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Article reports on the research of Dr. Charles Limb, of Johns Hopkins. Through fMRI, Limb found the brains of jazz musicians engaged with other musicians in spontaneous improvisation show robust activation in the same brain areas traditionally associated with spoken language and syntax. In other words, improvisational jazz conversations "take root in the brain as a language," Limb said. However, the areas of the brain associated with meaning are not activated.

Here's how to be more emotionally intelligent: 1. Emotions are concepts: They're not hardwired or universal. They're learned. 2. Emotional intelligence starts with emotional granularity: If your doctor came back with a diagnosis of "you're sick", you'd sue the quack for malpractice. Doctors need to be able to distinguish between "chancre" and "cancer." And you need to know the difference between "sad" and "lonely." 3. Emotional intelligence is in the dictionary: You can't feel Fremdschämen if you don't know what it is. So learn new emotion words so you can feel new emotions and increase your emotional granularity, that is, the ability to distinguish the emotions you feel and recognize them as distinct and different. 4. Create new emotions: We could all use a little more "passion-o-rama" in our lives. Name those unnamed feelings you have and share them with others to make them real. In sum, finding specific words to describe the particularities of what you're feeling can lead to greater mental health. The article also discusses the differences that cultures/languages have in re: feelings and emotions we might've previously assumed were universal.

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.

The brains of jazz musicians who are engaged with other musicians in spontaneous improvisation show robust activation in the same brain areas traditionally associated with spoken language and syntax. In other words, improvisational jazz conversations "take root in the brain as a language"

Dr. Nick Perham, a lecturer in the School of Health Sciences at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, conducted a 2010 study, "Can preference for background music mediate the irrelevant sound effect?", that shows how music can interfere with short-term memory performance. Perham had subjects conduct a certain task, in this case recalling a series of numbers, while listening to different kinds of background music. If sound exhibits acoustical variations, or what Perham calls an "acute changing-state," performance is impaired. Steady-state sounds with little acoustical variation don't impair performance nearly as much. Perham asked his subjects how they thought they performed when exposed to different tastes in music. Each reported performing much worse when listening to disliked music, although the study's results showed no difference. However, Perham found no distinction in performance, regardless of whether the music was liked or disliked: both were "worse than the quiet control condition. Both impaired performance on serial-recall tasks." The interviewer queried how curious how prevalent serial-recall is in everyday life, and if one could get by without developing this skill. Unlikely, Perham says, as one would have tremendous difficulty recalling phone numbers, doing mental arithmetic, and even learning languages. "Requiring the learning of ordered information has also been found to underpin language learning. If you consider language, learning syntax of language, learning the rules that govern how we put a sentence together, all of these require order information . . . " Perham says.

A great article about why you should learn another language and the benefits of it.

Many languages have words that do not exist in English. Speaking many languages gives you a different way to use the different languages. Multi-linguals tend to score better on math, english, vocabulary, and even on standardized tests. Also, a multi-lingual's ability to focus on details of language that help to slow down cognitive decline.

There was nothing very interesting in Katherine P. Rankin's study of sarcasm - at least, nothing worth your important time. All she did was use an M.R.I. to find the place in the brain where the ability to detect sarcasm resides. But then, you probably already knew it was in the right parahippocampal gyrus.

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

Although many people are wary of how much people actually learn from television and screentime, many people are able to learn different languages through the use of TV and shows. The Nistel sisters were able to become proficient in Spanish and English from watching TV shows every day after school. They claim that they never paid attention in English class and did not mention about ever taking Spanish lessons.

When it comes to the popular naming of infectious diseases, xenophobia has long played a prominent role. Susan Sontag, in her 1988 work, AIDS and Its Metaphors (a follow-up to her extended essay from a decade earlier, Illness as Metaphor), observed that "there is a link between imagining disease and imagining foreignness. It lies perhaps in the very concept of wrong, which is archaically identical with the non-us, the alien." Cognizant of how geographic labels have been unfairly used in the past, the WHO (World Health Organization) introduced a new set of best practices for naming infectious diseases, in 2015. Geographic names are to be avoided in order to "avoid causing offense," though the WHO did not insist that already established names like Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, should be retroactively changed.

