The Social Brain

Increasing Emotional Intelligence in the Classroom: Emotional Literacy

2011-07-26T23:42:00.000-07:00

Dr. Marc Brackett from the Health, Emotion and Behavior Lab at Yale University talks about the benefits of applying psychology research on emotions to classrooms via The RULER Approach: increases in students' and teachers' emotional intelligence, or emotional literacy are related to improvements in school members' subjective well-being, social skills, and academic performance.

The RULER Approach teaches the following competencies to enhance Emotional Literacy:

Recognize emotions
Understand emotions
Label emotions
Express emotions
Regulate emotions

The Social-Psychological Power of Touch

2010-10-31T09:34:00.000-07:00

Dacher Keltner shares insights from the new science of touch: compassionate communication, touch therapies, and proof that “to touch is to give life.” Pretty remarkable research.

Human Development: Tracking the Scientific Understanding of our Species

2010-10-07T21:27:00.000-07:00

This new series will cover select studies across a variety of sciences that are perceived to be particularly important to understanding and fostering human development.

The idea is to keep track of key findings across a number of human-centered fields to fight against the almost impregnable combination of apathy, academic myopia, and information overload that impede an explosive and radically-amazed appreciation of 21st Century Scientific Progress.

Below is the first (short) batch. Enjoy!

Longevity
Despite highest health spending, Americans' life expectancy falls behind other countries'
Obesity, smoking, traffic fatalities and homicide ruled out as causes of failure of US to keep up with gains in life expectancy in other countries.

Memory
Psychologist finds 'shocking' memory improvement
Enhance your memory.

Stress
Stressed-out mothers may worsen their child's asthma
You don't need your inhaler...as much as your mother needs a tranquilizer.

Emotion Regulation, Burnout, and Job Satisfaction Among Secondary School Teachers

2010-07-29T21:47:00.000-07:00

Background

Teaching is one of the most stressful occupations a person can have (Johnson et al., 2005; Kyriacou & Sutcliffe, 1977). Frequently identified sources of stress and decreased job satisfaction include the following:

inadequate salary and perceived low status of the profession (Carlson & Thompson, 1995; Kyriacou & Sutcliffe, 1978)

role conflict and ambiguity (Dunham, 1992)

time pressure (Chan, 1998)

student misbehavior (Turk, Meeks, & Turk, 1982)

relationships with supervisors (Litt & Turk, 1985)

large class size (Burke & Greenglass, 1994).

Teachers also experience intense, emotion-laden interactions on a daily basis and have a great number of emotional demands compared to most other professionals (Brotheridge & Grandey, 2002).

The stress and emotional demands associated with the teaching profession can lead to emotional and physical exhaustion, cynical attitudes about teaching, reduced feelings of personal accomplishment, and lower job satisfaction (Guglielmi&Tatrow, 1998; Shan, 1998; Vandenberghe & Huberman, 1999).

Abundant research has focused on these emotional demands and their impact on teachers’ well-being, mental health, stress, burnout, and job satisfaction as well as on learning outcomes for students (Chan, 2006). Relatively little is known, however, about protective factors against teacher stress and burnout.

Which psychological attributes might predict less emotional exhaustion and more positive emotions, increased feelings of personal accomplishment, and greater job satisfaction among teachers?

Research suggests that emotion-regulation ability (ERA) may account for meaningful variance in the prediction of these outcomes.

The Study

The topic of emotion regulation and its relationship with teacher effectiveness is beginning to garner attention by researchers.

This study examined the relationship between emotion-regulation ability (ERA), as assessed by the Mayer– Salovey –Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT), and both job satisfaction and burnout among secondary-school teachers (N =123).

It also examined the mediating effects of affect and principal support on these outcomes.

Findings

ERA was associated positively with positive affect, principal support, job satisfaction, and one component of burnout, personal accomplishment.

Two path models demonstrated that both positive affect and principal support mediated independently the associations between ERA and both personal accomplishment and job satisfaction. (2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

Read full article...

