Language

Michael Corballis is a professor emeritus at the University of Auckland, who has written extensively on the evolution of language and the origins of thought.

As a teenager, Chet Sherwood, a biological anthropologist at George Washington University, did not know he was destined to become a scientist.

Our awareness of our own speech often comes after the words have left our mouth, not before

  After glancing at the people in the photo above, what did you think? Perhaps you just thought ‘four people’, or ‘older people’, but it’s likely if I asked you to describe it you would say, ‘two men, two women’.

Books and recommendations from Scientific American MIND

Astronauts on a routine repair mission for the Hubble Space Telescope find themselves coping with more than they bargained for in the pulse-pounding opening sequence of Alfonso Cuaron's Oscar-winning film, Gravity.

Easy to pronounce can mean easy to believe

William Shakespeare may well have been more aware of his era’s science—including the Copernican view that the planets revolve around the sun—than has generally been thought

There are deep, surprising connections between words and the brain’s sense of motion through space

The Elephant Listening Project, associated with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is recording thousands of hours of forest elephant vocalizations. Steve Mirsky reports

 

Greetings from Boston where the 21st annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society is underway.  Saturday and Sunday were packed with symposia, lectures and more than 400 posters.

Sometimes I work with children and adults who can't put words to their feelings and thoughts. It's not that they don't want to - it's more that they don't know how.