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Prairie dogs have different alarm calls for different predators and can also indicate the size, color, speed, etc of the predator. In fact, it was found that the animals could combine and restructure their calls to describe things they hadn't seen before. This was found by having different breeds of dog (a golden retriever, a husky, a Dalmatian, a cocker spaniel) wander through the prairie dog territory one at a time and recording the resulting alarm calls; the calls highly varied even though the 'predator' was of the same predator class. They also showed different calls when researchers wearing different colored shirts walked through the territory (the same for different heights and walking speeds).

An article about researchers recording results after a patient regained his sight after being blind his whole life and how he reacts to the "new world"

An article about researchers recording results after a patient regained his sight after being blind his whole life and how he reacts to the "new world"

This article highlights the phrases that Clinton used during the presidential debate to attract black voters. Phrases like "systematic racism", "implicit bias", "black bias", and "racist" were used to identify with the black voters. Many viewers were excited that she was facing such issues and was tackling them head on because according to this article, "A big chunk of Americans - not just people of color - want our leadership to talk about race, and to talk about policing the criminal justice system and the role that race plays in those institutions." As a presidential candidate, Clinton has been forced to become more skilled with the word choice. Here, she attempts to appeal herself to different groups of people to attract votes.

Dr. Derald Wing-Sue examines the demeaning meta-communications or hidden messages in comments addressed to people of color. Though it should be noted that microaggressions can also be levied at white people, e.g. when Hawaii born-and-raised whites are asked "Where are you from?", and then when told "Here", persist: "No, I meant originally." ;-)

Hey Lara, thanks for remembering me ;-)

On some level we already know that language shapes the way we think. We're automatically more afraid to fight a guy named Jack Savage than somebody named Peewee Nipplepuss, even if we've never seen either of them before. It's totally illogical, but you probably run into an example of that every day, and don't notice it.

And for more on spatial orientation and color perception differences, read Guy Deutscher's _Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different Through Other Languages_. Referencing the first point that the author of the article makes, that English speakers are more apt to blame others, it's interesting how certain languages, like English, stress agency: someone/something causes an event, whereas languages like Hawaiian, are indeed, more apt to characterize situations in the passive: the event simply happened.

Interesting connections between language and the subconscious mind

more detail from Harvard about how to use N-gram

Description of words, syntax, etc.

"The problem with the dash-as you may have noticed!-is that it discourages truly efficient writing. It also-and this might be its worst sin-disrupts the flow of a sentence. Don't you find it annoying-and you can tell me if you do, I won't be hurt-when a writer inserts a thought into the midst of another one that's not yet complete?"

My problem has always been (and it is shared by others) that when one is thinking (or even just musing), we surround our ideas with parenthetical thoughts (which, to my mind, bracket every moment of waking life) and they become, in their own way (or "in the way", as it were) intrusive. And yet colorful.

"An area of the brain called the Visual Word Form Area, or VWFA, is activated whenever it sees something that looks like a word-and is so adept at packaging visual input for the brain's language centers that activation happens within a few tens of milliseconds. ... Instead of being "luminance-defined," words can be "motion-defined," distinguishable from their background not by color or contrast, but by their apparent direction of movement. Against a field of dots moving one way, words made up of dots moving in the other direction will "pop out" to most viewers, even if the word and background dots are the same shade."

Example of the motion-defined words used in the study: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/september/videos/973.html

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.

Code-switching involves moving freely between two different languages or dialects of a single language. Many people of color, especially mixed-race and multi-cultural people naturally code-switch. This article shows us Sheena Cobb as an example because she uses both the American Sign Language (ASL) and Black ASL depending on who she is with. Elements of black culture appear in Black ASL such as religious practice, cooking, humor, music, hairstyles, words and phrases typically used in the black communities. People who use Black ASL tend to sign with two hands, in different positions, in a larger signing space and with more repetition than with regular ASL signs.