Citation: All text taken directly from: (BRACKETT, PALOMERA, MOJSA-KAJA, REYES, & SALOVEY, 2010)

Eight Intriguing Facts about the Human Brain

2010-05-06T23:29:00.000-07:00

(1) The mind IS what the brain does. That is to say, your sense of Self, your consciousness, your emotions, language, moral reasoning, ability to write a symphony or paint a sunset, are all ONLY the products of neural firing and activity in your brain (if you accept the scientific mechanistic view of human nature), and not the result of some ethereal mind (if you reject Cartesian dualism).

(2) "The difference between seeing words, hearing words, reading words and generating words can correspond to different aspects of what part of your brain is active. To some extent, if we put you in an fMRI scanner and observed what you're doing in real time, by looking at the activity patterns in your brain we can tell whether you are thinking about music or thinking about sex. To some extent we can tell whether you're solving a moral dilemma versus something else. And this is no surprise if what we are is the workings of our physical brains" (Bloom, 2007).

(3) The basic unit of the brain, the neuron (which you have about 1000 billion of), is the only type of cell in your body that can remain with you from birth until death - all other cell types are replenished after about 7 years. Furthermore, even though this is the case, dead neurons can grow back, even in very late stages of life.

(4) It is never the actual drugs you take, for medical or recreational purposes, that make you feel calm, euphoric, or otherwise - it is rather the neurotransmitters, like serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine, which psychopharmacological substances trigger, that are the source of drug-induced moods and sensations. Hence Dan Gilbert's quote, "We have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodities we are constantly chasing."

(5) Is the human brain the same thing as your laptop? Does it work in the same way? There are a number of similarities between computing machines and your 3lb. fleshy mental universe, but there are two key differences. First, brains can take a lot of damage and still maintain relatively high levels of functioning. Computers on the other hand, as many of us are all well aware, are very temperamental and fragile. Second, brains are exceedingly faster than your Dell, despite the fact that you Dell is using considerably more conductive equipment. If the human brain were wired like a PC with the type of fatty equipment it uses to process information, it would take around 4 HOURS just to recognize a face. Luckily for us, our brain functions through extraordinarily efficient massively parallel distributive processing.

(6) Although as this post makes clear, we ARE our brains, there are a number of activities we are capable of even when decapitated (thank the French for this evidence). Research has found that all of the following phenomenon are possible without a brain: newborn sucking, limb flexation in withdrawal from pain, vomiting, and yes, even getting an erection of the penis (although I do not quite understand the evolutionary purpose of this).

(7) There are topological maps of you body encoded in your brain, so that body parts which are near one another, like your foot and your ankle, are closer together on the maps than parts which are farther apart, like your eyelids and your fingertips. Interestingly, the size of each part of your body in these brain maps is directly related to the potency of sensation in any particular body area (e. g., the mouth, fingertips, and genitals take up a very large portion of these maps, and your back and shoulders, although much larger in real life, take up much smaller sections).

(8) People who are right-handed create and process language in the left lobe of their brain. This seems relatively straightforward. However, some people who are left-handed create and process language in the right side of their brain, while for other lefties language is located in the left side of their brain - and yet there are a third group of lefties whose language centers are scattered throughout various parts of their brains!

There will be more to come in this new series on Intriguing Facts about the Human Brain.

Source: Foundations: This is your Brain

The Building Block of the Social Brain: Single Neurons

2010-05-01T08:36:00.000-07:00

Watching a Living Brain in the Act of Seeing -- With Single-Synapse Resolution

"When light falls on the retina of the human eye, it hits 126 million sensory cells, which transform it into electrical signals. Even the smallest unit of light, a photon, can stimulate one of these sensory cells. As a result, enormous amounts of data have to be processed for us to be able to see. While the processing of visual data starts in the retina, the finished image only arises in the brain or, to be more precise, in the visual cortex at the back of the cerebrum.

Pioneering a novel microscopy method, neuroscientist Arthur Konnerth and colleagues from the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) have shown that individual neurons carry out significant aspects of sensory processing: specifically, in this case, determining which direction an object in the field of view is moving. Their method makes it possible for the first time to observe individual synapses, nerve contact sites that are just one micrometer in size, on a single neuron in a living mammalian brain.

