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This month, the journal Pediatrics published a study that used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study brain activity in 3-to 5-year-old children as they listened to age-appropriate stories. The researchers found differences in brain activation according to how much the children had been read to at home. Children whose parents reported more reading at home and more books in the home showed significantly greater activation of brain areas in a region of the left hemisphere called the parietal-temporal-occipital association cortex. This brain area is "a watershed region, all about multisensory integration, integrating sound and then visual stimulation," said the lead author, Dr. John S. Hutton, a clinical research fellow at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. This region of the brain is known to be very active when older children read to themselves, but Dr. Hutton notes that it also lights up when younger children are hearing stories. What was especially novel was that children who were exposed to more books and home reading showed significantly more activity in the areas of the brain that process visual association, even though the child was in the scanner just listening to a story and could not see any pictures. "When kids are hearing stories, they're imagining in their mind's eye when they hear the story," said Dr. Hutton. "For example, 'The frog jumped over the log.' I've seen a frog before, I've seen a log before, what does that look like?" The different levels of brain activation, he said, suggest that children who have more practice in developing those visual images, as they look at picture books and listen to stories, may develop skills that will help them make images and stories out of words later on. "It helps them understand what things look like, and may help them transition to books without pictures," he said. "It will help them later be better readers because they've developed that part of the brain

For the study, conducted by Dr. John Hutton, a researcher and pediatrician at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, and someone with an interest in emergent literacy, 27 children around age 4 went into an FMRI machine. They were presented with the same story in three conditions: audio only; the illustrated pages of a storybook with an audio voiceover; and an animated cartoon. While the children paid attention to the stories, the MRI, the machine scanned for activation within certain brain networks, and connectivity between the networks. Here's what researchers found: In the audio-only condition (too cold): language networks were activated, but there was less connectivity overall. "There was more evidence the children were straining to understand." In the animation condition (too hot): there was a lot of activity in the audio and visual perception networks, but not a lot of connectivity among the various brain networks. "The language network was working to keep up with the story," says Hutton. "Our interpretation was that the animation was doing all the work for the child. They were expending the most energy just figuring out what it means." The children's comprehension of the story was the worst in this condition. The illustration condition was what Hutton called "just right".When children could see illustrations, language-network activity dropped a bit compared to the audio condition. Instead of only paying attention to the words, Hutton says, the children's understanding of the story was "scaffolded" by having the images as clues. Most importantly, in the illustrated book condition, researchers saw increased connectivity between - and among - all the networks they were looking at: visual perception, imagery, default mode and language. One interesting note is that, because of the constraints of an MRI machine, which encloses and immobilizes your body, the story-with-illustrations condition wasn't actually as good as reading on Mom or Dad's lap. The emotional bon

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."

Jez Burrows is the author of Dictionary Stories: more than 150 short fiction pieces, composed entirely from example sentences taken from 12 different dictionaries. Describing his writing process, Burrows comments: "It was only a few weeks into writing Dictionary Stories that I realized the dictionary is something of a Trojan horse. Trundling up to the perimeter of your bookshelves, it presents itself as a harmless book of reference-but look inside and you'll find it crawling with thousands upon thousands of microscopic pieces of fiction, all in the form of example sentences. Fiction is perhaps a slightly misleading word to use in this context. Lexicographers do not write these examples from scratch in the service of whimsical narrative; they query huge corpora of texts that could include novels, news broadcasts, articles and essays, and select an example that demonstrates the most probable usage of a word. But surrounded by the neutral, instructive language of dictionary definitions, example sentences feel vital and full of personality. The New Oxford American Dictionary contains over 80,000 examples, but it was just one ("He perched on the edge of the bed, a study in confusion and misery," an example of the word "study") that set me on the journey of collaging these sentences together to create very short stories. Should you wish to try writing stories of your own in this vein, I give you this list of some of the most versatile words the New Oxford American has to offer-or at least, words with the highest number of example sentences, any of which would make a fine start to a story." So, if you want to try emulating Burrows' style, here're the 6 words: 1. go, 2. run, 3. take, 4. set, 5. cut, and 6. stand. These words illustrate the linguistic concept of polysemy: words that possess many meanings. Try creating a story using one--or collaging several example sentences. Have fun!