Food for thought: " A few weeks ago, the world on my phone seemed more compelling than the offline world - more colorful, faster-moving and with a bigger scope of rewards. I still love that world, and probably always will. But now, the physical world excites me, too - the one that has room for boredom, idle hands and space for thinking. I no longer feel phantom buzzes in my pocket or have dreams about checking my Twitter replies. I look people in the eye and listen when they talk. I ride the elevator empty-handed. And when I get sucked into my phone, I notice and self-correct. It's not a full recovery, and I'll have to stay vigilant. But for the first time in a long time, I'm starting to feel like a human again."

I would be lying if I told you that this was a really good article. This is actually a badass article about how we use swear words and strong language to emphasize a point in daily conversation. If I were to say, "Wow! That is a really big car!" it does not carry much weight as if I were to say, "Damn! That's a big-ass car!" This article explains how using this kind of language adds a pop of color and richness to our day to day conversations.

Metaphors are extremely useful things. They provide a common language-an agreed-upon shorthand-for truths that can be difficult to discuss in terms that are simultaneously broad and precise. It doesn't take a Lakoff or a Luntz to appreciate the power of shared metonyms, particularly as the country grapples with the results of an election that was a political embodiment of that well-worn Fitzgerald line: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." This election, in particular, featured many more than two oppositional ideas. The 2018 midterms were about voter suppression, which is also to say about robbing swaths of Americans of their constitutional rights, which is also to say about structuralized inequality. They were about enfranchisement and its opposite. They were about progress. They were about backlash. They were about women winning. They were about women losing. They were about compassion empowered, and racism rewarded, and hard work realized, and cruelty weaponized, and corruption unpunished. They were about hatred. They were about love. They were about history made. They were about history ignored. They were about American exceptionalism in the best sense and-at the same time-in the worst. How do you sum that up in a headline or a news article? How do you talk about it in neatly cable-newsed sound bites? The true answer is that you can't, and the even truer answer is that this is why it is necessary to have a flourishing and extremely diverse media ecosystem, so that a broadly coherent picture might emerge from the individual efforts-but the more practical and immediate answer is that you can try to use metaphors to summarize the situation. You can talk about waves, with their familiarity and their liquidity and their visual power, and you can talk about the color of your notional water, and the size and shape of the swell, and you

This is from assistant professor Lera Boroditsky at Stanford University. She talks about how her research can show how language can shape the way that we think about time, shapes, space, colors and obejcts. "Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives."

which cognitive faculty would you most hate to lose? Most people would say sight or hearing, but what would your life be like if you had never learned a language? But are languages merely tools for expressing our thoughts, or do they actually shape our thoughts?

How different languages shape the way people who speak that language think. Lera Boroditsky has done studies on the Kuuk Thaayorre, an Indigenous Australian group who instead of using words like "left" or "right," they use cardinal directions (North, South, East, West). Because of how they use cardinal directions, the Kuuk Thaayorre are very oriented.

This article discusses the many benefits of bilingualism / being bilingual. It goes over a research experiment that was conducted to test the way that the mind distinguishes and identifies the difference between languages by having children do classification tests with shape and colors. It also discusses the differences between bilingualism vs monolingualism.

This article is about the many benefits of bilingualism and how bilinguals are smarter than monolinguals.

Patterns of negative or positive self-talk often start in childhood. Usually, the self-talk habit is one that's colored our thinking for years, and can affect us in many ways, influencing the experience of stress to our lives. However, any time can be a good time to change it! The article offers several pointers for change.

This article talks about why it is impossible to study a sentence and look at the physical structure of the letters without reading or comprehending the sentence meaning. It references the Stroop Effect, which is a cognitive interference where there is a delay in the reaction time of a certain task occurs due to a stimuli conflicting. So when people are told to read a set of words such as "orange, purple, green, blue, yellow", but the color of these words are not that of what they read, people usually stumble as they read. It was interesting because when we are children, it was the opposite, but once we learn the skill to read, it becomes irreversible.