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Your Native Tongue Holds a Special Place in Your Brain, Even if You Speak 10 Languages
Most people will learn one or two languages in their lives. But Vaughn Smith, a 47-year-old carpet cleaner from Washington, D.C., speaks 24. Smith is a hyperpolyglot—a rare individual who speaks more than 10 languages. In a new brain imaging study, researchers peered inside the minds of polyglots like Smith to tease out how language-specific regions in their brains respond to hearing different languages. Familiar languages elicited a stronger reaction than unfamiliar ones, they found, with one important exception: native languages, which provoked relatively little brain activity. This, the authors note, suggests there’s something special about the languages we learn early in life.
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Are You (Still) An Optimist? These Questions Might Help Explain Why
Imagine you’re back in high school — fluorescent lights humming, hard plastic chairs, a classroom stuffy with hormones and anxiety — and you’ve just aced a test. Do you think to yourself, “I guess I got lucky today?” Or does your internal monologue say, “Damn, I’m good!”? Now imagine that you’ve failed the test. Does the voice inside you whisper: “Of course. You’re so bad at this.” Or does it say, “Ugh — you just didn’t study hard enough.” And which of these responses might brand you as an optimist? You might think, for example, that the first response — crediting luck for a good outcome — is a sign of optimism, since it suggests good times ahead.
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Enhance Mental Health With a Culture of Gratitude
Work contributes significantly to mental health. Based on everything from assignments and responsibilities to relationships with leaders and colleagues, work makes a difference in how people feel physically, cognitively and emotionally. You can enhance your own mental health and your company can play a role as well by ensuring you have a sense of purpose, performing as well as you can and seeking opportunities for growth. But another way to nurture and sustain mental health is through something unexpected: gratitude. You can foster gratitude for yourself, and organizations can cultivate cultures of gratitude—and these will have positive effects for people as well as for business.
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Why Do We Have Eyebrows and Other Types of Facial Hair?
We humans seem to have an on-again, off-again relationship with facial hair. Prehistoric cave drawings reveal the myriad tools our ancient ancestors used to shave: shark’s teeth, sharpened flints and even clam shells. Nowadays, beards are back in style and people are taking a razor to their brows, instead. But is there a reason we evolved to have these hairy baubles in the first place? And, if so, what evolutionary advantage might we be throwing away for the sake of staying on trend? Turns out, researchers have a lot to say on the matter. Get their answers to why we have eyebrows, what eyelashes are for and why we grow beards. ...
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The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are and How Old You Think You Are
This past thanksgiving, I asked my mother how old she was in her head. She didn’t pause, didn’t look up, didn’t even ask me to repeat the question, which would have been natural, given that it was both syntactically awkward and a little odd. We were in my brother’s dining room, setting the table. My mother folded another napkin. “Forty-five,” she said. She is 76. Why do so many people have an immediate, intuitive grasp of this highly abstract concept—“subjective age,” it’s called—when randomly presented with it? It’s bizarre, if you think about it. Certainly most of us don’t believe ourselves to be shorter or taller than we actually are.
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Why Music Causes Memories to Flood Back
When Laura Nye Falsone’s first child was born in 1996, the Wallflowers album “Bringing Down the Horse” was a big hit. “All I have to hear are the first notes from ‘One Headlight,’ and I am back to dancing … with my brand-new baby boy in my arms,” she says. “It fills my heart with joy every time” When Carol Howard’s early-onset Alzheimer’s worsened, often she couldn’t recognize her husband. She once introduced him as her father. But if she heard a 1960s Simon & Garfunkel song playing, Howard, a marine biologist who died in 2019, could sing every word “effortlessly,” her husband says. This ability of music to conjure up vivid memories is a phenomenon well known to brain researchers.