Notes

From an article in Behavioral Scientist:

The Power of Language: How the Codes We Use to Think, Speak, and Live Transform Our Minds

By Viorica Marian

From the back cover: “While you may well think you speak only one language, in fact your mind accommodates multiple codes of communication. Some people speak Spanish, some Mandarin. Some speak poetry, some are fluent in math. The human brain is built to use multiple languages, and using more languages opens doors to creativity, brain health, and cognitive control.”

An excerpt from The Power of Language on Behavioral Scientist: “When given the Japanese words heiwa and tatakai and the English words war and peace, they were able to correctly guess that heiwa means ‘peace’ and tatakai means ‘war’ more often than one would expect by chance.”

From an article on Nautilus:

Slime mold grows differently depending on the music playing

If it’s sensitive to vibrations, does it react to music?

We grew the Physarum on a plate, and the plate was sitting on a speaker, and my student was driving the speaker with her iPhone. And we could see that for certain types of music, it would grow quite differently than for others. Some of them, it grew very nicely. Some of them, it just didn’t grow at all. It just really hated it; it just hunkered down.

What music in particular?

The thing is, she was 19 years old, so I didn’t recognize any of the artists that she was telling me about. But that’s a real easy home science project. Somebody could totally do that with their kids.