Category Archives: Hearing and Language

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)

The social resonance of baby babble

October 13, 2010 – 3:00 am

The New York Times investigates how the goohs and gaahs of baby babble transform through the first year of life, becoming ever more language-like until they mutate into the first recognisable words. But more than just tracking how the sounds change over time, the piece is a fascinating look at how they become enmeshed in [...]

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

The ’68 comeback perceptual

October 6, 2010 – 1:51 am

Elvis makes a fleeting comeback, accompanied by a milk drinking chimp and some well-dressed mice, in the hallucinations of a patient with Parkinson’s disease who is described in a case study published in the Southern Medical Journal. He had compulsive gambling behavior and multiple hallucinations (visual and auditory). Visual hallucinations were simple (shapes of shadows, [...]

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

Guided by voices

September 9, 2010 – 2:41 am

RadioLab has a fantastic mini-edition about the link between our internal thought stream and the development of auditory hallucinations – the experience of ‘hearing voices’. The programme discusses the theory that the experience of hearing hallucinated ‘voices in your head’ occurs when we lose the ability to recognise our internal thoughts as our own. Although [...]

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

Why are overheard phone conversations so distracting?

September 9, 2010 – 1:02 am

Psychological Science has a brilliantly conceived study that explains why overhearing someone talk on a mobile phone is so much more annoying than simply overhearing two people in conversation. It turns out that a one-sided conversation (brilliantly named a ‘half-a-logue’) draws in more of our mental resources because the information is less predictable – like [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Attention | Comments (13)

Language as a thought magnet

August 28, 2010 – 3:23 pm

Today’s New York Times has a wonderful feature article on how language shapes our perception of the world. The infamous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis claimed that our understanding was limited by language and has long been used as an example of a ‘dead theory’ but new evidence is suggesting that certain aspects of a language can indeed [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Reasoning | Comments (6)

Infamous last words

August 24, 2010 – 9:32 pm

The September issue of The Psychologist is completely open-access and has a fantastic article on the last words of executed prisoners. The piece is by media analyst Janelle Ward who has been studying the final statements of prisoners executed by the US state of Texas, who list death row departees and their final words on [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in News, Togetherness | Leave a Comment

Why we go doolally

August 11, 2010 – 8:00 pm

Someone who acts strangely or ‘goes mad’ is often described as having gone ‘doolally’. The military origin of this curious term is discussed in an aside in an academic article published in Twentieth Century British History. The article discusses the changing concepts of how imprisonment during war impacts on soldiers’ mental health: POWs were originally [...]

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

World without words

August 10, 2010 – 7:02 pm

The latest edition of RadioLab is a fantastic exploration of how the world might be different if we experienced it without the benefit of words that shape our concepts. As always, it sounds effortlessly beautiful, and this episode takes a diverse look at the different ways in which we might understand our lives wordlessly. Essentially, [...]

By vaughanbell | Leave a Comment

Tone deaf to the music of language

August 5, 2010 – 9:52 pm

Amusia is a condition in which people can’t distinguish musical notes or tunes. This has been investigated for the first time in Mandarin Chinese, a language that relies on tones to convey meaning, with the study finding that music perception problems also affect the ability to distinguish spoken words in tone language speakers. One common [...]

By vaughanbell | Comments (4)

Plastic punk

July 28, 2010 – 12:00 pm

Some awesome geek moves from the science of phonetics, as applied to the new wave punk classic ‘√áa Plane Pour Moi’ previously and falsely believed to have been sung by Plastic Bertrand. From the AV Club report: A staple of any new-wave dance night (ask a white person), ‚ÄúCa Plane Pour Moi‚Äù made a chart-stopping [...]

By vaughanbell | Comments (1)

The tools of language and the craft of understanding

June 30, 2010 – 8:00 am

Stanford Magazine has a fascinating article on how speakers of different languages think differently about the world. The piece focuses on the work of psychologist Lera Boroditsky and covers many of her completely intriguing studies about how the conceptual tools embedded within languages shape how we think. “In English,” she says, moving her hand toward [...]

By vaughanbell | Comments (5)

The endangered languages of New York City

April 29, 2010 – 8:00 am

The New York Times covers a fantastic project that is attempting to track down some of the world’s most endangered languages – by scouring the streets of the Big Apple. The Endangered Language Alliance is a project that aims to connect speakers of rare tongues but also to use the opportunity to study the languages [...]

By vaughanbell | Comments (1)

Discussing the False Prophets

February 14, 2010 – 8:00 am

In light of the retraction of the infamous Lancet paper that first started the MMR panic, the Point of Inquiry podcast has a fantastic interview with doctor and vaccine developer Paul Offit who has received death threats for publicly refuting the spurious connection between childhood jabs and autism. He’s also the author of the book [...]

By vaughanbell | Leave a Comment
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