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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.

At the heart of the current friction between Hong Kong and mainland China isn't just Hong Kong's autonomy and political freedoms. It's the territory's language. Though they share many of the same Chinese characters, Mandarin and Cantonese use them in such divergent ways-in terms of both grammar and vocabulary-that they constitute two different writing systems. China's government has tried to insist that Cantonese isn't really a language, and to suppress its use. But as with Bengali in the independence movement for Bangladesh, and the Soweto uprising against the imposition of Afrikaans in apartheid South African schools, Cantonese is beginning to take on a central role in Hong Kong's resistance to the authority of mainland China.

For more on the historical divide between Mandarin and Cantonese language speakers, see this article: http://www.chinese-lessons.com/cantonese/difficulty.htm

Botched autocorrects are a byproduct of a technological convenience that allows typing on the go, even when the message does not always come out as planned. Yet as autocorrect technology has become more advanced, so have its errors. Tech companies like Google, Facebook and Apple employ dozens of linguists - or "natural language programmers," as they are known - to analyze language patterns and to track slang, even pop culture. and they can do amazing things: correct when you hit the wrong keys (the "fat finger" phenomenon) and analyze whom you are texting, how you have spoken with that person in the past, even what you've talked about. Apple's iOS 8 operating system, released in September, even purports to know how your tone changes by medium - that is, "the casual style" you may use in texting versus "the more formal language" you are likely to use in email, as the company put it in a statement. It adjusts for whom you are communicating with, knowing that your choice of words with a buddy is probably more laid-back than it would be with your boss. Your smartphone may now be able to suggest not just words but entire phrases. and the more you use it, the more it remembers, paying attention to repeated words, the structure of your sentences and tone.

A start-up, Eterni-Me, is looking at ways of using artificial intelligence to keep us alive virtually - long after we're gone. The company collects data that you've curated from Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, photos, video, location information, and even Google Glass and Fitbit devices., and processes this huge amount of information using complex artificial intelligence algorithms. Then it generates a virtual YOU, an avatar that emulates your personality and can interact with, and offer information and advice to your family and friends, even after you pass away.

Award-winning, Chinese contemporary artist, Xu Bing, has created _Book From the Ground_, a text that speakers of any language can "read." His interest in pictorial storytelling was heightened by a bubblegum wrapper he happened upon-a series of three images connected by two arrows that instructed the chewer to put the gum back into the wrapper after chewing and throw it in the trash. This became Xu's inspiration for _Book from the Ground_. Xu's book reflects cultural literacy and modern tools and technologies, rather than traditional literacy. The author predicts that the younger generation is likely to find his icon language easier to "read" because they've been exposed to these images for as long as they can remember on the Internet. "I think it can be seen two ways," says Robert Harrist, a professor of Chinese art history at Columbia University who has taught a semester-length course on Xu's work. "It's great that everybody can communicate now and stay in touch constantly through one medium or another, a kind of shared, plugged-in visual world." But at the same time, with the "flattening and evening out in communication so much is lost," especially when it comes to tense or nuance. "The real surprising thing here and the challenge and the thing I love about it is he makes you ask yourself: What is writing?" adds Harrist, who describes Xu as "the greatest living Chinese artist, simple as that.... Everything he does is profoundly thoughtful."

Humans can communicate what is going on with them, and dogs can, too. The difference is, while humans primarily use verbal communication, dogs mainly communicate non-verbally through the use of body language and secondarily through vocalizations. This body language includes tail carriage and motion, ear and eye position, body position and movement, and facial expressions.

In a 2013 study, Karla Klein Murdock, a professor of psychology at Washington and Lee University, researched college-age texters. She found high-volume texters who were most stressed in their relationships were also most likely to admit to experiencing academic burnout and the lowest emotional well-being. Poorer sleep quality also seemed to plague the frequent texters. Why might heavy texting carry such a costly toll on people who are highly stressed in their relationships? A reasonable possibility that Murdock suggests has to do with the behavior and expectations of the heavy texter. Texting creates its own relational vortex. If the texts are flying fast and furious, things can easily get out of hand. Without the in-person cues that you would get if you were having a face-to-face discussion, misunderstandings and hurt feelings can quickly escalate. Texting also carries a cognitive cost, draining your attentional resources. As your inner reserve is worn down, you become exhausted and burned out. The physiological activation involved in texting erodes your sleep, and the stage is set for you to feel emotionally depleted.

Great find, Kai!

