While previous research has shown that there is heightened activity in the prefrontal cortex – the area of the brain that enables most people to feel remorse or learn moral behavior – when normal people lie, this is the first study to provide evidence of structural differences in that area among pathological liars.
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Ever needed that elusive word to describe a fear of having no beer? Or for a woman who looks pretty from the back but not the front? Help is at hand from a new book rounding up the world’s most specialised lexicon. “The Meaning of Tingo,” by British author Adam Jacot de Boinod, is somewhat of a labour of love, resulting from a year of solid trawling through 280 dictionaries and many dozens of Internet sites.
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Baby sign language (search), a trend popularized by the baby in “Meet the Fockers” (search) and “Will & Grace” star Debra Messing (search), is becoming increasingly common in homes, child care centers and preschools as a way to teach toddlers how to communicate before they have the motor skills to form words.
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In an article about to be published in the ‘journal Medical Hypotheses’ a group of Portuguese researchers propose that the differences which separate apes and humans, such as brain size and intellect, can be explained by differences in thyroid and steroid hormones.
Read the full article at Medical News Today
We are constantly learning new things as we go about our lives. In addition to learning new facts, procedures, and concepts, we are also refining our sensory abilities. How and when these sensory modifications take place is the focus of intense study and debate. In new work, researchers at Boston University and the University of Montreal unify two lines of research–our understanding of classical learning and a phenomenon known as the attentional blink–to achieve an important demonstration that high-level mental processing is required even for subliminal learning.
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A rose by any other name might not smell as sweet, UK research suggests. But labelling an unpleasant smell with a more appealing name can improve its aroma, an Oxford University team has found. In an experiment, volunteers asked to smell a cheddar cheese odour rated it as more pleasant when it was labelled as “cheddar” than as “body odour”.
Half of European citizens speak a second language, according to a European Union survey released Friday.
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By the time babies celebrate their first birthday, their ears are already tuned to the rhythms and sounds of their culture, researchers say. The finding suggests that one-year-olds in North America, for example, notice subtle changes in waltz-like rhythms but not in the complex dance rhythms unique to other continents.
Read the full article at National Geographic News
Not only does high blood pressure adversely affect mental functioning, but the correlation appears to be stronger among African-Americans than among whites, researchers report in the current issue of Psychosomatic Medicine.
Read the full article at Center for the Advancement of Health
When it comes to working out the relationships between ancient languages, grammar is more enlightening than vocabulary, scientists say.
Read the full article at Nature
The key to understanding how languages evolved may lie in their structure, not their vocabularies, a new report suggests. Findings published today in the journal Science indicate that a linguistic technique that borrows some features from evolutionary biology tools can unlock secrets of languages more than 10,000 years old.
Read the full article at Scientific American
Neuroscientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have assembled a first-of-its kind atlas of the folds of the cerebral cortex, the wrinkled surface layer of the brain credited with many of the higher cognitive functions that make us human. The atlas, known as the Population-Average, Landmark and Surface-based (PALS) Atlas, links brain functions to the various peaks and valleys of the cortex.
Read the full article at Washington University in St.Louis
The United States Senate is poised to consider a bill that would sharply increase the penalty for obscenity on the air, seeking to return to the public square the gentler tenor of yesteryear, when seldom were heard any scurrilous words, and famous guys were not foul mouthed all day. Yet researchers who study the evolution of language and the psychology of swearing say that they have no idea what mystic model of linguistic gentility the critics might have in mind. Cursing, they say, is a human universal.
Read the full article at The New York Times
Psychologists at Harvard University have found that five-year-olds are able to grasp numeric abstractions and arithmetic concepts even without the formal education or language to express this knowledge in words. The discovery of these inborn skills among preschoolers could point the way to new teaching techniques, making arithmetic easier and more pleasant for elementary school children.
Read the full article at EurekAlert
The popular media has portrayed men and women as psychologically different as two planets – Mars and Venus – but these differences are vastly overestimated and the two sexes are more similar in personality, communication, cognitive ability and leadership than realized, according to a review of 46 meta-analyses conducted over the last 20 years.
Read the full article at American Psychological Association
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