"The more he uses technology, the less he uses Braille ... technology is making the nearly 200-year-old writing system more accessible than ever. She shows off an electronic reader that's about the size of a paperback. Instead of having to lug around massive volumes of printed braille, this reader allows Deden to just sweep her fingers over little plastic nubs that rise and fall with each line of text. ... The federation estimates that today only 1 in 10 blind people can read Braille. That's down dramatically from the early 1900s."

"Psychology researchers at Britain's University of Nottingham wanted to know whether the voice that reads in our heads matches the voice that we read aloud in. In other words, does your internal monologue have an accent? ... you can't just ask people how they pronounce words in their heads. ... In order to get around that problem, the Nottingham researchers had subjects read limericks while carefully monitoring their eye movements. ... The subjects read the limericks silently to themselves. But when they got to rhymes that didn't make sense with their spoken accent, there was a distinct disruption in eye movement. ... what we know about he author of the piece can influence how we read it. ... 'For example, it has been demonstrated that knowledge of the presumed author's speaking speed can influence how quickly people read aloud a passage of text.'" Full study: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0025782

"But a series of ingenious experiments have shown that many people with dyslexia possess distinctive perceptual abilities. For example, scientists have produced a growing body of evidence that people with the condition have sharper peripheral vision than others. ... Moreover, these capacities appear to trade off: if you're adept at focusing on details located in the center of the visual field, which is key to reading, you're likely to be less proficient at recognizing features and patterns in the broad regions of the periphery. ... Although people with dyslexia are found in every profession, including law, medicine and science, observers have long noted that they populate fields like art and design in unusually high numbers. ... in some situations, it turns out, those with dyslexia are actually the superior learners."

"Of the Dickens citations in the OED, 258 citations are the earliest recorded by the dictionary for a particular word, and 1,586 are the earliest for a particular sense of a word. Dickens was certainly an innovative writer, but these examples are not necessarily his own coinages. ... Very often the words that Dickens ushered in were from the earthy slang associated with the working class, the theatre, or the criminal underworld, and Dickens did much to make these once "vulgar" words mainstream. Dickens's very first novel, The Pickwick Papers from 1837, introduced such slang terms as butter-fingers ("a clumsy person"), flummox ("bewilder"), sawbones ("surgeon"), and whizz-bang ("sound of a gunshot"). ... One way that Dickens devised new words was by adding suffixes to old ones. He made good use of the -y suffix to make adjectives (mildewy, bulgy, swishy, soupy, waxy, trembly) and -iness to make nouns (messiness, cheesiness, fluffiness, seediness). ... Finally, no discussion of Dickensian language would be complete without mentioning the richly evocative names of his characters."

"Researchers have demonstrated a striking method to reconstruct words, based on the brain waves of patients thinking of those words. ... In a 2011 study, participants with electrodes in direct brain contact were able to move a cursor on a screen by simply thinking of vowel sounds. ... With the help of that model, when patients were presented with words to think about, the team was able to guess which word the participants had chosen. They were even able to reconstruct some of the words, turning the brain waves they saw back into sound on the basis of what the computer model suggested those waves meant. ... The authors caution that the thought-translation idea is still to be vastly improved before such prosthetics become a reality." Full study: http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001251

"School-age children whose mothers nurtured them early in life have brains with a larger hippocampus ... For the current study, the researchers conducted brain scans on 92 of the children who had had symptoms of depression or were mentally healthy when they were studied as preschoolers. The imaging revealed that children without depression who had been nurtured had a hippocampus almost 10 percent larger than children whose mothers were not as nurturing. ... Although 95 percent of the parents whose nurturing skills were evaluated during the earlier study were biological mothers, the researchers say that the effects of nurturing on the brain are likely to be the same for any primary caregiver - whether they are fathers, grandparents or adoptive parents."

I've noticed this trend, too, in a lot of the articles I've posted recently. Something to be aware of: "...we worry that shorter, single-study articles can be poor models of science. ... we are troubled by the link between small study size and publication bias. Theoretically, if several small studies on a topic, each with its own small data set, are sent to publishers, the overall published results should be equivalent to the results of a single large study on that topic using a complete data set. But according to several "meta-studies" that have been conducted, this is often not the case: rather than the small studies' converging on the same result as a large study when published, the small studies give a very different result. ... Small studies are inherently unreliable - larger studies or, better still, multiple studies on the same topic, are more likely to give definitive, accurate results."

""Although a great deal of research has shown that more physically imposing individuals are more likely to acquire power, this work is the first to show that powerful people feel taller than they are," says Michelle M. Duguid, PhD ... In a series of three experiments, the researchers found a definite correlation between feeling powerful and feeling tall, and even suggest that future research may want to examine whether employers should consider placing short high-ranking workers in higher offices to raise their psychological sense of power. "Height is often used as a metaphor for power," Duguid says ... "These findings may be a starting point for exploring the reciprocal relationship between the psychological and physical experiences of power," Duguid says." Full study (free PDF): http://j.mp/yxfnPV

"Tweenage girls who spend endless hours watching videos and multitasking with digital devices tend to be less successful with social and emotional development ... The girls' answers showed that multitasking and spending many hours watching videos and using online communication were statistically associated with a series of negative experiences: feeling less social success, not feeling normal, having more friends whom parents perceive as bad influences and sleeping less. ... The survey findings are bad news, given that the 8 to 12 age range is critical for the social and emotional development of girls, and because children are becoming active media consumers at an ever-younger age. ... Higher levels of face-to-face communication were associated with greater social success, greater feelings of normalcy, more sleep and fewer friends whom parents judged to be bad influences. Children learn the difficult task of interpreting emotions by watching the faces of other people, Pea said. ... For the negative effects of online gorging, "There seems to be a pretty powerful cure, a pretty powerful inoculant, and that is face-to-face communication," Nass said."

