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"Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific information. ... The neuroscience information had a particularly striking effect on nonexperts' judgments of bad explanations, masking otherwise salient problems in these explanations."

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.

About the Author Dr. Reena Gupta is the Director of the Voice and Swallowing Center at OHNI. Dr. Gupta has devoted her practice to the care of patients with voice and swallowing problems. She is board certified in otolaryngology and laryngology and fellowship trained in laryngology, specializing in the care of the professional voice.

This article goes over the subtleties of sarcasm and why at times it has negative effects

Swearing like a sailor helps to lessen pain. Study shows that swearing and the effect of the brain helps to lessen pain. This is a book so you might have to download a PDF.

Discusses the purposes of apologizing and the effects of apologizing and not apologizing.

Since a large number of students listen to music while doing homework, this article explains on whether or not music is effective or detrimental to studying.

Have you ever experienced mind-numbing cold? Or have you ever felt like it was so hot you could barely think? Believe it or not, these expressions are more than just idioms. Research shows that shifts in core body temperature caused by extreme heat or cold can have significant effects not only on mood but also on cognition.

This video is an experiment of gratitude. It experimented the effects expressing gratitude with words, has on happiness.

This article captures the many distractions that humans face in the 21st century. Technology has a variety of pros as well as cons. It has allowed us to communicate more effectively and efficiently. However, technology has also brought with it a decreased in work efficiency, it has altered brain patterns, and may potentially exacerbate aging.

This article discusses the effect of music education on academic performance and language.

"Mondegreen" means a misheard word or phrase that makes sense in your head, but is, in fact, entirely incorrect. Hearing is a two-step process. First, there is the auditory perception itself: the physics of sound waves making their way through your ear and into the auditory cortex of your brain. And then there is the meaning-making: the part where your brain takes the noise and imbues it with significance. That was a car alarm. That's a bird. Mondegreens occur when, somewhere between the sound and the meaning, communication breaks down. You hear the same acoustic information as everyone else, but your brain doesn't interpret it the same way.

13 year old Trisha Prabhu of Naperville, IL, is a finalist in Google Science Fair 2014. Prabhu's project focuses on preventing cyber-bullying. Excerpted from her project summary statement: "Cyberbullying may result in depression, low self-esteem and in rare cases suicides in adolescent victims(12-18). Research shows that, over 50% of adolescents and teens have been bullied online and 10 to 20% experience it regularly. Research also shows that adolescents that post mean/hurtful messages may not understand the potential consequences of their actions because the pre-frontal cortex, the area of brain that controls reasoning and decision-making isn't developed until age 25. I hypothesized that if adolescents(ages 12-18) were provided an alert mechanism that suggested them to re-think their decision if they expressed willingness to post a mean/hurtful message on social media, the number of mean/hurtful messages adolescents will be willing to post would be lesser than adolescents that are not provided with such an alert mechanism. In order to check if my hypothesis was true, I created two Software systems: 1) Baseline 2) Rethink. "Rethink" system measured number of mean/hurtful messages adolescents were willing to post after being alerted to rethink, while the "Baseline" system measured the same without the alert. Results proved that adolescents were 93.43% less willing to post mean/hurtful messages using a "Rethink" system compared with "Baseline" system without alert."

Parents teach their children to lie. The teaching process is subtle but just as effective as if they had sent their children to formal classes in deception. How many times have parents told their kids "Look me in the eye and then tell me what you did?"

Research demonstrates that liars maintain more deliberate eye contact than do truthful people.

The effects on women because of the commonness of male gendered words

Anne Curzan, an English professor and linguist at the University of Michigan, examines texting from a descriptionist perspective. Curzan notes that that effective electronically-mediated communication (EMC) users have a shared system of rules and a detailed set of conventions that moves real-time conversation into written form.

Amusia is a deficit in musical memory, recognition, and in pitch processing that people can be born with or acquire through brain damage. Some people may think of themselves as being "tone-deaf", but most of these "bad" singers are just that. People with amusia are so unable to hear tones that they even struggle to differentiate between questions and statements when spoken. Language, like music, uses sound to convey meaning; be it a story, or simply an emotion. In fact, music and spoken language use many of the same structural elements: pitch, duration, intensity and melodic contour, to name a few. Melodic contour is the pattern in which pitch changes from high to low over time. This contouring of pitch is often used to express emotion in music. The emotional effect of contouring is appreciated across many cultures and across many age groups. In speech, melodic contour is created by intonation, which allows us to place emphasis upon certain words and distinguish the purpose of the sentence; e.g. whether it is a question, statement or command. These comparisons provide evidence for the overlap of brain areas and mechanisms that underlie speech and music processing. In addition, the storing of sound patterns in short-term memory is also overlapping for both language and music.

The effects of listening to music while studying are mixed and depend upon the type of music you listen to as well as the degree to which it distracts you.

Talks about the correlation between trolling and the Online Disinhibition Effect