Even if nothing else about this article were interesting, its title would be: Vocal communication is a central feature, but language encompasses much more, as linguist and neuropsychologist Angela Friederici pointed out at a recent meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. “Language is more than speech,” said Friederici, director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, in Leipzig, Germany. “Speech … uses a limited set of vowels and consonants to form words. Language, however, is a system consisting of words … and a set of rules called grammar or syntax to form phrases and sentences.” Nonhuman primates can learn the meaning of individual words, she notes, but aren’t capable of combining words into meaningful sequences of Read More ›

After we headlined and began discussing PS on hearing and consciousness yesterday, H raised a significant issue: H, 15: >> . . . the invocation of a Creator who “beautifully designed what each sound should sound like” and “put the special program that can interpret each frequency pattern of air vibration into each sound, thus giving us the sound experience” is an empty explanation, no more useful than claiming that mind arises from matter without any idea how that could happen. >> To this, I replied: KF, 16: >> The concept that the root of reality is Mind, and that mind is at least as fundamental as matter is not an empty claim or assertion. That intelligent, minded designers exist Read More ›

Sometimes a gem of a comment gets overlooked, but is well worth promotion to headlined status. Here, let us belatedly highlight SM on gerrymandering definitions in the slippery slope thread: SM, 13: >>If three successfully interbreeding populations of finches on a single island are separate species then whenever a Japanese person marries a Sicilian we already have inter-species marriage. This gerrymandering of definitions for partisan political advantage is a classic case of the Slippery Slope: we let people adjust a definition to their own advantage once, even in a small way, and it isn’t long before you cannot even discuss the subject because there are too many definitions and none are sufficiently accepted or overlapping for discussion to be meaningful. Read More ›

Pat Suwonpanich has made a comment on hearing and sound as a mental phenomenon leading to questions of conscious mind that I think is worth pondering by one and all, so let us headline (with slight edits): >>For those who wanna read less-technical article on hearing, I have tried to write my own article as shown below. Hope it will be useful for many of us. Whenever we hear beautiful music or any other interesting sounds, we should realize that the ability to hear is so special that no known set of nature’s laws can explain it ! Most of us tend to think that we hear sounds because there are various sounds around us. In reality, if there were Read More ›

The WIMP (Weakly Interacting Massive particles) model has just not worked out: We understand how the Standard Model particles behave. We have solid predictions for how they should interact through all of the fundamental forces, and experimental confirmation of those theories. We also have extraordinary constraints on how they’re permitted to interact in a beyond-the-Standard-Model fashion. Because of our constraints from accelerators, cosmic rays, decay experiments, nuclear reactors and more, we’ve been able to rule out many possible ideas that have been theorized. When it comes to what might make up the dark matter, however, all we have are the astrophysical observations and our theoretical work, in tandem, to guide us. The possible theories that we’ve come up with include Read More ›