ghoti

Advances in neuroscience and imaging

Here is a great short video on how we have mapped the structure brain with the latest scanning technology. As part of the a project called the Human Connector Project 1,200 Americans have been scanned in order to analyse differences between behaviour and the brain’s structures. Highly interested to see how language and the mind […]
International Mother Language Day

21 February is International Mother Language Day, a day to remember, protect and promote the world’s mother languages. The death of a language is the death of a culture, and the death of a way of thinking.
Two new books on metaphor

Two recent books on metaphors worth looking at is Raymond Gibbs and Herbert Colston’s Interpreting Figurative Meaning and Benjamin K. Bergen’s Louder Than Words. Gibbs and Colston approaches metaphorical meaning from psycholinguistics and neuroscience while Bergen looks at meaning from the cutting-edge perspective of neuroimaging. Both are worth a look. The Gibbs/Colston is harder to […]
Happy New Year

May 2014 be filled with more words of joy and happiness and less of anger and sorrow.
Tie Fighters and cultural unconsciousness

I spend a lot of time thinking about language, even when buying presents for my kids. This year I got the Lego Tie Fighter for my son (deep down the toy is for me but I believe we have kids so that we can continue our childhood into adulthood). For most of my life I […]
Motivation is one ingredient to learning any language

Just finished participating in a four-person panel talk about learning Japanese. Here are some points of commonality among panelists: regularity of study motviation through some interest in the target language’s culture enjoying the learning (relates to #2) authentic material or authentic situations For me learning is like being the anthropologist Levi-Strauss: you emmerse yourself in […]
Wait for the full Microsoft Surface with Windows 8

Apparently the released version of the Microsoft Surface version this week isn’t the full version. The version now is more like a tablet (example: Apple iPad) with an app store. This means it cannot do productivity stuff yet. But according to this video the 2013 version will be running Windows 8 (think next version of […]
Body language and changing your behaviour

Body language is known to tell you a lot about a person. In a reversal in thinking Amy Cuddy in this TED presentation talks about how controlling or changing your body language can change your behaviour and frame of mind. Time for my big stretch … if you get what I mean.
No ham in hamburger

Firstly, the patty in hamburgers are made from ground beef. So definitely no ham there. But more importantly the term ‘hamburger’ refers to people from Hamburg in Germany (like ‘Londoner’) from whom this dish is supposed to have come from. ‘Burg’ in old German means ‘castle’. The ‘Ham’ in Hamburg is still in dispute. Ham […]
Aris Venetikidis on maps in the brain

Here is a nice talk on how we map out our world in terms of getting from Point A to Point B. The key to making sense of things is simplification. Firstly, we represent getting somewhere by a series of landmarks. Secondly, no matter how windy a route is from two points our brains represent […]