Focusing on neurons known to play a role in processing visual signals related to movement, Konnerth's team discovered that an individual neuron integrates inputs it receives via many synapses at once into a single output signal -- a decision, in essence, made by a single nerve cell. The scientists report these results in the latest issue of the journal Nature. Looking ahead, they say their method opens a new avenue for exploration of how learning functions at the level of the individual neuron.

Neuroscientists speculate that a neuron might be caught in the act of learning a new orientation. Many nerve endings practically never send signals to the dendritic tree of an orientation neuron. Presented with visual input signals that represent an unfamiliar kind of movement, formerly silent nerve endings may become active. This might alter the way the neuron weighs and processes inputs, in such a way that it would change its preferred orientation; and the mouse might learn to discern certain movements better or more rapidly. 'Because our method enables us to observe, down to the level of a single synapse, how an individual neuron in the living brain is networked with others and how it behaves, we should be able to make a fundamental contribution to understanding the learning process,' Konnerth asserts."

Read the whole article here

Social Biases: The Brain's Social Autopilot

2010-03-23T23:10:00.000-07:00

This list (primarily based on scientific research) is for anyone who has ever left an interaction with another human being confused, befuddled, or bewildered:

* Actor-observer bias – the tendency for explanations of other individuals' behaviors to overemphasize the influence of their personality and underemphasize the influence of their situation (see also fundamental attribution error). However, this is coupled with the opposite tendency for the self in that explanations for our own behaviors overemphasize the influence of our situation and underemphasize the influence of our own personality.

* Egocentric bias – occurs when people claim more responsibility for themselves for the results of a joint action than an outside observer would.

* Forer effect (aka Barnum Effect) – the tendency to give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. For example, horoscopes.

* False consensus effect – the tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which others agree with them.

* Fundamental attribution error – the tendency for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior (see also actor-observer bias, group attribution error, positivity effect, and negativity effect).

* Halo effect – the tendency for a person's positive or negative traits to "spill over" from one area of their personality to another in others' perceptions of them (see also physical attractiveness stereotype).

* Herd instinct – Common tendency to adopt the opinions and follow the behaviors of the majority to feel safer and to avoid conflict.

* Illusion of asymmetric insight – people perceive their knowledge of their peers to surpass their peers' knowledge of them.

* Illusion of transparency – people overestimate others' ability to know them, and they also overestimate their ability to know others.

* Illusory superiority – overestimating one's desirable qualities, and underestimating undesirable qualities, relative to other people. Also known as Superiority bias (also known as "Lake Wobegon effect", "better-than-average effect", "superiority bias", or Dunning-Kruger effect).

* Ingroup bias – the tendency for people to give preferential treatment to others they perceive to be members of their own groups.

* Just-world phenomenon – the tendency for people to believe that the world is just and therefore people "get what they deserve."

* Notational bias – a form of cultural bias in which the notational conventions of recording data biases the appearance of that data toward (or away from) the system upon which the notational schema is based.

* Outgroup homogeneity bias – individuals see members of their own group as being relatively more varied than members of other groups.

* Projection bias – the tendency to unconsciously assume that others share the same or similar thoughts, beliefs, values, or positions.

* Self-serving bias (also called "behavioral confirmation effect") – the tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. It may also manifest itself as a tendency for people to evaluate ambiguous information in a way beneficial to their interests (see also group-serving bias).

* Self-fulfilling prophecy – the tendency to engage in behaviors that elicit results which will (consciously or not) confirm existing attitudes.[11]

* System justification – the tendency to defend and bolster the status quo. Existing social, economic, and political arrangements tend to be preferred, and alternatives disparaged sometimes even at the expense of individual and collective self-interest. (See also status quo bias.)

* Trait ascription bias – the tendency for people to view themselves as relatively variable in terms of personality, behavior and mood while viewing others as much more predictable.

