A new study from Princeton University reports that a female student of lead investigator, Uri Hasson, can project her own brain activity onto another person, forcing the person’s neural activity to closely mirror that in her own brain. The process is otherwise known as speech. There have been many functional brain-imaging studies involving language, but [...]

Here’s a little experiment. You know “Greensleeves“—the famous English folk song? Go ahead and hum it to yourself. Now choose the emotion you think the song best conveys: (a) happiness, (b) sadness, (c) anger or (d) fear. Almost everyone thinks “Greensleeves” is a sad song—but why? Apart from the melancholy lyrics, it’s because the melody [...]

In our introductory post, we wrote “let’s face it. We’re visual beings.” Here’s proof:

While natural selection works operates over an individual’s ability to survive, sexual selection operates over an individual’s ability to mate and successfully sire offspring. In other words, sexual selection is a process through which individuals of a given species struggle to be more reproductively successful. It works in two primary ways, first identified by Charles [...]

Babel’s Dawn, a book that grew out of a blog about the natural history of speech, is probably not like any other book you’ve read. That’s because it’s not really a book about the natural history of speech: it’s a book about a (fictitious) museum that tells the story about the natural history of speech. [...]