sentence. Soundplay can be used to build up meaning in a wide variety of ways (Ross 1989; van Peer 1986).
  • Many tropes, particularly metaphors and puns effected in a single word, can be understood as deviant selections. Thus, in the Jergens skin care headline (Table 2), "Science you can touch," there is a figurative metaphor, because "touch" does not belong to the set of verbs which can take as their object an abstract collective endeavor such as Science.
  • For example, a rhyme forges extra phonemic links among the headline elements.
  • "Performax protects to the max," the consumer has several encoding possibilities available, including the propositional content, the phonemic equivalence (Performax = max), and the syllable node (other words endin
  • Because they are over-coded, schemes add internal redundancy to advertising messages. Repetition within a text can be expected to enhance recall just as repetition of the entire text does.
  • The memorability of tropes rests on a different mechanism. Because they are under-coded, tropes are incomplete in the sense of lacking closure. Tropes thus invite elaboration by the reader. For example, consider the Ford ad with the headline "Make fun of the road" (Table 2). "Road" is unexpected as a selection from the set of things to mock or belittle. Via
  • This level of the framework distinguishes simple from complex schemes and tropes to yield four rhetorical operations--repetition, reversal, substitution, destabilization.
  • s artful deviation, irregularity, and complexity that explain the effects of a headline such as "Say hello to your child's new bodyguards," and not its assignment to the category 'metaphor.'
  • The rhetorical operation of repetition combines multiple instances of some element of the expression without changing the meaning of that element. In advertising we find repetition applied to sounds so as to create the figures of rhyme, chime, and alliteration or assonance (Table 2). Repetition applied to words creates the figures known as anaphora (beginning words), epistrophe (ending words), epanalepsis (beginning and ending) and anadiplosis (ending and beginning). Repetition applied to phrase structure yields the figure of parison, as in K Mart's tagline: "The price you want. The quality you need." A limiting condition is that repeated words not shift their meaning with each repetition (such a shift would create the trope known as antanaclasis, as shown further down in Table 2).
  • the possibility for a second kind of schematic figure, which would be produced via an operation that we have named reversal. Th
  • rhetorical operation of reversal combines within an expression elements that are mirror images of one another.
  • The rhetorical operation of destabilization selects an expression such that the initial context renders its meaning indeterminate. By "indeterminate" we mean that multiple co-existing meanings are made available, no one of which is the final word. Whereas in a trope of substitution, one says something other than what is meant, and relies on the recipient to make the necessary correction, in a trope of destabilization one means more than is said, and relies on the recipient to develop the implications. Tropes of substitution make a switch while tropes of destabilization unsettle.
  • Stern, Barbara B. (1988), "How Does an Ad Mean? Language in Services Advertising," Journal of Advertising, 17 (Summer), 3-14.
  • "Pleasure and Persuasion in Advertising: Rhetorical Irony as a Humor Technique," Current Issues & Research in Advertising, 12, 25-42.
  • Tanaka, Keiko (1992), "The Pun in Advertising: A Pragmatic Approach," Lingua, 87, 91-102.
  • "The Bridge from Text to Mind: Adapting Reader Response Theory to Consumer Research," Journal of Consumer Research,
  • Gibbs, Raymond W. (1993), "Process and Products in Making Sense of Tropes," in Metaphor and Thought, 2nd ed
  • Grice, Herbert P. (1989), Studies in the Way of Words, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  • Leigh, James H. (1994), "The Use of Figures of Speech in Print Ad Headlines," Journal of Advertising, 23(June), 17-34.
  • Mitchell, Andrew A. (1983), "Cognitive Processes Initiated by Exposure to Advertising," in Information Processing Research in Advertising, ed. Richard J. Harris, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 13-42.
Ryan Catalani

Howstuffworks "How BrainPort Works" - 1 views

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    "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."
Lara Cowell