* Ultimate attribution error – Similar to the fundamental attribution error, in this error a person is likely to make an internal attribution to an entire group instead of the individuals within the group.

Source: wikipedia.org

The Impact Bias: Future Happiness and Despair Never Live Up to Expectations

2010-03-23T22:46:00.001-07:00

"Here's two different futures that I invite you to contemplate, and you can try to simulate them and tell me which one you think you might prefer. One of them is winning the lottery. This is about 314 million dollars. And the other is becoming paraplegic. So, just give it a moment of thought. You probably don't feel like you need a moment of thought.

However, interestingly, there are data on these two groups of people, data on how happy they are. The fact is, that a year after losing the use of their legs, and a year after winning the lotto, lottery winners and paraplegics are equally happy with their lives [graphs of these data are shown in the video embedded below].

Now, don't feel too bad about failing the first pop quiz, because everybody fails all of the pop quizzes all of the time. The research that my laboratory has been doing, that economists and psychologists around the country have been doing, have revealed something really quite startling to us. Something we call the impact bias, which is the tendency for your mental simulator to work badly. For the simulator to make you believe that different outcomes are more different than in fact they really are.

From field studies to laboratory studies, we see that winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or not passing a college test, on and on, have far less impact, less intensity and much less duration than people expect them to have. In fact, a recent study -- this almost floors me -- a recent study showing how major life traumas affect people suggests that if it happened over three months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness" (Dan Gilbert, TED talk 2006).

For more of Dan Gilbert's research on cognitive biases and happiness:

THE Supercomputer: Creating a Computer that Functions like the Human Brain

2009-11-18T18:21:00.000-08:00

The modern computer has been essential to coming to understand how the Social Brain works, whether serving as a stimulus in an experiment, creating behavioral models, or performing complex statistical analyses on vast data sets.

However, IBM has been trying to take this a huge leap further. That is, IBM has been attempting to create a computer that works just like the human brain, because the human brain regularly performs an enormous number of processes, simultaneously, while expending minimal energy in the process (Marois & Ivanoff, 2005).

A recent breakthrough in IBM's project came out today:

"IBM has announced significant progress toward creating a computer system that simulates and emulates the brain's abilities for sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition, while rivaling the brain's low power and energy consumption and compact size.

Modern computing is based on a stored program model, which has traditionally been implemented in digital, synchronous, serial, centralized, fast, hardwired, general-purpose circuits with explicit memory addressing that indiscriminately over-write data and impose a dichotomy between computation and data.

In stark contrast, cognitive computing -- like the brain -- will use replicated computational units, neurons and synapses that are implemented in mixed-mode analog-digital, asynchronous, parallel, distributed, slow, reconfigurable, specialized and fault-tolerant biological substrates with implicit memory addressing that only update state when information changes, blurring the boundary between computation and data.

To perform the first near real-time cortical simulation of the brain that exceed the scale of the cat cortex, the team built a cortical simulator that incorporates a number of innovations in computation, memory, and communication as well as sophisticated biological details from neurophysiology and neuroanatomy.

This scientific tool, akin to a linear accelerator or an electron microscope, is a critical instrument used to test hypotheses of brain structure, dynamics and function. The simulation was performed using the cortical simulator on Lawrence Livermore National Lab's Dawn Blue Gene/P supercomputer with 147,456 CPUs and 144 terabytes of main memory.

The algorithm, when combined with the cortical simulator, allows scientists to experiment with various mathematical hypotheses of brain function and structure of how structure affects function as they work toward discovering the brain's core computational micro and macro circuits.

After the successful completion of Phase 0, IBM and its university partners were recently awarded $16.1 million in additional funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for Phase 1 of DARPA's Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) initiative. This phase of research will focus on the components, brain-like architecture and simulations to build a prototype chip.

The long-term mission of IBM's cognitive computing initiative is to discover and demonstrate the algorithms of the brain and deliver low-power, compact cognitive computers that approach mammalian-scale intelligence and use significantly less energy than today's computing systems."

