Scientific American - Language & Linguistics

Readers Respond on "Do Parents Matter?"--And More...

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:00:00 EST

Parents and Peers As a psychologist very familiar with the research, I think in “ Do Parents Matter? ” Judith Harris is conflating personality and behavior, which are two different concepts. Personality has more to do with genetic traits related to mood and energy (which plenty of research indicates are strongly influenced by genetics). Behavior, on the other hand, depends on context and is guided by laws of behaviorism--that is, reinforcement principles. If parents do (or do not) provide reinforcement for specific types of behavior, you will either see or not see those behaviors. Likewise, certain behaviors will be reinforced in the classroom by teachers.

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War Is Peace: Can Science Fight Media Disinformation?

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:00:00 EST

When I saw the statement repeated online that theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking of the University of Cambridge would be dead by now if he lived in the U.K. and had to depend on the National Health Service (he, of course, is alive and working in the U.K., where he always has), I reflected on something I had written a dozen years ago, in one of my first published commentaries:

“The increasingly blatant nature of the nonsense uttered with impunity in public discourse is chilling. Our democratic society is imperiled as much by this as any other single threat, regardless of whether the origins of the nonsense are religious fanaticism, simple ignorance or personal gain.”

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Foreign Afflictions: Mental Disorders across Country Borders

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:00:00 EST

Let us start with a little quiz. How many of these conditions have you heard of?

Taijin kyofusho , hikikomori , hwa-byung , or qi-gong psychotic reaction.

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Ability to Guess Others' Thoughts Tied to Language Proficiency

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:00:00 EST

What’s this guy thinking? Does he know what I know? Most of us develop the ability to make inferences about what other people might be thinking, the hallmark of “theory of mind,” at age four. Scientists have long known that the acquisition of language plays a role in this process, but so far it had been unclear whether social experience could substitute for it. A new study suggests it cannot.

Jennie Pyers of Wellesley College and her colleagues studied deaf adults in Nicaragua. Some of the participants had learned an early, rudimentary form of Nicaraguan sign language (NSL), whereas others were fluent in a more sophisticated form of NSL that included mental state terms, such as “know” and “think.” Pyers and her team had all signers undergo a so-called false-belief test in which signers looked at a sequence of pictures showing two boys playing in a room and storing a toy underneath a bed. After one of the boys leaves the room, the other moves the toy to a different location. Study participants then had to choose between two pictures to complete the series: the first showed the returning boy looking for the toy in its original location on reentering the room, and the second showed him looking in its new location.

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The Roots of Language

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:08 EST

One of the lingering challenges in cognitive psychology is the evolution of language. Even though it's so much a part of what it means to be human.

But a new clue to language's early formation comes from chimpanzee behavior.

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Your Brain on Books

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Stanislas Dehaene holds the chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology at the Collège de France, and he is also the director of the INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit at NeuroSpin, France’s most advanced neuroimaging research center. He is best known for his research into the brain basis of numbers, popularized in his book, “The Number Sense.” In his new book, “Reading in the Brain,” he describes his quest to understand an astounding feat that most of us take for granted: translating marks on a page (or a screen) into language. He answered questions recently from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. [More]

MIND Reviews: Shaken: Journey into the Mind of a Parkinson's Patient

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:00:00 EST

DVDs Shaken: Journey into the Mind of a Parkinson’s Patient [More]

Calendar: MIND events in November and December

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 09:00:00 EST

NOVEMBER

Dementia, you thief [More]

Why We Worry (preview)

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:00:00 EST

The young girl wanted to unburden herself about her problem. She told her doctor that she worried excessively and that she felt overwhelmed by these thoughts. One memory that she described to Douglas Mennin, director of the Yale Anxiety and Mood Services at Yale University, was particularly telling. Her grandmother had shared intense feelings about the recent passing of a good friend. As the young girl listened, her mind wandered to thoughts of her grandmother dying. The worry soon spiraled into concerns about the girl’s own death. She became so disturbed, she cut short her visit to her grandmother and ran home.

Psychologists believe that worry, defined as a person’s negative thoughts about a future event, evolved as a constructive problem-solving behavior. But excessive fretting--as happened with the girl--does more harm than good. Chronic worriers operate under the misperception that their overthinking and attempts at controlling every situation allow them to problem-solve and plan for the future. Instead their thought pattern hinders cognitive processing and also causes overstimulation of emotion- and fear-processing areas in the brain. The hypervigilance that is the result can lead to cardiovascular problems, ultimately rendering the body unable to cope properly with stress.

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Ask the Brains: Why Do We Have Trouble Facing Our Credit Cards the "Right" Way?