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut once opined, "There is no reason why the simple shapes of stories can't be fed into computers. They are beautiful shapes." Thanks to new text-mining techniques, this has now been done. Researchers at the University of Vermont's Computational Story Lab have analysed over 1,700 English novels to reveal six basic story types - you could call them archetypes - that form the building blocks for more complex stories. They are: 1. Rags to riches - a steady rise from bad to good fortune 2. Riches to rags - a fall from good to bad, a tragedy 3. Icarus - a rise then a fall in fortune 4. Oedipus - a fall, a rise then a fall again 5. Cinderella - rise, fall, rise 6. Man in a hole - fall, rise The researchers used sentiment analysis to get the data - a statistical technique often used by marketeers to analyse social media posts in which each word is allocated a particular 'sentiment score', based on crowdsourced data. Depending on the lexicon chosen, a word can be categorised as positive (happy) or negative (sad), or it can be associated with one or more of eight more subtle emotions, including fear, joy, surprise and anticipation. For example, the word 'happy' is positive, and associated with joy, trust and anticipation. The word 'abolish' is negative and associated with anger. Do sentiment analysis on all the words in a novel, poem or play and plot the results against time, and it's possible to see how the mood changes over the course of the text, revealing a kind of emotional narrative. While not a perfect tool - it looks at words in isolation, ignoring context - it can be surprisingly insightful when applied to larger chunks of text

This is a great site for getting an idea of what colleges are looking for in an essay. My idea of a good college essay changed after reading the top voted college essay.

The top essay was a very descriptive piece. It sounded like a short story, and I didn't know you could write about those kind of topics on a college essay. This site really helps me get a better idea of what an essay should look like when the time comes to submit one.

It really helps to be able to read examples of good college essays. It gives you an idea of not only what to write about but how to write it. I never would have guessed some of the top voted college essays would be written on such simple, everyday topics. I have a lot of work to do haha.

In one of the most viral Twitter stories of 2018, people listened to the same acoustically-degraded audio clip of a word, and hotly debated which was the correct word: laurel or yanny. What's the reason for the diametrically-opposed discrepancy? The poor quality of the audio, likely re-recorded multiple times, makes it more open to interpretation by the brain, says Brad Story, a professor of speech, language and hearing sciences at the University of Arizona. Primary information that would be present in a high-quality recording or in person is "weakened or attenuated," Story says, even as the brain is eagerly looking for patterns to interpret. "And if you throw things off a little bit, in terms of it being somewhat unnatural, then it is possible to fool that perceptual system and our interpretation of it," says Story. Story says the two words have similar patterns that easily could be confused. He carried out his own experiment by analyzing a waveform image of the viral recording and compared it to recordings of himself saying "laurel" and "yanny." He noticed similarities in the features of these words, which you can see below. Both words share a U-shaped pattern, though they correspond to different sets of frequencies that the vocal tract produces, Story explains. Britt Yazel, a neuroscience post-doctoral student at UC Davis, also provides more reasons for why people are hearing different things. Some people have greater sensitivity to higher frequencies or lower frequencies, Yazel says. "But not only that, the brains themselves can be wired very differently to interpret speech," he says. For example, if you hear the sounds in either "yanny" or "laurel" more in your everyday life, you might be more likely to hear them here. In other words, your brain may be primed and predisposed to hearing certain sounds, due to environmental exposure.

I was surprised by this article and by the fact that sometimes, our seemingly boring moments in life has the potential to transform into a great college essay. This article made me change my views of college essays and reexamine what topics I want to write about.

I liked the ideas this essay shared because I realized that if I were to have written my college essay prior to reading this article, my essay would've been similar to the majority of students who submit college essays. This site stresses the importance of being different and that having humility, humor, and personal stories in college essays are attractive. But the article did imply that there are limits and that some things such as torturing animals and showing inconsideration to other people, are inappropriate.

It seems more common now for counselors and advisors to recommend writing about everyday things, but with our own personal "flair." So it was helpful to read in this article about how there are some negative everyday experiences that are important to leave out.

Providing new details about how it's trying to counter the spread of fake news on its services, Facebook says it's working with fact-checking groups to identify bogus stories - and to warn users if a story they're trying to share has been reported as fake.

This article provides useful tips on how to confidently present a memorable story. Storytelling is essential to our human identity, helping us who we are. And sharing a tale with an audience can be immensely rewarding. But for novices, it can also be terrifying. Fear of speaking in public is very common. A great many of the world's greatest performers have struggled with powerful stage fright. The article aims to help you build your confidence and find your own voice.

When you think of Egyptian hieroglyphics, you probably think of looking at them. What you probably don't think of is reading them. However, for the first time ever Ancient Egyptian stories have been published in English for people to read. Writings from Ancient Egypt published by Penguin Random House contains stories that are over 2,000 years old.