Source: Scientists Perform Cat-Scale Cortical Simulations and Map the Human Brain

Questions on the Implications & Limits of Supercomputers:

-If humans are able to successfully re-create their organic brains with cold chips and circuits, using their natural intelligence, and technology grows at an exponential rate (Moore's Law), while evolution progresses at a relatively steady rate (Becoming Human)- is it fair to say that the computing power, complexity, diversity, and richness of IBM's Blue Gene supercomputers will then outmatch that of the very brains which produced them?

-If the brain is the most evolved and sophisticated system known, then creating a computer that exceeds human cognitive capacities is really the triumph of Technology over Evolution - of Human Selection over Natural Selection - no? Does this then place us technically in a new stage of evolution? Are we are already in the age of self-evolution?

-Can we manufacture "creative cognitive-computers"? These IBM supercomputers may become as quick and expansive as the human brain, but will they offer equally unique and/or creative output? More? Less?

-Can these highly-developed machines demonstrates dynamic creativity without limbic and emotional systems? Does creativity require emotion?

-Can we build emotional computers?

-It is possible for us to produce a computer with consciousness, that is, self-awareness?

"This terribly significant business of other people"

2009-06-13T00:54:00.000-07:00

As a social psychologist, trying to come to some reasonable grip, on at least a portion of the vast sea of human social activity and behavior, is the end game.

But, it is seriously worth noting that although social psychology is just over a century old, humans have been at this problem for millenia - indeed since there have been humans.

Will breakthroughs in biopsychology, cognitive science, and behavioral neuroscience yield an ax to break through the ice?

It is argued, and quite tenably so, that because people have free will (though this is certainly debatable), they can be placed in the exact same conditions, and behave differently. Seeing that one of science's pillars, Prediction, cannot hold when matter is at times erratic and self-driven - then how is social psychology to be legitimately defended as a science? Or, even a decent folk science?

Consider author Philip Roth's question in his famed book American Pastoral :

"You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong.

You might as well have the brain of a tank.

You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again.

Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of perception.

And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims?"

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The Social Brain Stresses: Relief in Trees

2009-06-09T01:20:00.000-07:00

Robert Frost said that "To be social, is to be forgiving."

Wise words that point to the inevitable stresses we with social brains engage in, on some level or another, every day. But perhaps relieving The Social Brain's tension may be quite easier than anyone would have imagined. In the age of 'oh-yeah-we-got-a-pill-for-that,' this should come as welcome news.

"It used to be that we looked at cataclysmic events, like divorce or loss of a job, as stressors," says Kathleen Wolf of the College of Forest Resources at the University of Washington.

"But now we are seeing that our daily lives have constant small stressors, and the cumulative effect is significant. Consequently, even small, incremental contacts with nature in our daily lives are beneficial."

In her study, Andrea Faber Taylor looked at children living in Chicago's notorious Robert Taylor Homes housing project.

The children she studied were all from the same socioeconomic bracket; all were African American; all lived in virtually identical apartments to which their families had been randomly assigned; and all lived on the second, third, or fourth floors, the best levels for viewing nature.

The only difference was that some apartments overlooked trees and grass while others overlooked pavement.

Girls who could see nature from their windows were better able to concentrate, and to control impulsive behavior, as measured in standard psychological tests. These behaviors tend to help children resist peer pressure and sexual pressure, and help in other challenging situations.

"Our theory was that public housing is a very fatiguing environment," says Faber Taylor. "It turns out that small amounts of greenery seem to make a big difference. You don't have to live in Sherwood Forest to enjoy nature's benefits."

Source: How Nature Heals Us
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For more info on nature and healing studies check this out:

Looking IS Healing: Nature

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Happy People See Better than Unhappy People

2009-06-03T22:31:00.000-07:00

"Good and bad moods literally change the way our visual cortex operates and how we see" (Adam Anderson).

A University of Toronto study provides the first direct evidence that our mood literally changes the way our visual system filters our perceptual experience suggesting that seeing the world through rose-coloured glasses is more biological reality than metaphor.

The Study

“Specifically our study shows that when in a positive mood, our visual cortex takes in more information, while negative moods result in tunnel vision," says Dr. Anderson. The study appears tomorrow in the Journal of Neuroscience.