Why Do Most Languages Have So Few Words for Smells? - 0 views

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    Every sense has its own "lexical field," a vast palette of dedicated descriptive words for colors, sounds, tastes, and textures. But smell? In English, there are only three dedicated smell words-stinky, fragrant, and musty-and the first two are more about the smeller's subjective experience than about the smelly thing itself. All of our other scent descriptors are really descriptions of sources: We say that things smell like cinnamon, or roses, or teen spirit, or napalm in the morning. The other senses don't need these linguistic workarounds. Some scientists have taken this as evidence that humans have relegated smell to the sensory sidelines, while vision has taken center-field. It's a B-list sense, deemed by Darwin to be "of extremely slight service." Others have suggested that smells are inherently indescribable, and that "olfactory abstraction is impossible." Yet some languages, like those of the Jahai people of Malaysia and the Maniq of Thailand use between 12 and 15 dedicated smell words: basic vocabulary not used for taste, or to describe general ideas of edibility. These two groups clearly show that odors, contrary to popular belief, are not universally ineffable; people from both cultures are also able to distinguish smells more accurately than Western cultures.
Lara Cowell

Dr. Gottman's 3 Skills (and 1 Rule!) for Intimate Conversation - The Gottman Institute - 1 views

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    While noted psychologist Gottman's 3 Skills and 1 Rule were originally intended for couples, they apply equally to any close relationship and could create better, more effective communication. In a nutshell, here they are: Here are Dr. Gottman's three skills and one rule for crucial conversation: The rule: Understanding must precede advice. The goal of an intimate conversation is only to understand, not to problem-solve. Premature problem solving tends to shut people down. Problem solving and advice should only begin when both people feel totally understood. Skill #1: Putting Your Feelings into Words The first skill is being able to put one's feelings into words. This skill was called "focusing" by master clinician Eugene Gendlin. Gendlin said that when we are able to find the right images, phrases, metaphors, and words to fit our feelings, there is a kind of "resolution" one feels on one's body, an easing of tension. Focusing makes our conversations about feelings much deeper and more intimate, because the words reveal who we are. Skill #2: Asking Open-Ended Questions The second skill of intimate conversations is helping one's conversational partner explore his or her feelings by asking open-ended questions. This is done by either asking targeted questions, like, "What is your disaster scenario here?" or making specific statements that explore feelings like, "Tell me the story of that! Skill #3: Expressing Empathy The third skill is empathy, or validation. Empathy isn't easy. In an intimate conversation, the first two skills help us sense and explore another person's thoughts, feelings, and needs. Empathy is shown by communication that these thoughts, feelings, and needs make sense to you. That you understand why the other person's experience. That does not mean that you necessarily agree with this person. You might, for example, have an entirely different memory or interpretation of events. Empathy means communicating that, given
dylenfujimoto20

How advertisers manipulate all our senses at once | The Independent - 0 views

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    Since the creation of advertisements, its hard for people to go a day without seeing at least one ad on TV, outside, or online. It's like impossible. However with the increasing amount of advertisements people see everyday, research shows that it is harder to retain what you saw. As a result, advertisers are reverting to a newer method called linguistic synaesthesia which is a type of metaphor created by combining linguistic expressions which evoke multiple senses at one time. Read the article to find out more examples of linguistic synaesthesia.
Lisa Stewart

Make Sense: Word Games With a Purpose : Language Lounge : Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus - 2 views

  • The GWAPs at wordrobe.org help researchers develop valuable training data for Natural Language Processing (NLP) which, in a nutshell, is the science of trying to get computers to process language the way humans do, only better and faster.
Lara Cowell

How "twist my arm" engages the brain - 0 views

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    (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
kellymurashige16

These Gloves Can Translate Sign Language to Voice and Text - 0 views

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    University of Washington students have created gloves called SignAloud. These gloves sense hand motions and translate the meanings, allowing more people to understand sign language.
Lisa Stewart

Neurons and how they work - YouTube - 1 views

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    great video gives you sense of size
Ryan Catalani

BPS Research Digest: Can grammar be sexist? - 9 views

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    French and German, like other Romance language, have masculine and feminine forms of nouns, and "when referring to several people by their role... and the gender of that group is either not known, irrelevant or mixed," they will use the masculine form. However, the masculine form used in this way is traditionally thought to be generic - but "the French and German participants took longer to say that the second sentence made sense if it referred to women."
Ryan Catalani

Reading Creates 'Simulations' In Minds : NPR - 5 views

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    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."
Alex Hino

