Category Archives: Hearing and Language

Mixing up a decade of All in the Mind

December 12, 2011 – 2:51 am

The amazing ABC Radio National programme All in the Mind is ten years old and is celebrating by mixing up some specially themed editions from its extensive archives. First up is the psychology and neuroscience of sex that tackles everything from gender myths to the neuroscience of female orgasm. The following edition, to hit the [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in News | Leave a Comment

I am yours for 2 coppers

November 4, 2011 – 8:15 pm

I’ve just found a wonderful 1973 study on the psychoanalysis of graffiti that discusses how unconscious desires might be expressed through public scrawlings. It has a completely charming table that compares graffiti from A.D. 79 Pompeii with 1960′s Los Angeles to demonstrate the similarity of themes across the centuries.     The author concludes that [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Remembering | Comments (7)

Ten years of the language gene that wasn’t

October 26, 2011 – 2:03 am

It’s now ten years since mutations in the FOXP2 gene were linked to language problems, which led to lots of overblown headlines about a ‘language gene’, which it isn’t. The actual science is no less interesting, however, and Discover Magazine has a fantastic article that looks back on the last decade since the gene’s discovery [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Remembering | Comments (3)

The secret life of the inner voice

October 23, 2011 – 3:56 pm

Don’t miss the latest RadioLab short, a programme about a guy whose world has been unevenly slowed down. Psychological fascinating but also a beautiful piece of storytelling. When Andy first met Kohn, he saw a college freshman in a wheelchair who moved slow and talked slow. But it only took one conversation for Andy to [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Togetherness | Leave a Comment

Strong piano at high fruitiness

August 23, 2011 – 5:32 pm

A wonderful graph which shows how strongly the sounds of the piano, strings, woodwind and brass instruments are associated with fruity smells, across smells of low, medium and high fruitiness. From a recent study entitled ‘A Fruity Note: Crossmodal associations between odors and musical notes’. The study also tests how strongly these instruments are associated [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Integrating | Comments (2)

Auditory brain trip

August 18, 2011 – 12:24 am

If you’ve got 15 minutes to spare, you could do far worse than spending it listening to an excellent edition of the Guardian Science Podcast on the neuropsychology of hearing and language. Perceptual and linguistic neuroscience has a tendency to bit a little technical and difficult to engage with but the programme is both wonderfully [...]

By vaughanbell | Leave a Comment

Reaching for the high notes

August 17, 2011 – 5:48 pm

Science writer Emily Anthes has a fascinating interview with a speech therapist who works with male-to-female transsexuals to help make their voice sound more feminine. It gives both an insight into a little known area of speech therapy as well as highlighting some of the often overlooked differences between male and female voices. EA: So, [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Togetherness | Comments (1)

It’s pronoun or never

August 17, 2011 – 2:06 am

Scientific American has a fascinating interview with psychologist James Pennebaker​ about how your use of pronouns can reveal a surprising amount about you. Much to my surprise, I soon discovered that the ways people used pronouns in their essays predicted whose health would improve the most. Specifically, those people who benefited the most from writing [...]

By vaughanbell | Comments (3)

Diagnostic dilemma, innit bruv

July 27, 2011 – 12:16 am

I’ve just been directed to a wonderful 2007 case study from the British Medical Journal that reports how middle aged doctors can mistake street slang for symptoms of schizophrenia. Detailed and repeated assessment of [the patient's] mental state found a normal affect, no delusions, hallucinations, or catatonia, and no cognitive dysfunction. His speech, however, was [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Theory, Togetherness | Comments (16)

Hearing the voices of colours

April 12, 2011 – 11:06 pm

A spectacular case of psychosis, rather oddly described as ‘Methamphetamine Induced Synesthesia’, in a case report just published in The American Journal on Addictions. The report concerns a 30-year-old gentleman from the Iranian city of Shiraz with a long-standing history of drug use who recently started smoking crystal: Six months PTA [prior to admission] (October [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Integrating, Seeing | Comments (3)

Bollocks to it

March 22, 2011 – 1:14 am

Teenagers love to swear. Says who? Says science you melon farmers. And what could be better than a top ten of teenage swearing compiled by science wielding psycholinguists? A US – UK show down. Let the cursing commence. The book Trends in Teenage Talk: Corpus Compilation, Analysis and Findings was written to summarise the findings [...]

By vaughanbell | Comments (29)

A victim of metaphor

February 26, 2011 – 1:40 am

A gripping piece from Not Exactly Rocket Science describes how simply changing the metaphors used to describe crime can alter what we think is the best way of tackling it. The article covers a new study on the power of metaphors and how they can influence our beliefs and understanding of what’s being discussed. In [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Integrating, Reasoning | Comments (25)

Want to come up and see my sketchings?

February 19, 2011 – 2:14 am

The Royal Society of Arts has an awesome video that animates one of Steven Pinker’s lectures on ‘Language as a Window into Human Nature’. It covers how we use certain implicit properties of language to negotiate social relationships – discussing everything from the cult film Fargo to why we try and seduce people with indirect [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Togetherness | Comments (5)

Poetic sensitivities

December 27, 2010 – 7:29 pm

Perceptual psychologists have long been interested in limen – the threshold at which a stimulus becomes detectable. The following limen for the different senses, expressed in everyday terms rather than in terms of physical quantities, have a certain poetry to them. I got this information via email as a scan of an (unknown to me) [...]

By tomstafford | Also posted in Seeing | Comments (10)

A poetry of muddlings and loss

November 9, 2010 – 1:26 am

Art critic Tom Lubbock developed a brain tumour which estranged him from language in subtle and unpredictable ways. The Guardian has a stunning article where the writer describes how his relationship with language was altered as the tumour encroached upon his brain. It is one of the most powerfully nuanced accounts of language impairments I [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Inside the Brain | Comments (1)

Sensory blending

October 22, 2010 – 3:25 am

The BBC’s science series Horizon just broadcast a fantastic edition on perception, illusions and how the senses combine with each other to the point of allowing us to integrate artificial new senses. If you’ve got a healthy interest in psychology, the first half of the programme discusses several important but well-known effects like the rubber [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Integrating, Seeing | Comments (4)
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