The U of T team used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine how our visual cortex processes sensory information when in good, bad, and neutral moods.

The researchers first showed subjects a series images designed to generate a good, bad or neutral mood. Subjects were then shown a composite image, featuring a face in the centre, surrounded by “place” images, such as a house. To focus their attention on the central image, subjects were asked to identify the gender of the person’s face.

The Results

When in a bad mood, the subjects did not process the images of places in the surrounding background. However, when viewing the same images in a good mood, they actually took in more information — they saw the central image of the face as well as the surrounding pictures of houses.

The discovery came from looking at specific parts of the brain — the parahippocampal “place area” — that are known to process places and how this area relates to primary visual cortical responses, the first part of the cortex related to vision.

Why Positive and Negative Emotions are BOTH Useful

"Good moods enhance the literal size of the window through which we see the world. The upside of this is that we can see things from a more global, or integrative perspective.

The downside is that this can lead to distraction on critical tasks that require narrow focus, such as operating dangerous machinery or airport screening of passenger baggage.

Bad moods, on the other hand, may keep us more narrowly focused, preventing us from integrating information outside of our direct attentional focus" (Anderson).

Source: People Who Wear Rose-colored Glasses See More, Study Shows
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Discussion:

Might this enrich, in part, our understanding of a number of interesting behavioral phenomenon?

Like:

-When we are happy we notice more things that previously did not penetrate our attention, stimulation is increased.

-Unhappy people tend to have more accidents and physical injuries.

-The attractiveness of a person can vary widely, despite various objective factors of beauty such as symmetry, depending on their moods: sanguinity noticeably adding to attractiveness and unhappiness detracting from it.

-Happy people do better and finish quicker on an array of physical and mental tests than discontented people.

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Nietzsche Weighs In: Humanity's Major Questions

2009-06-03T20:45:00.000-07:00

Human social behavior is wildly influenced by major uncertainties about our own nature, and our own "place" in the cosmos. That is, we seek out people, experiences, and social institutions to learn about, develop, edit, distill, and confirm/reject answers to fundamental questions of existence. And, it is with this information that many social actions are influentially guided. That said, a little wisdom from philosophy on these matters can be very illuminating on why The Social Brain acts as it does.
--
To know or not to know?

"Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders."

What are the defining characteristics of one's personality or identity?

"Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had."

How can we maximize pleasure, and minimize pain?

"We must not study ourselves while having an experience."

Should we try to get back to the "good old days," "live in the now," or "plan for the future"?

"Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present."

What is the purpose and/or meaning of life?

"Art is the proper task of life."

What is next, or should be next, for humankind?

"Man is something that ought to be overcome."

--
Source: Friedrich Nietzsche

(Note: There certainly will be more to come on this theme as many of the most thorny questions about the social animal have already been thoroughly examined, for millenia, by great philosophers, or as I sometimes like to call them "pre-scientists.")

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The Social Brain Speaks: Lessons in Language

2009-06-01T21:22:00.000-07:00

There is no doubt that language offers both demonstrations of and a special window into the social brain, and human nature in general. Watching Dr. Paul Bloom's lecture on language at Open Yale Courses, I learned a number of intriguing facts about our linguistic faculty:

(1) Babies who are not spoken to directly (though are around speaking) seem to develop the same capacity for language as those babies who are addressed on a regular basis. There appears to be no interesting influence of parental speech-rearing on the ability for babies to normally develop the miracle of speech. (But, why would anyone not talk to their babies? Some cultures see this as senseless because 'what does the baby have to say?')

(2) In Nicaragua, there are documented cases of children who have created their own individual sign language out of the need for better means of communication because their parents, who do not know sign language, possess a broken form of spoken language.

(3) All neurologically normal humans, who at least hear language or have another person to communicate to, can develop normal speech abilities.

(4) There has never been a human culture discovered that does not possess and use language.