Essays, Admission Information, Undergraduate Admission, U.Va. - 16 views

  • Any student who has already learned the basics of showing should think about taking a risk on the college essay. What kind of risk? Think about starting an essay with: "I sat in the back of the police car." Or, as in the example (below): " The woman wanted breasts."
  • People wonder if they will be penalized if they do take a risk in an application. They want to know, in other words, if there is any risk in taking a risk. Yes, there is. I can say, however, that my experience in the admissions field has led me to conclude the great majority of admissions officers are an open-minded lot
    • brad hirayama
       
      The line "a Good essay always shows; a weak essay always tells" is a concept that is true in all real life situations.  we learned and had practice with this in acting class (yes acting), that it means a lot more if you show emotion rather than just saying i'm sad or happy.  i find that this is true for college essays too: in order to stand out you need to be the one that make the reader think and invision what you are saying; that is what would make you stand out.
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    • Alex Hino
       
      Appealing to all of the sense through just words seems like a tricky task.
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    I think the best piece of advice from this is to show, not tell. I also like the idea of taking a risk, as long as the topic of choice isn't offensive or makes someone feel uncomfortable.
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    I thought a piece of good advice was to try to stand-out. Use a "hook" to bring the reader in, take risks, and don't conform to what you think the college would want the essay to be written about (Be yourself and show your voice through the writing).
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    I agree with Stephanie, in that I think the best advice is to show and not tell. It seems we are so used to "telling," because of all the analytical papers and what not we write that we sometimes get stuck telling instead of showing. We need to break this habit and start showing and appealing to all five senses in our writing.
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    "We are not looking for students who all think the same way, believe the same thing, or write the same essay". I found that quote very interesting and it shows just how important it is to take risks while writing the essays. By taking a risk it would show that your writing is different and unique.
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    I agree with Kaylin that being yourself is the best way to catch the reader's attention and show your own voice. Colleges don't want to read essays about the generic stories you think they want to hear. Instead they want to read a story coming from memories and thoughts in your head so they can feel as if they know the "real" you instead of the persona put on the paper.
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    "If we are what we eat, we are also what we write." I liked this article because it was basically saying that you have to display your true self in every way that you can through your writing. Trying to stray from being generic and vague. From this article, I know that what makes a good college essay stand out is to not be afraid to use your sensory but then have reason as to why you're using it and don't just simply "tell", let the reader know exactly what's going on in full specifics as much as possible, use a hook that can work in your favor, and lastly remain original and unique.
Lara Cowell

How extreme isolation warps the mind - 0 views

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    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.
amywestphalen15

Babies Can Follow Complex Social Situations - 1 views

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    Infants can make sense of complex social situations, taking into account who knows what about whom, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "Our findings show that 13-month-olds can make sense of social situations using their understanding about others' minds and social evaluation skills," says psychological scientists and study authors You-jung Choi and Yuyan Luo of the University of Missouri.
brandonzunin15

Relativism > The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) - 0 views

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    Many linguists, including Noam Chomsky, contend that language in the sense we ordinary think of it, in the sense that people in Germany speak German, is a historical or social or political notion, rather than a scientific one. For example, German and Dutch are much closer to one another than various dialects of Chinese are.
ablume17

Why it makes sense for children to learn in the language they know best - 1 views

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    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.
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    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.
Lara Cowell

The Neuroscience & Power of Safe Relationships - Stephen W. Porges - SC 116 -... - 0 views

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    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.
Lara Cowell

Language alters our experience of time - 0 views

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    How do humans construct their mental representations of the passage of time? The universalist account claims that abstract concepts like time are universal across humans. In contrast, the linguistic relativity hypothesis holds that speakers of different languages represent duration differently. A 2017 study conducted by Panos Athanasopoulos, Professor of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, and felllow linguist Emanuel Bylund, shows that bilinguals do indeed think about time differently, depending on the language context in which they are estimating the duration of events. Learning a new way to talk about time really does rewire the brain. Our findings are the first psycho-physical evidence of cognitive flexibility in bilinguals. It seems that by learning a new language, you suddenly become attuned to perceptual dimensions that you weren't aware of before. The fact that bilinguals go between these different ways of estimating time effortlessly and unconsciously fits in with a growing body of evidence demonstrating the ease with which language can creep into our most basic senses, including our emotions, our visual perception and now it turns out, our sense of time. But it also shows that bilinguals are more flexible thinkers and there is evidence to suggest that mentally going back and forth between different languages on a daily basis confers advantages on the ability to learn and multi-task, and even long term benefits for mental well-being.
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