Our perception of colours can depend on whether we view them from the left or the right, scientists have found. They say this demonstrates how language can alter the way we see the world.
Read the full article at Nature
The recipe is simple. Take one fading literary property with a cash-rich proprietor, one statistical string analysis algorithm, and a sheaf of brain images with hot and cool color patches. Mix well. Sprinkle with neurotransmitters; add sex and violence to taste; and serve on a bed of fresh press releases.
Read the full article at Language Log
University of California researchers tested the hypothesis that language plays a role in perception by carrying out a series of colour tests. They found that people were able to identify colours faster in their right visual field than in their left. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study said it was because the right field is processed in the brain area responsible for language.
Read the full article at BBC News
From the evocative Tom Cruise-inspired term “jump the couch,” meaning to exhibit frenetic or bizarre behavior, to the less colorful but more complex “integrity,” the words and expressions Americans favored in 2005 are jockeying for position on linguists’ and dictionary editors’ year-end lists.
Read the full article at Los Angeles Times
Our ability to understand speech or decide which fruit in the store is freshest depends on the brain’s dexterity in integrating information over time. The prefrontal cortex, where working memory resides, plays a critical role in helping us make these countless everyday decisions. A novel computational study by Brandeis researchers in this week’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences proposes for the first time a neuronal model for the mechanisms underlying a time-related task in this complex decision-making process.
Read the full article at Brandeis University
A team of researchers has proposed new limits on the time when the most recent common ancestor of humans and their closest ape relatives - the chimpanzees - lived. Scientists at Arizona State and Penn State Universities have placed the time of this split between 5 and 7 million years ago - a sharper focus than that given by the previous collection of molecular and fossil studies, which have placed the divergence anywhere from 3 to 13 million years ago.
Read the full article at Brightsurf
Darwin’s fingerprints can be found all over the human genome. A detailed look at human DNA has shown that a significant percentage of our genes have been shaped by natural selection in the past 50,000 years, probably in response to aspects of modern human culture such as the emergence of agriculture and the shift towards living in densely populated settlements.
Read the full article at New Scientist
Linguistics experts claim to have cracked the secret behind the success of all-time best-selling novelist Agatha Christie. And they say they are a step closer to working out a mathematical formula for what makes a book “unputdownable”.
Read the full article at Scotsman
According to experiments conducted by Derek Lyons, a graduate student at Yale, humans are hard-wired to learn by imitation, even when that is clearly not the best way to learn. If he is right, this represents a big evolutionary change from our ape ancestors. Other primates are bad at imitation. When they watch another primate doing something, they seem to focus on what its goals are and ignore its actions.
Read the full article at New York Times
Researchers have discovered the first brain regulatory gene that shows clear evidence of evolution from lower primates to humans. They said the evolution of humans might well have depended in part on hyperactivation of the gene, called prodynorphin (PDYN), that plays critical roles in regulating perception, behavior and memory.
Read the full article at Duke University
For the first time in 12 years, the International Phonetic Association is amending its official alphabet. A sound called the labiodental flap will be granted its own letter, one that looks something like a v with a hook.
Read the full article at New York Times
There are over 6,800 languages the world. Most are spoken, but some have a rather unique form of delivery, including whistling. More than 1,000 miles from Anchorage, in the village of Savoonga, which is located on Saint Lawrence Island, some claim an ancient form of communication still exists.
Langdon, a healthy, active woman of 51, had had a stroke. And like many people who suffer strokes, her life since that weekend in May 2002 hasn’t been quite the same. She doesn’t run for exercise anymore; her weakened right arm keeps her off the tennis court. And - most puzzling to her and others - when she speaks, her voice sounds like she comes from France.
Read the full article at KRT Wire
Tools for ancient texts have been successfully created that will open up rare texts and manuscripts locked away in museums, libraries and archives, and promote new kinds of scholarship while also preserving large swathes of European history and culture for the future. With funding from the IST programme and the US, the CHLT project has developed morphological analysers, citation databases, visualisation and clustering tools, and combined them with dictionaries to aid experienced scholars, students and the general public alike.
Read the full article at IST Results
New research from the University of Alberta shows that men and women utilize different parts of their brains while they perform the same tasks. The results of the research are reported this month in the journal NeuroImage.
Read the full article at EurekAlert!
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