Functional neuroimaging has given rise to tens of thousands of publications, but we remain far from a comprehensive understanding the neural basis of mental functions. I will argue that this arises from two fundamental flaws in the way that neuroimaging research has been done.
It can be tempting to take a nap on a bus or in a train. But how to make sure you don’t miss your stop? Sleep appears to be accompanied by a loss in our capacity to perceive and interact with our environment. Yet previous experiments have shown that certain sounds are perceived during sleep. For instance, a sleeping person tends to wake up more easily at the sound of their first name rather than the name of another person.
Languages differ in their phonology, i.e. in the sounds they use (French has nasal vowels, English doesn’t), in the restrictions upon the sequencing of these sounds within syllables and words (in French, words cannot start with the sequence /tl/; in English, /h/ can only occur syllable-initially), and in the processes that modify these sounds across words (in English, /t/ can be changed into /p/: “sweet boy” can be pronounced as “sweep boy”; in French, it can be changed into /d/: “botte verte” can be pronounced as “bodde verte”).
Programme:
March 12
Nura Sidarus (DEC, ENS)
La liberté vue par les neurosciences
Que signifie être libre? Normalement, on se sent libre de faire nos propres choix. Néanmoins, notre environnement peut nous influencer, même sans que l'on s'en aperçoive ! Dans ce cas, sommes-nous responsables de nos actions? Venez découvrir ce que les neurosciences cognitives nous apprennent sur la liberté humaine.
March 13
To meet Claire Gillan, contact Stefano Palminteri: stefano.palminteri@ens.fr.
Conférence donnée par Steven Pinker à l'occasion de la sortie de la version française de son livre "Enlightenment now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress" aux éditions Les arènes.
Inscription sur https://steven-pinker.eventbrite.fr
Why do people of different linguistic background sometimes perceive the
same acoustic signal differently? For instance, when hearing nonnative
speech that does not conform to sound structures allowed in their native
language, listeners may report hearing vowels that are not acoustically
present. This phenomenon, known as perceptual vowel epenthesis, has been
attested in various languages such as Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese,
Korean, and English. The quality of the epenthesized vowel varies