This article talks about the parts of the brain that help you produce and process language. It goes into detail about how the neural pathways are the same for bilinguals and what your brain does to process your second language.

Scientists say they have made an atlas of where words' meanings are located in the brain. The map shows that words are represented in different regions throughout the brain's outer layer. Moreover, the brains of different people map language in the same way: words with related meanings lit up similar parts of the brain. Words meanings could pop up in different places simultaneously. Hearing the word "top" caused regions associated with clothing and appearances to light up. But "top" could also stimulate a region associated with words related to numbers and measurements. UC Berkeley neuroscientist, Jack Gallant, who authored the study, says the findings contradict two beliefs nonscientists commonly have about the brain. First, that only the left hemisphere handles language. Second, that the brain has localized regions which handle specific tasks. Contrary to those ideas, he says, language and meaning are distributed. "It's not that there's one brain area and one function," he says. But for Gallant, the real surprise is that the meanings of words triggered the same brain regions across multiple people in his study.

Scientists say they have made an atlas of where words' meanings are located in the brain. The map shows that words are represented in different regions throughout the brain's outer layer. Moreover, the brains of different people map language in the same way.

Though smartphones seem ubiquitous in daily life, they are actually so new that researchers are just beginning to understand what the devices may do to the brain. Researchers say phones and social media not only serve a primitive need for connection but can also create powerful feedback loops. "People are carrying around a portable dopamine pump, and kids have basically been carrying it around for the last 10 years," said David Greenfield, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine and founder of The Center for Internet and Technology Addiction.

Negative thinking= detrimental both mentally and physically; it inhibits one's ability to bounce back from life's inevitable stresses. Negative feelings activate a region of the brain called the amygdala, which is involved in processing fear and anxiety and other emotions. Dr. Richard J. Davidson, a neuroscientist and founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, has shown that people in whom the amygdala recovers slowly from a threat are at greater risk for a variety of Health problems than those in whom it recovers quickly. Both he and Dr. Fredrickson and their colleagues have demonstrated that the brain is "plastic," or capable of generating new cells and pathways, and it is possible to train the circuitry in the brain to promote more positive responses. That is, a person can learn to be more positive by practicing certain skills that foster positivity. 8 suggested activities to help bolster those skills: 1.Do good things for other people. 2.Appreciate the world around you. 3.Develop and bolster relationships. 4.Establish goals that can be accomplished. 5.Learn something new. 6.Choose to accept yourself, flaws and all. 7.Practice resilience. 8.Practice mindfulness.

A new study, conducted by Dr. Catherine Birken, a pediatrician and scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Ontario, revealed the following: the more time children between the ages of six months and two years spent using handheld screens such as smartphones, tablets and electronic games, the more likely they were to experience speech delays. In the study, which involved nearly 900 children, parents reported the amount of time their children spent using screens in minutes per day at age 18 months. Researchers then used an infant toddler checklist, a validated screening tool, to assess the children's language development also at 18 months. They looked at a range of things, including whether the child uses sounds or words to get attention or help and puts words together, and how many words the child uses. Twenty percent of the children spent an average of 28 minutes a day using screens, the study found. Every 30-minute increase in daily screen time was linked to a 49% increased risk of what the researchers call expressive speech delay, which is using sounds and words. Commenting on the study, Michelle MacRoy-Higgins and Carlyn Kolker, both speech pathologists/therapists and co-authors of "Time to Talk: What You Need to Know About Your Child's Speech and Language Development," offered this advice: interact with your child. The best way to teach them language is by interacting with them, talking with them, playing with them, using different vocabulary, pointing things out to them and telling them stories.

I find this very relevant to us as teens because we do tend to have very selective hearing and memory, such that if we hear something that we don't like we just choose not to listen. I also found the information on optimism being very good for the body and I found it interesting that 80% of people are optimist even when they don't think so themselves.

Article provides a quick overview re: the neuroscience of positive thinking and its effect on emotional and physical health.

This article talks about how music is able to affect our mood. It is said that even sad music is able to lift someone's mood. However, sometimes sad music can also make people feel negative feelings. Also people who listened to happy or upbeat music were able to lift their moods in just two weeks