Group items tagged

Semantic Sustainability

Here's a followup on the Economist's language blog: http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/04/change . The comments are pretty interesting, too.

Luke Center has archived the lectures of their speaker series addressing all 17 of the UN Sustainability and Development Goals. Might be worth a listen as you work on your Changemaker projects.

It takes just one-tenth of a second for our brains to begin to recognize emotions conveyed by vocalizations; apparently human brains pay more attention when emotions are embedded in vocalizations rather than in speech. Participants were able to detect vocalizations of happiness (i.e., laughter) more quickly than vocal sounds conveying either anger or sadness. Vocalizations displaying anger, however, are more resonant than those displaying other emotions: both produced ongoing brain activity that lasted longer than either of the other emotions: "listeners engage in sustained monitoring of angry voices, irrespective of the form they take, to grasp the significance of potentially threatening events." More anxious individuals also have a faster and more heightened response to emotional voices in general than people who are less anxious.

"Sustained changes in the region of the brain associated with cognitive function and emotional control were found in young adult men after one week of playing violent video games ... The results showed that after one week of violent game play, the video game group members showed less activation in the left inferior frontal lobe during the emotional Stroop task and less activation in the anterior cingulate cortex during the counting Stroop task."

Actually, there are some studies just about emotional Stroop tests that sound similar to the one in the violent video games study. This looks like a good presentation about how emotional Stroop tests work: http://frank.mtsu.edu/~sschmidt/Cognitive/Emotion1.pdf This one talks about why those Stroop tests work: "In this task, participants name the colors in which words are printed, and the words vary in their relevance to each theme of psychopathology.The authors review research showing that patients are often slower to name the color of a word associated with concerns relevant to their clinical condition." - http://brainimaging.waisman.wisc.edu/~perlman/papers/stickiness/WilliamsEmoStroop1996.pdf This is a meta-analysis of emotional Stroop test studies that describes (actually, it's critical of) how such studies are done: http://www.psych.wustl.edu/coglab/publications/LarsenMercerBalota2006.pdf

Thanks, Ryan! I will take a look at these.

"Facebook, YouTube and even texting will be the salvation of many of the world's endangered languages, scientists believe. Of the 7,000 or so languages spoken on Earth today, about half are expected to be extinct by the century's end. ... Tuvan, an indigenous tongue spoken by nomadic peoples in Siberia and Mongolia, even has an iPhone app to teach the pronunciation of words to new students. 'It's what I like to call the flipside of globalisation' [said K David Harrison] ... 'Everything that people know about the planet, about plants, animals, about how to live sustainably, the polar ice caps, the different ecosystems that humans have survived in - all this knowledge is encoded in human cultures and languages, whereas only a tiny fraction of it is encoded in the scientific literature.'"

A collaboration between the Gottman Institute and the Huffington Post, Thrive Global offers sustainable, science-based solutions to enhance well-being, performance, and purpose, and create a healthier relationship with technology. Some useful communication articles!

Daniel T. Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, notes that while Google is good at finding information, the brain beats it in two essential ways. 1. Context: Champions of Google underestimate how much the meaning of words and sentences changes with context. With the right knowledge in memory, your brain deftly puts words in context. 2. Speed Quick access is supposed to be a great advantage of using the internet. Students have always been able to look up the quadratic equation rather than memorize it, but opening a new browser tab takes moments, not the minutes required to locate the right page in the right book. Yet "moments" is still much slower than the brain operates. That's why the National Mathematics Advisory Panel listed "quick and effortless recall of facts" as one essential of math education. Speed matters for reading, too. Researchers report that readers need to know at least 95 percent of the words in a text for comfortable absorption. Pausing to find a word definition is disruptive. Good readers have reliable, speedy connections among the brain representations of spelling, sound and meaning. Speed matters because it allows other important work - for example, puzzling out the meaning of phrases - to proceed. Using knowledge in the head is also self-sustaining, whereas using knowledge from the internet is not. Every time you retrieve information from memory, it becomes a bit easier to find it the next time.

Although smartphones have immense potential to improve welfare, their persistent presence may come at a cognitive cost. In this research, we test the "brain drain" hypothesis that the mere presence of one's own smartphone may occupy limited-capacity cognitive resources, thereby leaving fewer resources available for other tasks and undercutting cognitive performance. Results from two experiments indicate that even when people are successful at maintaining sustained attention-as when avoiding the temptation to check their phones-the mere presence of these devices reduces available cognitive capacity. Moreover, these cognitive costs are highest for those highest in smartphone dependence.

This article shows the importance of music therapy practice when focusing on communication skills with a speech pathologist within a pediatric rehabilitation setting. There is a case about a kid named Sam who is an eleven year old boy who sustained a severe garrotting injury. The article goes over how the individual music therapy program helped him to maximize his potential and motivation in achieving his communication goals, while speech pathology provided therapeutic intervention and outcomes while he re-learned his speech skills.

Article discusses the importance of preserving endangered indigenous languages: it's not only the languages at risk but also the world views they express - tens of thousands of years of accumulated ecological, biological and cultural knowledge. "Every last word means another lost world," is how the Living Tongue Institute for Endangered Languages puts it.