This report studies 65 political influencers belonging to the Alternative Influence Network (AIN): an assortment of scholars, media pundits, and internet celebrities who use YouTube to promote a range of political positions, from mainstream versions of libertarianism and conservatism, all the way to overt white nationalism. AIN's savvy use of YouTube promotes radicalization and adoption of extremist political viewpoints. Content creators in the AIN claim to provide an alternative media source for news and political commentary. They function as political influencers who adopt the techniques of brand influencers to build audiences and "sell" them on far-right ideology. This report presents data from approximately 65 political influencers across 81 channels. These groups uphold a broader "reactionary" position: a general opposition to feminism, social justice, or left-wing politics. Members of the AIN cast themselves as an alternative media system by: * Establishing an alternative sense of credibility based on relatability, authenticity, and accountability. * Cultivating an alternative social identity using the image of a social underdog, and countercultural appeal. Members of the AIN use the proven engagement techniques of brand influencers to spread ideological content: * Ideological Testimonials * Political Self-Branding * Search Engine Optimization * Strategic Controversy

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.

This article is geared for couples, but the advice could be extrapolated to any social relationship. Self-soothing is crucial for effective listening, and these are some strategies to help you do this: 1. Write down what your partner says and any defensiveness you're feeling 2. Be mindful of love and respect (remember the big picture and why you like this person) 3. Slow down and breathe. 4. Hold on to yourself: look inward and see what you are telling yourself about what this conflict means and how it may impact you. Also, consider that your partner's complaint may have truth to it. Sometimes we hold onto a distorted self-portrait. 5. Don't take your partner's complaint personally. 6. Ask for a reframe: if the other person is saying something that is triggering, ask them to say it in a different way. 7. Push the pause button: agree to take a 20 minute break, so the fight-flight response is deactivated, then resume.

Skepticism of online "news" serves as a decent filter much of the time, but our innate biases allow it to be bypassed, researchers have found - especially when presented with the right kind of algorithmically selected "meme." At a time when political misinformation is in ready supply, and in demand, "Facebook, Google, and Twitter function as a distribution mechanism, a platform for circulating false information and helping find receptive audiences," said Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College (and occasional contributor to The Times's Upshot column). Why? Here are the key reasons: 1. Individual bias/first impressions: subtle individual biases are at least as important as rankings and choice when it comes to spreading bogus news or Russian hoaxes. Merely understanding what a news report or commentary is saying requires a temporary suspension of disbelief. Mentally, the reader must temporarily accept the stated "facts" as possibly true. A cognitive connection is made automatically: Clinton-sex offender, Trump-Nazi, Muslim men-welfare. and refuting those false claims requires a person to first mentally articulate them, reinforcing a subconscious connection that lingers far longer than people presume.Over time, for many people, it is that false initial connection that stays the strongest, not the retractions or corrections. 2. Repetition: Merely seeing a news headline multiple times in a news feed, even if the news is false, makes it seem more credible. 3. People tend to value the information and judgments offered by good friends over all other sources. It's a psychological tendency with significant consequences now that nearly two-thirds of Americans get at least some of their news from social media.

Research from Concordia University in Montreal reveals a new perk visible in the problem-solving skills of bilingual toddlers. The study assessed the vocabularies of 39 bilingual children and 43 monolinguals when they were aged 24 months, and then again at 31 months. During the second assessment, the researchers also had the young participants perform a battery of tasks to test their cognitive flexibility and memory skills. While overall, there was little difference between the bilingual and monolingual toddlers, bilingual children performed significantly better on the conflict inhibition tasks than did their monolingual counterparts. Conflict inhibition refers to the mental process of overriding a well-learned rule that you would normally pay attention to. These were the two tasks: 1. Reverse categorization -- participants were told to put a set of little blocks into a little bucket and big blocks into a big bucket. Then the instructions were switched -- big blocks in the little bucket and little blocks in the big bucket. 2. Shape conflict -- participants were shown pictures of different sized fruit and asked to name them. Then a new series of images was shown, with a small fruit embedded inside a large one. Toddlers were asked to point to the little fruit. Crivello, one of the lead researchers, commented that "Language switching underlies the bilingual advantage on conflict tasks. In conflict inhibition, the child has to ignore certain information -- the size of a block relative to a bucket, or the fact that one fruit is inside another. That mirrors the experience of having to switch between languages, using a second language, even though the word from a first language might be more easily accessible."

According to Hirsh-Pasek, a professor at Temple University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, more and more studies are confirming the importance of conversation. "Language is the single best predictor of school achievement," she told me, "and the key to strong language skills are those back-and-forth fluent conversations between young children and adults." However, parents' digital device distraction is undermining valuable, face-face, verbal and non-verbal interactions that're crucial to language and emotional development.