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:00:00 EST

Why do most customers at my bookstore have trouble understanding my instructions to swipe their debit cards with the magnetic stripe “toward me?” Almost everyone positions their card the wrong way, then asks in confusion, “Stripe toward me?”--meaning themselves. What is causing everyone to make the same mistake? --Michael Manchester, Aylmer, Ontario

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Babies Already Have an Accent

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:51:08 EST

[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]

How can you tell the difference between a French baby and a German baby? No, it’s not that one is wearing a saucy little beret while the other is tucked into tiny pair of lederhosen. Well, maybe that’s part of it. But a new study in the journal Current Biology shows that the babies actually sound different. Because the melody of an infant’s cry matches its mother tongue. [More]

MIND Reviews: The Human Spark

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:00:00 EST

TELEVISION The Human Spark [More]

MIND Reviews: Brainy Gifts

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:00:00 EST

Catch Some Slow Waves Zeo sleep monitor ($399) [More]

Newborns may start honing their mother tongue with their first cries

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:33:00 EST

The cry of newborn babies may seem like nothing more than inescapable shrills, but they could be infants' first attempts to imitate the language they hear while in the womb. [More]

True Love: How to Find It (preview)

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:00:00 EST

Adapted from the book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives , by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler. Copyright © 2009 by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. http://www.connectedthebook.com/

Nicholas and his wife, Erika, like to joke that they had an arranged marriage, South Asia–style. Although they lived within four blocks of each other for two years and were both students at Harvard, their paths never crossed. Erika had to go all the way to Bangladesh so that Nicholas could find her. In the summer of 1987 he went to Washington, D.C., where he had grown up and gone to high school, to care for his ailing mother. He was a medical student, single and, he foolishly thought, not ready for a serious relationship. His old high school friend, Nasi, was also home for the summer. Nasi’s girlfriend, Bemy, who had come to know Nicholas well enough that her gentle teasing was a source of amusement for all of them, was also there. She had, as it turned out, just returned from a year in rural Bangladesh, doing community development work.

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Will E.T. Look Like Us?

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:00:00 EST

What are the odds that intelligent, technically advanced aliens would look anything like the ones in films, with an emaciated torso and limbs, spindly fingers and a bulbous, bald head with large, almond-shaped eyes? What are the odds that they would even be humanoid? In a YouTube video, produced by Josh Timonen of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, I argue that the chances are close to zero ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKAXrmkx12g ). Richard Dawkins himself made this interesting observation in a private communication after viewing it:

I would agree with [Shermer] in betting against aliens being bipedal primates, and I think the point is worth making, but I think he greatly overestimates the odds against. [University of Cambridge paleontologist] Simon Conway Morris, whose authority is not to be dismissed, thinks it positively likely that aliens would be, in effect, bipedal primates. [Harvard University biologist] Ed Wilson gave at least some time to the speculation that, if it had not been for the end-Cretaceous catastrophe, dinosaurs might have produced something like the attached [referring to paleontologist Dale A. Russell’s illustrated evolutionary projection of how a bipedal dinosaur might have evolved into a reptilian humanoid].

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Dangerous Liaisons: How to Deal with a Drama Queen

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:00:00 EST

Sam paged me at 9 p.m., crying. It had started with his hair, which he was convinced was falling out. And although his work as a teacher’s aide had “filled him with love and joy,” he was sure his boss had given him a nasty look at the lunch break, and he felt utterly sick inside. Later Sam had phoned his partner, who had seemed distant. Afraid he was about to be dumped, Sam locked himself in the staff bathroom and cried for almost an hour, failing to finish his work and preventing others from using the facilities.

Sam is a drama queen--a person who reacts to everyday events with excessive emoton and behaves in theatrical, attention-grabbing ways. This type is the friend who derails a casual lunch to tell you a two-hour story about the devastating fight she had with her partner or the co-worker who constantly obsesses about how he is about to lose his job and needs your support to make it through the day. The drama queen worships you one minute and despises you the next, based on overreactions to minor events.

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How the Brain Reveals Why We Buy

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 12:35:00 EST

Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from Mindfield: How Brain Science Is Changing Our World by Lone Frank , to be released in the U.S. November 10. [More]

Rational and Irrational Thought: The Thinking That IQ Tests Miss (preview)

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:00:00 EST

No doubt you know several folks with perfectly respectable IQs who just don’t seem all that sharp. The behavior of such people tells us that we are missing something important by treating intelligence as if it encompassed all cognitive abilities. I coined the term “dysrationalia” (analogous to “dyslexia”), meaning the inability to think and behave rationally despite having adequate intelligence, to draw attention to a large domain of cognitive life that intelligence tests fail to assess. Although most people recognize that IQ tests do not measure important mental faculties, we behave as if they do. We have an implicit assumption that intelligence and rationality go together--or else why would we be so surprised when smart people do foolish things?

It is useful to get a handle on dysrationalia and its causes because we are beset by problems that require increasingly more accurate, rational responses. In the 21st century, shallow processing can lead physicians to choose less effective medical treatments, can cause people to fail to adequately assess risks in their environment, can lead to the misuse of information in legal proceedings, and can make parents resist vaccinating their children. Millions of dollars are spent on unneeded projects by government and private industry when decision makers are dysrationalic, billions are wasted on quack remedies, unnecessary surgery is performed and costly financial misjudgments are made.

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Dogs Can't Smell a Liar

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:16:08 EST

[ The following is an exact transcript of this podcast. ]

You can teach your dog to lie down. But you can’t teach him to lie, or to know when you’re lying. Because a new report shows that Spot can’t spot deception. The study’s in the journal Behavioural Processes . [More]