Keeping in touch is no longer about face to face, but instead screen to screen, highlighted by the fact that more than 1 billion people are using Facebook every day. Social media has become second nature -- but what impact is this having on our brain? "In a recent study, researchers at the UCLA brain mapping center used an fMRI scanner to image the brains of 32 teenagers as they used a bespoke social media app resembling Instagram. By watching the activity inside different regions of the brain as the teens used the app, the team found certain regions became activated by "likes", with the brain's reward center becoming especially active." This article goes into depth on how social media like instagram is changing our brain. It shows us what parts of our brain are getting stimulated when we use social media! It also talks about peer influence, social learning, and reward circuitry.
This article talks about different dialects in America and how American dialects are continuing to diverge, primarily with their vowel sounds. In particular, cities in the Great Lakes have been observed as revolutionizing the sound of English. Linguists have observed what's called a "chain shift," where by changing one sound, such as the short "a" sound, would have an effect in changing multiple sounds and therefore altering the Northern Cities dialects. This article goes on to outline the history behind these changes, the unawareness factor people from these cities experience, the racial aspect of how this dialect is diverging, and other points.
Over the years, we have found that our words come from different parts of the brain. In addition the part of the brain which we use to formulate thoughts into sentences, we also use the part of the brain that deals with emotion when we swear. Researchers discovered that patients with neurodegenerative diseases like a stroke, were still able to swear. Studying patients with Tourette syndrome have also proved that swearing uses many areas of the brain. Since swearing involves the emotional part of the brain, we know that profanity is used to express intense emotions.
Regular speech is generated in the left hemisphere, in an area of the brain close to the surface. The cerebral cortex, or "gray matter," is often associated with higher thought processes such as thought and action. "It's sophisticated," says Bergen, "and comports with the idea of what it means to be human."
Swearing, on the other hand, is generated much deeper in the brain, in regions that are older and more primitive in evolutionary terms, says Bergen. These regions are often found in the right hemisphere in the brain's emotional center, the limbic system."These are words that express intense emotions-surprise, frustration, anger, happiness, fear," says psychologist and linguist Timothy Jay, who began studying profanity more than 40 years ago."[Swearing] serves my need to vent, and it conveys my emotions to other people very effectively and symbolically," he says. "Where other animals like to bite and scratch each other, I can say 'f*ck you' and you get my contempt-I don't have to do it physically."
Profanity serves other purposes, too. Lovers use it as part of enticing sex talk; athletes and soldiers use it to forge camaraderie; and people in positions of power use it to reaffirm their superiority. Profanity is even used as a celebratory expression, says Adams, citing "F*ck yeah!" as an example.
The meaning of a profanity, like any other word, changes with time, culture and context. While swear words have been around since Greek and Roman times, and maybe even earlier, the types of things people consider offensive have changed. "People of the Middle Ages had no problems talking about sex or excrement, that was not their hang-up," Adams explains. "Their hang-up was talking about God disrespectfully...so that was what a profanity was."
The left hemisphere of the brain is responsible for emotions like happiness, sadness, and anger. The part of the brain that we use to formulate thoughts into sentences is that part that we also use to deal with emotion when we swear. Different studies done on people found with brain issues/diseases allowed researchers to understand that profanity is used to express the extreme emotions.
This article talks about how even though learning how to program a computer seems like learning a new language, computer language is actually processed through a different area of the brain than when language is processed. It says that it activates the multiple demand network, which is also activated by complex cognitive tasks such as solving math problems or crossword puzzles. However, it appears to rely on different parts of the network than math or logic problems do, which suggests that coding does not precisely replicate the cognitive demands of mathematics either. The article says that researchers didn't find any regions that appear to be exclusively devoted to programming. They also suggest that understanding computer code cannot be categorized as a language-based or math-based skill. Instead, they think it might require a combination of both skills, even though the brain regions don't reflect it.
Researchers from Brown University and King's College London have uncovered new details about how brain anatomy influences language development in young kids. Using advanced MRI, they find that different parts of the brain appear to be important for language development at different ages.
Their study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, found that the explosion of language acquisition that typically occurs in children between 2 and 4 years old is not reflected in substantial changes in brain asymmetry. Structures that support language ability tend to be localized on the left side of the brain. For that reason, the researchers expected to see more myelin -- the fatty material that insulates nerve fibers and helps electrical signals zip around the brain -- developing on the left side in children entering the critical period of language acquisition. Surprisingly, anatomy did not predict language very well between the ages of 2 and 4, when language ability increases quickly. "What we actually saw was that the asymmetry of myelin was there right from the beginning, even in the youngest children in the study, around the age of 1," said the study's lead author, Jonathan O'Muircheartaigh, the Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at King's College London. "Rather than increasing, those asymmetries remained pretty constant over time." That finding, the researchers say, underscores the importance of environment during this critical period for language.
While asymmetry in myelin remained constant over time, the relationship between specific asymmetries and language ability did change, the study found. To investigate that relationship, the researchers compared the brain scans to a battery of language tests given to each child in the study. The comparison showed that asymmetries in different parts of the brain appear to predict language ability at different ages.