(5) Children of slaves who spoke "pidgin," or a broken-up mishmash of different languages which is not a fully developed language (created by the desire to communicate between slaves with different tongues), were able to produce a full-blown linguistic system (often called "creole") with phonology, morphology, and syntax. The ability to manufacture a language in a single generation from parents with an incomplete one, seems to suggest that humans have some inborn capacity for language. For, how else do we satisfactorily explain this phenomenon?

(6) There are a number of completely intelligent children who are social beings with a strong desire to communicate, who simply cannot learn language. This can be attributed, perhaps, to genetic defects, as one could have a genetic defect that might cause one to see the world differently as in color blindness.

(7) The number of possible sentences one can produce with a finite set of characters is infinite. The reason for this is "recursion." That is although there are a finite number of letters, words, and morphemes (sounds clusters, syllables) in each language they can be repeated and interchanged in a never-ending sequence. This is also the case with the infinite possibilities of music composition despite the finite number of musical notes.

(8) Even after just 4 days, babies already show preference to their native languages. That is, they will suck on a bottle, or perform another indicated task so to hear their indigenous language as opposed to a foreign one. French children preferred French to Russian, and vice versa.

(9) There are cases where deaf twins or siblings develop their own totally unique forms of sign language to communicate with one another despite no training, cues, or observations of signing.

(10) Studies show that babies learn sign language in the same way and at about the same rate as spoken language. That is, they babble, use first words, sentences, and complex linguistic structure concomitantly.

(11) Babies do not need to be taught grammar or syntax, for few parents ever speak to their babies in a systemic and grammatically sound manner, it is usually "goo goo gaa gaa." Yet, syntax emerges, no problem.

(12) The average person knows on average, 80,000 words (the lower limit is about 60,000 and the higher limit is about 100,000 words). However, most of our acquisition of words is done as babies and young children. Therefore, the average baby learns about 9 new words a day.

For a copy of the transcript from Dr. Bloom's lecture click here.

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PSYCHOGENESIS: Four Billion Years in Six Minutes

2009-05-30T00:06:00.000-07:00

“The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use” (Arthur Koestler).

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Scientists Reaching Consensus On How Brain Processes Speech

2009-05-27T00:03:00.000-07:00

“Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel.” (Emerson)

In the June issue of Nature Neuroscience, the investigator, Josef Rauschecker, PhD, and his co-author, Sophie Scott, PhD, a neuroscientist at University College, London, say that both human and non-human primate studies have confirmed that speech, one important facet of language, is processed in the brain along two parallel pathways, each of which run from lower- to higher-functioning neural regions.

These pathways are dubbed the 'what' and 'where' streams and are roughly analogous to how the brain processes sight, but are located in different regions, says Rauschecker, a professor in the department of physiology and biophysics and a member of the Georgetown Institute for Cognitive and Computational Sciences.

Both pathways begin with the processing of signals in the auditory cortex, located inside a deep fissure on the side of the brain underneath the temples - the so-called "temporal lobe."

Information processed by the "what" pathway then flows forward along the outside of the temporal lobe, and the job of that pathway is to recognize complex auditory signals, which include communication sounds and their meaning (semantics).

The "where" pathway is mostly in the parietal lobe, above the temporal lobe, and it processes spatial aspects of a sound - its location and its motion in space - but is also involved in providing feedback during the act of speaking.

What is so interesting to Rauschecker is that although speech and language are considered to be uniquely human abilities, the emerging picture of brain processing of language suggests "in evolution, language must have emerged from neural mechanisms at least partially available in animals," he says.

"Speech, or the early process of language, is well modeled by animal communication systems, and these studies now demonstrate that primate auditory cortex, across species, displays the same patterns of hierarchical structure, topographic mapping, and streams of functional processing," Rauschecker says.

"There appears to be a conservation of certain processing pathways through evolution in humans and nonhuman primates."

"But mostly, we are fascinated by the fact that humans can make such exquisite sense of the slight variation in sound waves that reach our ears, and only lately have we been able to model how the brain knows how to attach meaning to these sounds in terms of communication."

Source: Scientists Reaching Consensus On How Brain Processes Speech