'By studying language in people with aphasia, we can try to accomplish two goals at once: we can improve our clinical understanding of aphasia and get new insights into how language is organized in the mind and brain,' said Daniel Mirman, Professor of Psychology at Drexel University. Mirman is lead author of a new study which examined data from 99 people who had persistent language impairments after a left-hemisphere stroke. In the first part of the study, the researchers collected 17 measures of cognitive and language performance and used a statistical technique to find the common elements that underlie performance on multiple measures. Researchers found that spoken language impairments vary along four dimensions or factors: 1. Semantic Recognition: difficulty recognizing the meaning or relationship of concepts, such as matching related pictures or matching words to associated pictures. 2. Speech Recognition: difficulty with fine-grained speech perception, such as telling "ba" and "da" apart or determining whether two words rhyme. 3. Speech Production: difficulty planning and executing speech actions, such as repeating real and made-up words or the tendency to make speech errors like saying "girappe" for "giraffe." 4. Semantic Errors: making semantic speech errors, such as saying "zebra" instead of "giraffe," regardless of performance on other tasks that involved processing meaning. In the second part of the study, researchers mapped the areas of the brain associated with each of the four dimensions identified above.

Researchers from King's College London Institute of Psychiatry, in collaboration with Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) and the University of Barcelona, mapped the neural pathways involved in word learning among humans. They found that the arcuate fasciculus, a collection of nerve fibres connecting auditory regions at the temporal lobe with the motor area located at the frontal lobe in the left hemisphere of the brain, allows the 'sound' of a word to be connected to the regions responsible for its articulation. Differences in the development of these auditory-motor connections may explain differences in people's ability to learn words. Researchers used diffusion tensor imaging to image the structure of the brain before a word learning task and functional MRI, to detect the regions in the brain that were most active during the task. They found a strong relationship between the ability to remember words and the structure of arcuate fasciculus, which connects two brain areas: the territory of Wernicke, related to auditory language decoding, and Broca's area, which coordinates the movements associated with speech and the language processing. In participants able to learn words more successfully their arcuate fasciculus was more myelinated i.e. the nervous tissue facilitated faster conduction of the electrical signal. In addition the activity between the two regions was more co-ordinated in these participants. Dr Catani concludes, "Now we understand that this is how we learn new words, our concern is that children will have less vocabulary as much of their interaction is via screen, text and email rather than using their external prosthetic memory. This research reinforces the need for us to maintain the oral tradition of talking to our children."

This is the second part of the article about political mass communication. It mostly deals with things like collocations, fill-ins, and framing. Collocations are words that are often used with others and so carry a particular connotations because of their association. For example, calling someone a rabid feminist vs. calling them a radical feminist would suggest more danger and wildness because of the use of the word rabid. Fill-ins refer to the use of deliberately obfuscating or vague language which encourages the listeners to respond by filling-in the gaps with their own preconceived notions or biases and can be a helpful persuasive tool. For example, saying something like, "they want to control you." The "they" here is vague and thus allows the listener to fill in with whatever they want. The article also touches on doublespeak and the use of euphemisms to refer to unpleasant topics (George W. Bush and enhanced interrogation anyone?). Framing, more broadly refers to the use of these tactics to get listeners to interpret the speech in certain ways favorable to the speaker.

Social media-from Facebook to Twitter-have made us more densely networked than ever. Yet for all this connectivity, new research suggests that we have never been lonelier (or more narcissistic)-and that this loneliness is making us mentally and physically ill. Social interaction matters. Loneliness and being alone are not the same thing, but both are on the rise. We meet fewer people. We gather less. and when we gather, our bonds are less meaningful and less easy. The decrease in confidants-that is, in quality social connections-has been dramatic over the past 25 years. In one survey, the mean size of networks of personal confidants decreased from 2.94 people in 1985 to 2.08 in 2004. Similarly, in 1985, only 10 percent of Americans said they had no one with whom to discuss important matters, and 15 percent said they had only one such good friend. By 2004, 25 percent had nobody to talk to, and 20 percent had only one confidant.

Alexia LaFata in Culture Texting is the biggest catch-22 of our time. We love it for its convenience and fun Emojis, but we probably don't notice just how much it's making us feel like sh*t. Everybody loves the feeling of the little red (1) on the screen, but what about when you're waiting for an answer that never comes?

Because each individual and gender values and perceives sending and receiving text messages unequally, it is often difficult to assume the intent of a person's text message. Due to assumptions, social normality conditions, and the expectations people have on each other, the objective of a person's message can get lost in the receiver's translation and perception of the text.

Word "edges" are important for language acquisition. Children start to learn the sound of words by remembering the first and last syllables. A new study sheds light on the information the infant brain uses during language acquisition and the format in which it stores words in its memory. Infants start to learn words very early, during the first months of life, and to do so they have to memorise their sounds and associate them with meanings. The study by Silvia Benavides-Varela (now at the IRCCS Fondazione Ospedale San Camillo in Venice, but at SISSA at the time the study was performed) and Jacques Mehler, neuroscientist at SISSA, revealed the format in which infants remember their first words. In particular, the two scientists saw that infants aged about seven months accurately encode the sound and position of the first and last syllable, whereas they have difficulty retaining the order of syllables in the middle.