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"The Enduring Voices team is pleased to present these Talking Dictionaries, giving listeners around the world a chance to hear some of the most little-known sounds of human speech. Several communities are now offering the online record of their language to be shared by any interested person around the world. While you probably won't walk away from these Talking Dictionaries knowing how to speak a new language, you will encounter fascinating and beautiful sounds--forms of human speech you've never heard before--and through them, get a further glimpse into the rich diversity of culture and experience that humans have created in every part of the globe. "

"Our society is divided into castes based upon a supposed division between theoretical knowledge and practical skill. The college professor holds forth on television, as the plumber fumes about detached ivory tower intellectuals. The felt distinction between the college professor and the plumber is reflected in how we think about our own minds. Humans are thinkers, and humans are doers."

Some philosophers before Locke had suggested that it would be good to find the limits of the Understanding, but what Locke does is to carry out this project in detail. In the four books of the Essay Locke considers the sources and nature of human knowledge. Book I argues that we have no innate knowledge. (In this he resembles Berkeley and Hume, and differs from Descartes and Leibniz.) So, at birth, the human mind is a sort of blank slate on which experience writes. In Book II Locke claims that ideas are the materials of knowledge and all ideas come from experience. The term 'idea,' Locke tells us "…stands for whatsoever is the Object of the Understanding, when a man thinks" (Essay I, 1, 8, p. 47). Experience is of two kinds, sensation and reflection. One of these - sensation - tells us about things and processes in the external world. The other - reflection - tells us about the operations of our own minds. Reflection is a sort of internal sense that makes us conscious of the mental processes we are engaged in. Some ideas we get only from sensation, some only from reflection and some from both.

"It uses an "emotional engine" and a cloud-based artificial intelligence system that allows it to analyse gestures, expressions and voice tones. The firm said people could communicate with it "just like they would with friends and family" and it could perform various tasks. It will go on sale to the public next year for 198,000 yen ($1,930; £1,150). "People describe others as being robots because they have no emotions, no heart," Masayoshi Son, chief executive of Softbank, said at a press conference. "For the first time in human history, we're giving a robot a heart, emotions.""

"The long-held theory helped to explain a part of the hearing process called "adaptation," or how humans can hear everything from the drop of a pin to a jet engine blast with high acuity, without pain or damage to the ear. Its overturning could have significant impact on future research for treating hearing loss, said Anthony Ricci, PhD, the Edward C. and Amy H. Sewall Professor of Otolaryngology and senior author of the study."

"Platonists believe that there is a universal truth underlying all of mathematics. Formalists believe all of mathematics can be defined by a set of predefined rules. Ever wonder about the deeper significance of these two critical mathematical philosophies? Using thought experiments like the Allegory of the Cave and the Barber's Paradox, the great mathematics popularizer and author of Is God a Mathematician?, Mario Livio, untangles these two didactic ways of viewing the world and the very nature of human knowledge."

How the Mind Works By Steven Pinker Chapter One: Standard Equipment Why are there so many robots in fiction, but none in real life? I would pay a lot for a robot that could put away the dishes or run simple errands. But I will not have the opportunity in this century, and probably not in the next one either. There are, of course, robots that weld or spray-paint on assembly lines and that roll through laboratory hallways; my question is about the machines that walk, talk, see, and think, often better than their human masters. Since 1920, when Karel Capek coined the word robot in his play R.U.R., dramatists have freely conjured them up: Speedy, Cutie, and Dave in Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, Robbie in Forbidden Planet, the flailing canister in Lost in Space, the daleks in Dr. Who, Rosie the Maid in The Jetsons, Nomad in Star Trek, Hymie in Get Smart, the vacant butlers and bickering haberdashers in Sleeper, R2D2 and C3PO in Star Wars, the Terminator in The Terminator, Lieutenant Commander Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the wisecracking film critics in Mystery Science Theater 3000.

