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The human voice appears to trigger pleasure circuits in the brains of typical kids, but not children with autism, a Stanford University team reports. The finding could explain why many children with autism seem indifferent to spoken words. The Stanford team used functional MRI to compare the brains of 20 children who had autism spectrum disorders and 19 typical kids. In typical kids there was a strong connection between areas that respond to the human voice and areas that release the feel-good chemical dopamine, but that connection was reduced in autistic children. Connections between voice areas and areas involved in emotion-related learning also were weaker, creating greater communication difficulties. The new study's suggestion that motivation is the problem could explain why speech often comes late to children with autism even though the brain circuit involved in processing spoken words seems to function normally; the reward circuitry isn't working the way it does in typical children.

Yes, caffeine helps. But new research shows that the moderate noise level in busy cafés also perks up your creative cognition. Global X/ Flickr PROBLEM: To optimize creativity, how quiet or noisy should your workspace be? METHODOLOGY: Researchers led by Ravi Mehta conducted five experiments to understand how ambient sounds affect creative cognition.

Dana Suskind, a University of Chicago pediatric otolaryngologist, states our exposure to rich language in the first three years of our lives is critical not just for our ability to pronounce long words but for our overall development and success. The 4 Ts are key points for parents and caretakers of small children: 1. Tune in: be interested in what your child is interested in 2. Talk more: talking more, using richer language, narrating your child's day. 3. Take turns: viewing your child as a conversational partner from day one. Babies are born to learn. 4. Turn off the technology: there is no substitute for real live human interaction.

Studies have proven that bilinguals are better at ignoring unnecessary words in a sentence. Since bilingual people are constantly sorting through one language and the other and picking which one to use and which one to ignore their brain is stimulated more than monolingual people. The monologuists' brains light up more than the bilinguals' brain in an fMRI scan. Researches said that this ment that the monologuists' brain had to work harder to do the same thing as the bilinguals.

An article that further elucidates ideas brought up in class about becoming bilingual at a young age. Interesting enough, I discovered this article from Descubre.com, my Spanish class' practice site.

New studies have found that brain activity follows a very strict protocol during sleep. The brain is constantly using a lot of energy; during sleep one of the things that energy is being used for is to maintain memories that may need to be called upon again.

"People deaf from birth may be able to reassign the area of their brain used for hearing to boost their sight, suggests a study."

This article discusses the importance of baby babble in language development.

The experimenters argue that a baby's vocalizations signal a state of focused attention, a readiness to learn language. When parents respond to babble by naming the object at hand, the argument goes, children are more likely to learn words. So if a baby looks at an apple and says, "Ba ba!" it's better to respond by naming the apple than by guessing, for example, "Do you want your bottle?"

Essay/study by Deborah Tannen: "So the key to why having sisters makes people happier - men as well as women - may lie not in the kind of talk they exchange but in the fact of talk. If men, like women, talk more often to their sisters than to their brothers, that could explain why sisters make them happier." See also discussion on Language Log: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2739 (they advise us to be wary of overstating the significance of the results)

very thorough study answering some of the questions we had in class today after reading the short Pennebaker article

scholarly journal article describes research in more depth about why writing about a recent break-up helps you get over it faster

"It's what you've been craving. Peaceful sleep without a struggle. That's what Lunesta is all about: helping most people fall asleep quickly, and stay asleep all through the night. It is easy to see that this text presents an argument directed towards getting the readers of the ad to buy Lunesta. However, it may be a little harder at first to see what the premises are that are put forward to support this conclusion, and what the form of the argument is. The argument evidently has some sort of structure, but it may not be apparent what that structure is. We begin by making a so-called key list of the statements that make up the explicit premises and conclusion of the argument."

"the researchers discovered, the more data-dense the average syllable is, the fewer of those syllables had to be spoken per second - and the slower the speech thus was. English, with a high information density of .91, is spoken at an average rate of 6.19 syllables per second. Mandarin, which topped the density list at .94, was the spoken slowpoke at 5.18 syllables per second. ... Despite those differences, at the end of, say, a minute of speech, all of the languages would have conveyed more or less identical amounts of information."

"The reason that the unusual fonts are effective is that it causes us to think more deeply about the material," a co-author of the study, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton, wrote in an e-mail. "But we are capable of thinking deeply without being subjected to unusual fonts. Think of it this way, you can't skim material in a hard to read font, so putting text in a hard-to-read font will force you to read more carefully."

I wonder how this might relate to second language learning. When one doesn't know the words, even if the font is markedly legible, reading is slower and more difficult. One would expect comprehension and retention to be better, but I doubt that is the case. Interesting article. Must be why wedding invitations get put into Olde English or ornate script typefaces -- so that folks will read the names more carefully.

Ha!