Analyzing the verbs that followed male and female pronouns in 100K stories, the following patterns were observed: 1. Women are more likely to be in the role of victims- "she screams", "she cries", or "she pleads." Men tend to be the aggressor: "he kidnaps" or "he beats". Not all male-oriented terms are negative- many, like "he saves"/"he rescues" are distinctly positive- but almost all are active rather than receptive. 2. There's an old stereotype (that's appeared in works like Game of Thrones and Sherlock Holmes) that "poison is a woman's weapon", and this is supported in our analysis. Female characters are more likely to "poison", "stab", or "kick"; male characters are more likely to "beat", "strangle", or simply "murder" or "kill". Men are moderately more likely to "steal", but much more likely to "rob". 3. Based on this text analysis, a fictional murderer is about 2.5X as likely to be male than female, but in America (and likely elsewhere) murderers are about 9X more likely to be male than female. This means female murderers may be overrepresented in fiction relative to reality. David Robinson, the data scientist who ran the text analysis, offers these questions for future research: 1.Is the shift stronger in some formats or genre than another? We could split the works into films, novels, and TV series, and ask whether these gender roles are equally strong in each. 2. Is the shift different between male- and female- created works? 3. Has the difference changed over time? Some examination indicates the vast majority of these plots come from stories written in the last century, and most of them from the last few decades (not surprising since many are movies or television episodes, and since Wikipedia users are more likely to describe contemporary work). 4. I'd also note that we could expand the analysis to include not only pronouns but first names (e.g. not only "she tells", but "M

In this article, it talks about Trumps language compared to past political officials. In analyzing Trumps language, linguists from University of Pennsylvania saw that one of Trumps thirteen used used words were often one and two syllabled words, with the exception of Mexico being three syllabled. Linguists were analyzing Trumps way of answering questions, and saw that he diverts this answer is a much different way than other politicians. Most politician, when diverting their answer from the question would start with "well", "now", and "what". But, Trump would usually start with the word "I". In public speakings, politicians would used stories to put a personal connection on answering questions, but with Trump his stories often start out of nowhere.

Summary: A new AI-based system called a semantic decoder can translate a person's brain activity -- while listening to a story or silently imagining telling a story -- into a continuous stream of text. Unlike other thought decoding systems in development, this system does not require subjects to have surgical implants, making the process noninvasive.

The "Baby Fae" story I mentioned in large group--this is a documentary about it made recently.

Narratives powerfully persuade humans; pathos can outweigh logos to create believability.

Next time you're headed Down Under, don't be a bogan. Pack your togs, thongs and esky lid, and save any tea bags for a mug of hot water. Australia's beach culture has transformed the English used there.

Love comes in all different shapes, sizes and languages. Helena Halmari, English and Linguistics professor, held a forum on Friday that examined love letters between Finnish composer Jean Sibelius and his wife, Aino. Halmari has been studying the letters through which the couple corresponded. What Halmari has found to be so interesting is that Jean wrote mostly in Swedish, while Aino wrote in Finnish. She talked about the different ways she studied the languages. "I wanted to get a general idea of how the languages were divided," said Halmari. "I knew that it could be very simple because Sibelius uses Swedish and Aino uses Finnish, but it wasn't always simple because they sometimes mixed each other's languages together. Most of the time, though, they stick to their own languages, which didn't make it hard for them at all because they were both bilingual." One would expect the use of two different languages to affect communication in some way, especially negatively. However, Jean and Aino were able to clearly understand each other, and even appreciated the other's use of their first language. Halmarin discussed the relationship between the two. "I don't think their use of two different languages impeded their communication because they both knew each other's languages," said Halmari. "For Jean, Swedish was the preferred written language, because he always worried that he would make mistakes when writing in Finnish." While she has examined forms of bilingual audio communication, such as medieval sermons and recordings, the letters are the first written form of bilingual communication that Halmari has come across. "I haven't looked at letters that were like this before," Halmari said. "In my research, I've looked at bilingual spoken language like recordings, and even email correspondence. They tend to follow the same patterns, though it's not as clear, because some people mix the languages sometimes within the same senten

"Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it," Jonathan Swift once wrote. It was hyperbole three centuries ago. But it is a factual description of social media, according to an ambitious and first-of-its-kind study produced by MIT and published Thursday in Science. The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter's existence-some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years-and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories. "It seems to be pretty clear [from our study] that false information outperforms true information," said Soroush Vosoughi, a data scientist at MIT who has studied fake news since 2013 and who led this study. "And that is not just because of bots. It might have something to do with human nature."