How does literary style evolve? Surprisingly, clues lie in words with seemingly little meaning, such as “to” and “that”. By analyzing how writers use such “content-free” words, mathematician Daniel Rockmore and colleagues at Dartmouth College were able to conduct the first, large-scale “stylometric” analysis of literature. Content-free words are indicative of writing style, Rockmore says….
A prevalent understanding, particularly in the 1980s, was that boys and girls are born cognitively the same. It was the way parents and society treated them that made them different. Since then, a preponderance of research has called this belief into question. The majority of today’s psychologists agree that some of the differences exhibited by…
From Barbara King at NPR’s 13:7, a blog set at the intersection of science and culture: There’s no language gene. There’s no innate language organ or module in the human brain dedicated to the production of grammatical language. There are no meaningful human universals when it comes to how people construct sentences to communicate with each other….
How do we judge whether a person knows what he or she is talking about? How do we gauge someone’s credibility? At least in part, we rely on a set of cues – titles, university degrees, papers published, lectures given – that have long been bound up in the concept of “expertise”. If a person…
Climate researchers pay too little attention to social sciences, the executive director of the Bolivian Mountain Institute told delegates at the International Conference of Mountain Countries on Climate Change in Nepal. “More interaction between the natural and social sciences is necessary,” said Dirk Hoffmann, adding that the lack of effective dialogue between science and social…
Thousands of years ago, farming spread across Europe and replaced the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of early inhabitants. Now a study of ancient DNA says that trend was driven by farmers moving from place to place. Scientists have long debated how farming expanded across Europe. Did farmers migrate? Did the idea of farming spread from culture to…
Detectable changes in the brain precede the appearance of symptoms like memory loss or other changes in cognitive function resulting from repeated blows to the head, according to Dr. Charles Bernick, who presided over the Professional Fighters Brain Health Study. The physical changes are a reduction in size in the hippocampus and thalamus of the…
Are creative people more adept at justifying immoral behavior, and thereby more likely to transgress ethical boundaries? Or does unethical behavior require people to be more inventive, causing them to be more imaginative? Whatever the relationship between creativity and immorality, a growing body of evidence, including a recent paper published in the Journal of Personality…
Confidence can boost or bust group decisions
A review of “Mimesis and Science: Empirical Research on Imitation and the Mimetic Theory of Culture and Religion,” edited by psychologist Scott Garrels.