"Regions of the brain that weren't important to successful language in toddlers became more important i
Abstract: Self-affirmation theory posits that people are motivated to maintain a positive self-view and that threats to perceived self-competence are met with resistance. When threatened, self-affirmations can restore self-competence by allowing individuals to reflect on sources of self-worth, such as core values. Many questions exist, however, about the underlying mechanisms associated with self-affirmation. We examined the neural mechanisms of self-affirmation with a task developed for use in a functional magnetic resonance imaging environment. Results of a region of interest analysis demonstrated that participants who were affirmed (compared with unaffirmed participants) showed increased activity in key regions of the brain's self-processing (medial prefrontal cortex + posterior cingulate cortex) and valuation (ventral striatum + ventral medial prefrontal cortex) systems when reflecting on future-oriented core values (compared with everyday activities). Furthermore, this neural activity went on to predict changes in sedentary behavior consistent with successful affirmation in response to a separate physical activity intervention. These results highlight neural processes associated with successful self-affirmation, and further suggest that key pathways may be amplified in conjunction with prospection.
Main reasons places develop their "local tongue" is by geography on who owns what or if that place is very isolated from others. If different places don't come in contact with each other they will have an independent growth and make their own language.
This webpage, associated with a 2005 PBS 3-hour program of the same name, addresses several Words R Us Related issues, including African American English, perspectives on written & spoken English, regional dialects, Spanish & Chicano English, communicative choices & linguistic style, prescriptionist vs. descriptionist philosophies towards language, etymology, and slang. It also has hyperlinks to various credible academic sources for applied linguistics.
Babies who engage in musical play may have an easier time picking up language skills, suggests a new study that is the first in young babies to examine differences in brain regions involved in detecting sound patterns.
Dozens of countries, representing a wide range of languages, vie for the Eurovision song contest every year, but English has been by far the most dominant tongue, with 26 victories. So this year, Spain, which has not won since 1969, decided: If you can't beat them, join them. Spain's Eurovision entry will be sung entirely in English. This has sparked debate between people who embrace English as the language that will relate to more people and those who want Spain's entry to represent Spanish language and culture.
SINGAPORE - Is the government's war on Singlish finally over? Our wacky, singsong creole may seem like the poor cousin to the island's four official languages, but years of state efforts to quash it have only made it flourish. Now even politicians and officials are using it.
Re " A Dreaded School Test in France Becomes a Tool of Integration " (Fontenay-sous-Bois Journal, May 12): Several factors contribute to the necessity of retaining the dreaded dictation ( dict ée) as an essential tool in teaching the French language.
The brains of adolescents are notoriously more receptive to short-term rewards and peer approval, which can lead to risky behavior. But researchers and educators are noticing that young people are also more sensitive to notions of social justice and autonomy. Teenage rebellion can be virtuous - even wholesome - depending on the situation. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that teenagers make wiser choices if they are encouraged to reimagine healthy behavior as an act of defiance.
This article offers brief insight into the two types of accents, 'foreign' and 'regional,' and the difference in sound pronunciation between people from different areas.
Brain imaging studies have explored the neural mechanisms of recovery in adults following acquired disorders and, more recently, childhood developmental disorders. However, the neural systems underlying adult rehabilitation of neurobiologically based learning disabilities remain unexplored, despite their high incidence. Here we characterize the differences in brain activity during a phonological manipulation task before and after a behavioral intervention in adults with developmental dyslexia. Phonologically targeted training resulted in performance improvements in tutored compared to nontutored dyslexics, and these gains were associated with signal increases in bilateral parietal and right perisylvian cortices. Our findings demonstrate that behavioral changes in tutored dyslexic adults are associated with (1) increased activity in those left-hemisphere regions engaged by normal readers and (2) compensatory activity in the right perisylvian cortex. Hence, behavioral plasticity in adult developmental dyslexia involves two distinct neural mechanisms, each of which has previously been observed either for remediation of developmental or acquired reading disorders.
Like a human's brain, a dog's brain responds to the meaning of a word and how the word is said. And like with a human's brain, the dog's left hemisphere reacts to meaning and the right hemisphere reacts to intonation. In the study, words were said to dogs in positive and neutral tones, but only positive words spoken in a positive tone prompted strong activity in the brain's reward center. This study suggested that non-primates could process meaning and emotion long before humans could talk.
In relation to the current election that just passed, it was pretty obvious that there was a huge disconnect between two opposing sides. Words of frustration and anger flooded newsprints and social media. In the past, researchers found that there was a curious phenomenon in known as "positive feedback", which refers to people's tendency to use more positive words than negative words. In recent years, Google Books and the New York Times partnered to disprove this phenomenon. Both major print companies forged through tons of texts and found that 16.2 million of those texts contained negative language. They also found that negative words were used more frequently during times of unemployment, poverty, inflation rates, wartime casualties and political tension. More research has been conducted by psychological scientist including William Hamilton and Mark Liberman. Shockingly, they found that events like these were being triggered more often and positive language has decreased in the last 200 years.
This article is pretty self-explanatory based on the article - it talks about how monkeys' vocal cords and bodies are physiologically able to talk and make distinct sounds. However, monkeys lack the brain circuits used by humans to learn sounds, and the special nerve sets humans use to control the shape of our vocal tracts.
"IT IS A SPECTATOR SPORT to look at someone else's books, if not an act of voyeurism or armchair psychology," wrote Henry Petroski in " The Book on the Bookshelf." Yet when the books don't belong to an individual, but rather to a hotel or a bar, it is not armchair psychology - it is an invitation to a chance encounter.
