Scientific American - Language & Linguistics

MIND Reviews: The Other Brain

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EST

The Other Brain: From Dementia to Schizophrenia, How New Discoveries about the Brain Are Revolutionizing Medicine and Science by R. Douglas Fields. [More]

Auto-dicted: Sans a Major Diversion of U.S. Transportation Dollars to Mass Transit, Urban Traffic Congestion May Not Ease

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:00:00 EST

Dear EarthTalk: Short of massive efforts to build a public transportation infrastructure, which doesn’t appear likely anytime soon, what is being done to address traffic congestion, which is reaching absurd levels almost everywhere? --John Daniels, Baltimore

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Why is talking with gestures easier than talking without them?

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EST

Why is talking along with gestures so much easier than trying to talk without gesturing? -- Lionel Halvorsen, Cornith, Tex.

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Chimps Talk with Their Hands

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EST

The origins of language have long been a mystery, but mounting evidence hints that our unique linguistic abilities could have evolved from gestural communication in our ancestors. Such gesturing may also explain why most people are right-handed.

Researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center recently examined captive chimpanzees and found that most of them predominantly used their right hand when communicating with one another--for example, when greeting another chimp by extending an arm. The animals did not show this hand preference for noncommunicative actions, such as wiping their noses. Such lateralized hand use suggests that chimpanzees have a system in their left brain hemisphere that is coupled to the production of communicative gestures, says study author William Hopkins. The same cerebral hemisphere is host to most language functions in humans, which hints that an ancestral gestural system could have been the precursor for language, he says.

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Belief in the Brain

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EST

Religious belief may seem to be a unique psychological experience, but a growing body of research shows that thinking about religion is no different from thinking about secular things--at least from the standpoint of the brain. In the first imaging study to compare religious and nonreligious thoughts, evaluating the truth of either type of statement was found to involve the same regions of the brain.

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, used functional MRI to evaluate brain activity in 15 devout Christians and 15 nonbelievers as the volunteers assessed the truth or falsity of a series of statements, some of which were religious (“angels exist”) and others nonreligious (“Alexander the Great was a very famous military ruler”). They found that when a subject believed a statement--whether it was religious or not--activity appeared in an area called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is an area associated with emotions, rewards and self-representation.

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Accents Trump Skin Color

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EST

Children, like adults, use three visible cues--race, gender and age--to arrange their social world. They prefer to make friends with kids similar to them on these traits. New research shows that verbal accents may be equally important in guiding youngsters’ social decisions--in fact, accents may be even more important than race.

Working at Harvard University, developmental psychologist Katherine D. Kinzler and her colleagues first showed American five-year-olds photographs of different children paired with audio clips of voices and asked which ones they preferred as a friend: a child who spoke English, one who spoke French, or one who spoke English with a French accent. Even though the subjects understood the French-accented English, they were almost four times more likely to choose the native English speaker as a friend.

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MIND Reviews: Temple Grandin

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EST

Temple Grandin HBO Films [More]

The Brain and the Written Word (preview)

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EST

Stanislas Dehaene holds the chair of experimental cognitive psychology at the Collège de France, and he is also director of the INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit at NeuroSpin, the most advanced neuroimaging research center in France. Dehaene is best known for his research into the cerebral basis of numbers, popularized in his book The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics (Oxford University Press, 1999). In his new book, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention (Viking Adult, 2009), 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. Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook recently talked with Dehaene about how the art of reading reveals the fundamental relationship between our cultural inventions and our evolved brain.

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND : How did you become interested in the neuroscience of reading?

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Be Sad and Succeed

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EST

Next time you find yourself in a bad mood, don’t try to put on a happy face--instead tackle a project that has been stymieing you. [More]

Accentuating the Negative

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EST

Consider the following statements: “War continues.” “No sign of peace.” Does our brain treat these two sentences differently, despite their identical meaning? A new study suggests it does. [More]

MIND Reviews: The Perfect Swarm

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 09:00:00 EST

The Perfect Swarm: The Science of Complexity in Everyday Life by Len Fisher. Basic Books, 2009

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Busting Big Myths in Popular Psychology (preview)

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 09:00:00 EST

Parts of this article are adapted from 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behavior , by Scott O. Lilienfeld, Steven Jay Lynn, John Ruscio and Barry L. Beyerstein. Copyright © Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

Popular psychology has become a fixture in our society, and its aphorisms, truths and half-truths permeate our everyday existence. A casual stroll through our neighborhood bookstore reveals dozens of self-help, relationship, recovery and addiction books that serve up heaping portions of advice for steering us along life’s rocky road. About 3,500 self-help books are published every year, and numerous new Internet sites on mental health sprout up every month.

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Why We Return to Bad Habits

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 09:00:00 EST

If you have ever lost weight on a diet only to gain it all back, you were probably as perplexed as you were disappointed. You felt certain that you had conquered bad eating habits--so what caused the backslide? New research suggests that you may have succumbed to a cognitive distortion called restraint bias. Bolstered by an inflated sense of impulse control, we overexpose ourselves to temptation and fall prey to impulsiveness.

