Learning another language can change your perspective on Life!
The language we speak may influence not only our thoughts, but our implicit preferences as well. That’s the finding of a study by psychologists at Harvard University, who found that bilingual individuals’ opinions of different ethnic groups were affected by the language in which they took a test examining their biases and predilections.
Continue reading… “Language May Help Create, Not Just Convey, Thoughts and Feelings”
Mary increasingly gets guys to attend her spiritual class… She does not know why
Positive psychological changes that occur during meditation training are associated with greater telomerase activity, according to researchers at the University of California, Davis, and the University of California, San Francisco. The study is the first to link positive well-being to higher telomerase, an enzyme important for the long-term health of cells in the body.
Continue reading… “Meditation Training Increases Cellular Health!?”
If only this were the case in America
Full-term babies are born with a key collection of networks already formed in their brains, according to new research that challenges some previous theories about the brain’s activity and how the brain develops.
Continue reading… “Babies Brain’s Crazy Unconscious Activity”
1 in 9 babies in poverty have babies with severely depressed mothers.
More than half of babies in poverty are being raised by mothers who show symptoms of mild to severe depression, potentially creating problems in parenting and in child development, according to a new study.
Continue reading… “Half of Babies in Poverty Have a Mother with Depression”
A study undertaken to help scientists concerned with abnormal brain development in premature babies has serendipitously revealed evolution’s imprint on the human brain.
Continue reading… “Baby Brain Growth Mirrors Changes from Apes to Humans”
Even premature babies at 33 weeks post-conceptional age, about 2 months before term (40 gestational weeks), are capable of recognizing and distinguishing two objects of different shapes (a prism and a cylinder) with their right or left hands. This is the first demonstration of fully efficient manual perception in preterm human infants.
Continue reading… “Babies, Even When Premature, ‘See’ With Their Hands”
Duke University Medical Center scientists crowded around a laser-powered microscope in a darkened room to peer into the brain of an anesthetized juvenile songbird right after he heard an adult tutors’ song for the first time.
Continue reading… “Scientists Image Brain at Point When Vocal Learning Begins”
The brains of infants who die of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) produce low levels of serotonin, a brain chemical that conveys messages between cells and plays a vital role in regulating breathing, heart rate, and sleep, reported researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Continue reading… “SIDS Linked to Low Levels of Serotonin”
Geographic distribution of the 2,236 languages included in the present study
Psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Memphis have released a new study on linguistic evolution that challenges the prominent hypothesis for why languages differ throughout the world.
Continue reading… “Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure”
Here’s a piece of research that might leave you tickled: laughter is a universal language, according to new research. The study, conducted with people from Britain and Namibia, suggests that basic emotions such as amusement, anger, fear and sadness are shared by all humans.
Continue reading… “Everybody Laughs, Everybody Cries: Researchers Identify Universal Emotions”
Researchers can predict your performance on a video game simply by measuring the volume of specific structures in your brain, a multi-institutional team reports this week.
Continue reading… “Video Gamers: Size of Brain Structures Predicts Success”
Why does a human baby need a full year before it can start walking, while a newborn foal gets up on its legs almost directly after birth? Scientist have assumed that human motor development is unique because our brain is unusually complex and because it is particularly challenging to walk on two legs. But now a research group at Lund University in Sweden has shown that human babies in fact start walking at the same stage in brain development as most other walking mammals, from small rodents to elephants.
Continue reading… “Why Does a Human Baby Need a Full Year Before Starting to Walk?”
