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The problem of looking at our devices nonstop is physiological and social. The average human head weighs between 10 and 12 pounds, and when we bend our neck to use digital devices, the gravitational pull on our head and the stress on our neck increases to as much as 60 pounds of pressure. That common position leads to incremental loss of the curve of the cervical spine. Posture has been proven to affect mood, behavior and memory, and frequent slouching can make us depressed, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information. The way we stand affects everything from the amount of energy we have to bone and muscle development, and even the amount of oxygen our lungs can take in. A study in 2010 found that adolescents ages 8 to 18 spent more than 7.5 hours a day consuming media. In 2015, the Pew Research Center reported that 24 percent of teenagers are "almost constantly" online. Adults aren't any better: Most adults spend 10 hours a day or more consuming electronic media, according to a Nielsen's Total Audience Report from last year. "Mobile devices are the mother of inattentional blindness," said Henry Alford, the author of "Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That: A Modern Guide to Manners." "That's the state of monomaniacal obliviousness that overcomes you when you're absorbed in an activity to the exclusion of everything else." Children now compete with their parents' devices for attention, resulting in a generation afraid of the spontaneity of a phone call or face-to-face interaction. Eye contact now seems to be optional, Dr. Turkle suggests, and sensory overload can often mean our feelings are constantly anesthetized. Researchers at the University of Michigan claim empathy levels have plummeted while narcissism is skyrocketing, with emotional development, confidence and health all affected

This article talks about a theoretical language, proposed in the early to mid 19th century, called Solresol. It's basically a language that uses colors and twelve notes of the chromatic scale as the basic words, and each combination of notes and colors means a different word.

Talks about how dagnabbit came about. Talks about how people choose not to use the true name of certain beings (such as bears and wolves) since they were scared of its power, so they end up altering the name ie. Goddammit-->Dagnabbit. This is called taboo deformations. They alter the words with phonemes and dissimilation.

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

As emoji have become more specific in both their appearance and their meaning, their ideographic flexibility has eroded. Emoji are transforming into a large catalog of fixed portraits, rather than a smaller set of flexible ideograms.

We use both sides of our brain for speech, New York University researchers have discovered: a finding that alters previous conceptions about neurological activity. Many in the scientific community have posited that both speech and language are lateralized -- that is, we use only one side of our brains for speech, which involves listening and speaking, and language, which involves constructing and understanding sentences. However, the conclusions pertaining to speech generally stem from studies that rely on indirect measurements of brain activity, raising questions about characterizing speech as lateralized. In their examination, the researchers tested the parts of the brain that were used during speech. Here, the study's subjects were asked to repeat two "non-words" -- "kig" and "pob." Using non-words as a prompt to gauge neurological activity, the researchers were able to isolate speech from language. An analysis of brain activity as patients engaged in speech tasks showed that both sides of the brain were used -- that is, speech is, in fact, bi-lateral. The results also offer insights into addressing speech-related inhibitions caused by stroke or injury and lay the groundwork for better rehabilitation methods.

The science of swearing and how it effects the brain.

Its weird to think that something we say so casually has so much meaning.

Why would a psychological scientist study swearing? Expertise in such an area has different practical significance inside and outside the community of psychological science. Outside the scientific community, expertise on taboo language is justification for frequent consultation about contemporary issues that are perennial: Is swearing harmful? Should children be allowed to swear?

Rhett and Link go through an entire day basically only saying one word. I find this to be pretty interesting for the first few minutes, but it gets boring afterwards. This is due to the fact that they end up using gestures (like pointing or mimicking) to convey what they mean. While it gets boring, there are some moments where they seem to understand each other perfectly. Other people also catch on, so that is pretty interesting too.

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.