Northwestern University psychologists first asked a group of smokers to take a self-control test. Unknown to the participants, the test was a pretense to randomly label half the group as having high self-control and half as having low self-control. After hearing their supposed result, participants played a game that involved watching the 2003 movie Coffee and Cigarettes while challenging themselves with one of four levels of temptation, each with its own cash reward. They could keep a cigarette unlit in their mouths (for the most money), unlit in their hand, on a nearby desk or (for the lowest reward) in another room. Participants earned a prize only if they avoided smoking for the entire 95-minute film.

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Multimedia Memory Boost

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 09:00:00 EST

Listen and Learn Learning by listening to information as we sleep has long been a mainstay of science fiction--and wishful thinking--but a new study suggests the idea may not be so farfetched. What we hear during deep sleep can strengthen memories of information learned while awake.

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Calendar: MIND events in March and April

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 09:00:00 EST

MARCH

1 How does the human brain process fear? Neuroscientist Joseph E. LeDoux of New York University will reveal what we know about the biological underpinnings of fear and memory during a lecture hosted by the Oregon Health & Science University. The lecture is part of a series leading up to Brain Awareness Week (March 15–21), which inspires events worldwide. This year O.H.S.U. is hosting seven weeks of activities, including talks by leading brain researchers and science writers such as Jonah Lehrer (a contributing editor for Scientific American Mind), a workshop for teachers, a brain fair and a scientific meeting. [More]

Numbers Wars: School Battles Heat Up Again in the Traditional versus Reform-Math Debate

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 08:00:00 EST

Over the past 20 years educators have fought over the best way to teach numbers to kids. Advocates of traditional math tout the practice of algorithms and teacher-centered learning, whereas reform-math proponents focus on underlying concepts and student inquiry. In the face of continued declining scores in the U.S., these so-called math wars have heated up recently with the circulation of petitions, the release of contested curriculum guidelines and, in one case, the filing of a lawsuit. At stake is the ability of American high school graduates to perform everyday math tasks and compete in a global economy.

The war began in 1989, when the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) released a set of standards that reshaped a generation of instruction. Instead of having students memorize formulas and compute problems such as adding fractions, advocates of reform math encouraged students to develop their own visual representations of math concepts and use calculators to solve numerical tasks.

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A Sensory Fix for Problems in School (preview)

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 09:00:00 EST

To succeed in school, children must master the “three R’s”--reading, writing and arithmetic--but not all students readily grasp these basic skills. Among English-speaking children, an estimated 2 to 15 percent have trouble reading or spelling, problems broadly classified as dyslexia. From 1 to 7 percent struggle to do math, a disability known as dyscalculia. Statistics vary; dyslexia appears to be more common, for example, among English speakers than among speakers of highly phonetic languages, such as German or Italian. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that at least one child in most elementary school classes in the U.S. suffers from dyslexia or dyscalculia.

These learning disabilities defy easy explanation. Neither is the result of faulty eyesight or hearing, both of which can also delay language acquisition but are easily corrected using glasses or hearing aids. Instead children with dyslexia and dyscalculia have working sensory organs, apparently normal sensory and motor development and, sometimes, above-average intelligence.

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Start Science Sooner

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 08:00:00 EST

Good science education at the earliest grades is supremely important, but in most classrooms it gets short shrift. Studies have found that children in kindergarten are already forming negative views about science that could cast a shadow across their entire educational careers. When researchers interviewed kindergartners from typical classrooms, barely a third of the children showed any knowledge of science, whether from school or other sources. Many children said that science was for older kids and adults, not kindergartners like them. They talked of science being about magic potions or dangerous chemicals; they said science is hard, science is not interesting, and “I am not good at science.” Ask a room of five-year-olds to draw a scientist, and you will likely get lots of pictures of white-coated men in laboratories. Furthermore, even before first grade, fewer girls than boys say they like science.

It is perilous to generalize about anything in the U.S. education system--quality varies enormously from classroom to classroom--but science has long been a poor stepchild to mathematics and reading. One report noted that science instruction in the early grades “occurs sporadically and rarely engages children in practices that encourage rigorous and reflective science learning.” Science is high on the list of subjects that early-grade teachers feel ill prepared to teach. A 2009 study found that Head Start children in Florida ended their pre-K year with significantly lower readiness scores in science than in any other domain.

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Limits of Perception

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 10:01:00 EST

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.” --Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism

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How Fantasies Affect Focus

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 09:00:00 EST

Fantasizing about sex gets more than just your juices flowing--it also boosts your analytical thinking skills. Daydreaming about love, on the other hand, makes you more creative, according to a study published in the November 2009 Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin .

Previous research suggests that our problem-solving abilities change depending on our states of mind and that love--a broad, long-term emotion--triggers global brain processing, a state in which we see the big picture, make broad associations and connect disparate ideas. Sex, on the other hand--more specific and here and now--initiates more local processing, in which the brain zooms in and focuses on details. Researchers at the University of Amsterdam, University of Groningen and Jacobs University Bremen wondered whether thinking about love might actually help people perform better on creative tasks, whereas imagining sex might prime people to do better on tasks requiring analytical thinking.

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