"New research is showing that speakers shouldn't discard those "ums" and "ahs" and other speech fillers if they want to be understood by listeners. ... "One finding that we had is that if you're listening to a story or a speech, people remember the content better if the person says 'uh' and 'um' in it than if the story is completely fluent," Watson said. ... "This is speculation, but if the speaker doesn't know what they're saying very well, you pay attention more because you think you need to work harder to get it. One thing that disfluencies do is buy speakers more time. They are a signal to the person listening that I need more time."" Link to study: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749596X11000234

"[In] A new study led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley ... Brain scans revealed that people with no symptoms of Alzheimer's who engaged in cognitively stimulating activities throughout their lives had fewer deposits of beta-amyloid, a destructive protein that is the hallmark of the disease. ... While previous research has suggested that engaging in mentally stimulating activities - such as reading, writing and playing games - may help stave off Alzheimer's later in life, this new study identifies the biological target at play. ... Notably, the researchers did not find a strong connection between amyloid deposition and levels of current cognitive activity alone. "What our data suggests is that a whole lifetime of engaging in these activities has a bigger effect than being cognitively active just in older age," said Landau. The researchers are careful to point out that the study does not negate the benefits of kicking up brain activity in later years."

"...a new study from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests rumor-mongering can have positive outcomes such as helping us police bad behavior, prevent exploitation and lower stress. ... Overall, the findings indicate that people need not feel bad about revealing the vices of others, especially if it helps save someone from exploitation, the researchers said. ... The study focused on "prosocial" gossip that "has the function of warning others about untrustworthy or dishonest people," said Willer, as opposed to the voyeuristic rumor-mongering about the ups and downs of such tabloid celebrities as Kim Kardashian and Charlie Sheen."

"Talking or texting on a phone while walking can make it difficult to stay on course and may interfere with memory recall ... Moreover, participants who were texting while walking veered off course demonstrating a 61 percent increase in lateral deviation and 13 percent increase in distance traveled."

"Teenagers are more susceptible to developing disorders like addiction and depression ... "The brain region traditionally associated with reward and motivation, called the nucleus accumbens, was activated similarly in adults and adolescents," said Moghaddam. "But the unique sensitivity of adolescent DS to reward anticipation indicates that, in this age group, reward can tap directly into a brain region that is critical for learning and habit formation." ... not only is reward expectancy processed differently in an adolescent brain, but also it can affect brain regions directly responsible for decision-making and action selection. ... "Adolescence is a time when the symptoms of most mental illnesses-such as schizophrenia and bipolar and eating disorders-are first manifested, so we believe that this is a critical period for preventing these illnesses," Moghaddam said."

"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

"These guys have worked out how to measure power differences between individuals using the patterns of words they speak or write. In other words, they say the style of language during a conversation reveals the pecking order of the people talking. ... The key to this is an idea called linguistic co-ordination, in which speakers naturally copy the style of their interlocutors. ... 'If you are communicating with someone who uses a lot of articles - or prepositions, orpersonal pronouns - then you will tend to increase your usage of these types of words as well, even if you don't consciously realize it,' say Kleinberg and co." Also, as the article mentions, Kleinberg (previously) developed the algorithm on which Google's PageRank (the algorithm used to rank pages in its search engine) is based. Link to the study (available in PDF): http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.3670

"Two vital parts of mentally organizing the world are classification, or the understanding that similar things belong in the same category; and induction, an educated guess about a thing's properties if it's in a certain category. ... 'For the last 30 to 40 years it has been believed that even for very young children, labels are category markers, as they are for adults,' explains psychologist Vladimir M. Sloutsky ... To test their hypothesis, the psychologists showed pictures of two imaginary creatures to preschoolers and college undergraduates. Both animals had a body, hands, feet, antennae, and a head. ... The difference arose when the head was a jalet's but [the] label was "flurp," or vice-versa. Then, most of the adults went with the label (we accept that a dolphin is a mammal, even though it looks and swims like a fish). The children relied on the head for identification. Regardless of its name, a thing with a jalet's head is a jalet." Link to the study (PDF): http://cogdev.cog.ohio-state.edu/Papers/2011/SD-VS-PsychScience.pdf

"Chimpanzees appear to consider who they are "talking to" before they call out. Researchers found that wild chimps that spotted a poisonous snake were more likely to make their "alert call" in the presence of a chimp that had not seen the threat. This indicates that the animals "understand the mindset" of others."

"[New research] is suggesting that atypical brain function is a fundamental aspect of speech production tasks for adults who stutter. ... "Now because many speech areas are interconnected across the two hemispheres through the corpus callosum, it might suggest that hemispheric dominance for speech and language has not been established to the same degree as it has been for normally fluent adults." ... Loucks then used functional magnetic resonance imaging of brain activity to study participants who stutter and found that even brief, simple speech tasks - such as producing a single word to name a picture - is associated with altered functional activity."

"Did occupy occupy your attention? Were you talking about tiger moms or tiger blood? Or were you paralyzed by the condition known as FOMO (fear of missing out)?"