It's easy for us to ridicule the foolishness of people in the past who believed things that turned out to be absurdly false. We are horrified that the Aztecs would make human sacrifices to appease a volcano god. We laugh that people were afraid Columbus would sail off the edge of the earth. We are amazed that the people of Salem, Massachusetts would hang people for being witches and we are shocked that religious authorities would burn Giordano Bruno at the stake for teaching that the earth went around the sun. And we are particularly appalled by the hatred of the Nazis that enabled Hitler to murder millions.

"In delivering aid to drought-stricken California last week, President Obama and his aides cited the state as an example of what could be in store for much of the rest of the country as human-caused climate change intensifies. But in doing so, they were pushing at the boundaries of scientific knowledge about the relationship between climate change and drought. While a trend of increasing drought that may be linked to global warming has been documented in some regions, including parts of the Mediterranean and in the Southwestern United States, there is no scientific consensus yet that it is a worldwide phenomenon. Nor is there definitive evidence that it is causing California's problems."

"Crime dramas frequently depict detectives interrogating suspected criminals under bright lights to get the truth out of them. Now, a new study may lend credence to this tactic, as it suggests human emotion - both positive or negative - is experienced more intensely under bright lights."

In The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain, Tali Sharot argues that we have a neurobiological basis for imagining a positive future. "Humans," she writes, "do not hold a positivity bias on account of having read too many self-help books. Rather, optimism may be so essential to our survival that it is hardwired into our most complex organ, the brain."

Informative and compelling video about the Nocebo Effect

"Body language affects how others see us, but it may also change how we see ourselves. Social psychologist Amy Cuddy shows how "power posing" - standing in a posture of confidence, even when we don't feel confident - can affect testosterone and cortisol levels in the brain, and might even have an impact on our chances for success."

"Traditionally, faith and reason have each been considered to be sources of justification for religious belief. Because both can purportedly serve this same epistemic function, it has been a matter of much interest to philosophers and theologians how the two are related and thus how the rational agent should treat claims derived from either source. Some have held that there can be no conflict between the two-that reason properly employed and faith properly understood will never produce contradictory or competing claims-whereas others have maintained that faith and reason can (or even must) be in genuine contention over certain propositions or methodologies. Those who have taken the latter view disagree as to whether faith or reason ought to prevail when the two are in conflict. Kierkegaard, for instance, prioritizes faith even to the point that it becomes positively irrational, while Locke emphasizes the reasonableness of faith to such an extent that a religious doctrine's irrationality-conflict with itself or with known facts-is a sign that it is unsound. Other thinkers have theorized that faith and reason each govern their own separate domains, such that cases of apparent conflict are resolved on the side of faith when the claim in question is, say, a religious or theological claim, but resolved on the side of reason when the disputed claim is, for example, empirical or logical. Some relatively recent philosophers, most notably the logical positivists, have denied that there is a domain of thought or human existence rightly governed by faith, asserting instead that all meaningful statements and ideas are accessible to thorough rational examination. This has presented a challenge to religious thinkers to explain how an admittedly nonrational or transrational form of language can hold meaningful cognitive content."

"Next time you tell a story to someone, don't be upset if they don't believe you, because what you may not know, is that occasionally you can't even believe your own memories!  Yes, that's correct, even your own memories can deceive you.  The concept of false memories is well supported in scientific research.  People generally think of their memories as something like an accurate recording that documents and stores everything that happens with perfect accuracy.  In reality, human memory is very prone to inaccuracies."

"There's been a range of interesting reactions to my piece on Pete Seeger's question about whether confidence in science as a source of human progress is underpinned by fact or faith. Some readers may have missed that the discussion was not about confidence in science as an enterprise, but confidence that benefits would always accrue to society from applications of scientific knowledge. "

"In recent years anthropologists have begun to point out that sensory perception is culturally specific. "Sensory perception," Constance Classen, the author of "The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch," says, "is a cultural as well as physical act." It's a controversial claim made famous by Marshall McLuhan's insistence that nonliterate societies were governed by spoken words and sound, while literate societies experienced words visually and so were dominated by sight. Few anthropologists would accept that straightforwardly today. But more and more are willing to argue that sensory perception is as much about the cultural training of attention as it is about biological capacity."