Babel No More: Unraveling the Secrets of Superhuman Language-Learners. By Maria Popova What a Chilean YouTube disaster and a busy Manhattan restaurant have to do with the limits of the human brain. Nineteenth-century Italian cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti, a legend in his day, was said to speak 72 languages. Hungarian hyperpolyglot Lomb Kató, who taught herself Russian by reading Russian romance novels, insisted that “one learns grammar from language, not language from grammar.” Legendary MIT linguist Ken Hale, who passed away in 2001, had an arsenal of 50 languages and was rumored to have once learned the notoriously difficult Finnish while on a flight to Helsinki.
Just like extraordinary feats of memory, extraordinary feats of language serve as a natural experiment probing the limits of the human brain — Mezzofanti maintained that “god” had given him this particular power, but did these linguistic superlearners really possess some significant structural advantage over the rest of us in how their brains were wired? Donating = Loving Share on Tumblr.
The Benefits of Bilingualism. Adventures with an Extreme Polyglot: Excerpt from 'Babel No More' If the first 10 amendments to the Constitution went before today’s voters, how would they fare? Change of Heart About the Bill of Rights? … Is it possible that some of our constitutional rights aren’t the dreamboats we think they are? Maybe they’re even cheating on us. For example, the Supreme Court has ruled that rich knuckleheads have the constitutional right to make unlimited political contributions.
We’re Having a Steamy Affair With Rights… President Obama, sworn defender of our constitutional rights, has said, “In the United States, health care is not a privilege for the fortunate few; it is a right.” And so far, Chief Justice John Roberts is backing him up. Meanwhile Duty Sits Home Waiting for Us to Text About Hooking Up Later, Maybe, if Nothing Else Is Going On… NARAL defends the constitutional right to abortion. NRA defends the constitutional right to something similar, ex post facto. Reactionary troglodyte Tea Party embraces the Constitution—says it means government wronging rights.
And… Breaking the Habits that Enslave Us: Q&A with Charles Duhigg | NeuroTribes. Hello there! If you enjoy the content on Neurotribes, consider subscribing for future posts via email or RSS feed. Charles Duhigg, New York Times reporter and author of "The Power of Habit" For a species obsessed with free will, choices, and options, we spend a surprising amount of time acting like zombies. We’re already sipping our morning coffee before we notice we’ve navigated to the kitchen on automatic pilot. We pull our smart phones from our pockets while the friend beside us says something that deserves our full attention.
Indeed, we spend more than 40 percent of our precious waking hours engaged in habitual actions [PDF], according to a 2006 study at Duke University. That’s one reason noxious habits like smoking, overeating, and meth addiction are so hard to break. Duhigg breaks down the sequence of ritualized behavior (which he calls the habit loop) into three component parts: the cue, the routine, and the reward. Steve Silberman: How did you become interested in habits? Internet Archive Wayback Machine.