Both metaphor and grammar influence how people think about political candidates and elections. voters' attitudes can be influenced by a number of factors, including which information the media chooses to emphasize and how it is slanted. Framing, how a message is worded to encourage particular interpretations and inferences, can influence the perception of political candidates. Negative framing is often used to make opposing candidates seem weak, immoral and incompetent. It is persuasive because it captures attention and creates anxiety about future consequences. Grammar, though seemingly innocuous, also encodes meaning and is linked to mental experience and physical interactions with the world. Information framed with past progressive caused people to reflect more on the action details in a given time period than did information framed with simple past. Using grammatical aspect to frame campaign information, positive or negative, appears to be an effective tool for influencing how people perceive candidates' past actions. It may also be tweaked to invite inferences about what candidates will do in the future because it influences inferences about how events transpire.

Languages a world apart have a similar habit of borrowing elevated vocabulary from other languages. In 1066, because the ruling class spoke Old French, that set of vocabulary became synonymous with the elite. Everyone else used Old English. During this period, England's society was diglossic: one community, two language sets with distinct social spheres. Today, English-speakers pick and choose from the different word sets-Latinate (largely Old French borrowings) and Germanic (mostly Old English-derived words)-depending on the occasion. Although English is no longer in a diglossic relationship with another language, the Norman-era diglossia remains reflected in the way we choose and mix vocabulary. In informal chat, for example, we might go on to ask something, but in formal speech we'd proceed to inquire. There are hundreds of such pairs: match/correspond, mean/intend, see/perceive, speak/converse. Most of us choose one or the other without even thinking about the history behind the split. Germanic words are often described as earthier, simpler, and friendlier. Latinate vocabulary, on the other hand, is lofty and elite. It's amazing that nine hundred years later, the social and political structure of 12th-century England still affects how we think about and use English. The article also discusses a similar historical phenomenon in India, where much of southern India, just like Norman England, was diglossic between Sanskrit (an Indo-European language used ritually and formally by Hindu elites) and vernacular Dravidian languages. Today, that diglossia is gone, but Sanskrit-derived vocabulary still forms an upper crust, mostly pulled out for formal speech or writing.

Recent History of Our Struggle to Make Foreign Languages Core Foreign language study is in the national education Goals 2000, which states: "By the year 2000 all American students will leave grades 4, 8, and 12 having demonstrated competency in challenging subject matter including English, mathematics, science, foreign language, civics and government, arts, history, and geography..."

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.

Primates, birds, cetaceans, dogs and other species have proven able, through extensive training, to understand human words and simple sentences. And as Ed Yong explained, in some exceptional cases, such as Kanzi and Alex, they've even been able to engage in two-way communication with humans. However, language is more than a process through which meaning is attached to words or short sentences. Language might be described as the ability to take a finite set of elements (such as words), and using a set of rules (grammar and syntax) to create infinite combinations, each of which is comprehensible. In addition, as far as we can tell, humans are the only species who can create and comprehend understandable silliness, like "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously".

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

The oldest forms of communication even before languages included body language, drawings, dancing, acting, and grunting. High or low pitched grunts indicated social communication or warning signs. The ancient Egyptians were some of the first people to use symbols as a means of recording their lives or for goods and trading and eventually the symbols changed to the alphabets we use today.

A study done with monolingual babies and bilingual babies under a year old showed that in the earlier months, both sets of babies had discrimination abilities to separate languages, but by eight months only the bilinguals had this ability. The study was done by only showing visual clips of people speaking different languages. This means that the babies could differentiate languages by looking at facial movements and the rhythm and shape of the person's mouth.

This article talks about an illusion our brain pulls on called the McGurk effect. This is when visual speech is mismatched with auditory speech and can result in the perception of an entirely different message. The example the article uses is if the visual "ga" were combined with the sound "ba", this results in the perception of "da." Vased on the principle of causal inference, researchers were able to create an algorithm model of multi-sensory speech perception. What this means is that when your brain is given a particular pair of auditory and visual syllables, it calculates the likelihood that they are from a single talker compared to multiple talkers and uses this likelihood to determine the final speech perception.

In a study, it is predicted that bilinguals have enhanced brain networks because they had a delayed onset of Alzheimer's by five years compared to monolinguals of similar educational backgrounds. Through CT scans, it was discovered that bilinguals physically had twice as much atrophy of the brain as monolinguals at the time symptoms started. This means that bilinguals showed no symptoms of Alzheimer's even though their brains physically looked like they did.