Distinguishing 'things' from 'stuff': Brain's visual processing areas separate solid objects from flowing substances
Jul 2025, phys.org
Things - rigid or deformable objects like a bouncing ball
Stuff - liquids or granular substances such as sand
"When you're looking at some fluid or gooey stuff, you engage with it in different way than you do with a rigid object. With a rigid object, you might pick it up or grasp it, whereas with fluid or gooey stuff, you probably are going to have to use a tool to deal with it"
via MIT: Dissociable Cortical Regions Represent Things and Stuff in the Human Brain, Current Biology (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.07.027.
Image credit: AI Art - Help Computer - 2026
Language structure shapes color-adjective links even for people born blind, study reveals
Apr 2025, phys.org
"Certain colors are strongly associated with certain adjectives (e.g., red is hot, blue is cold)""Some of these associations are grounded in visual experiences such as seeing glowing red embers. Surprisingly, despite having no visual experience, many congenitally blind people show very similar color associations, which are likely learned through language. We show that these associations are indeed embedded in the statistical structure of language."
via University of Wisconsin-Madison: Qiawen Liu et al, Learning about color from language, Communications Psychology (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s44271-025-00230-9.
A universal rhythm guides how we speak: Global analysis reveals 1.6-second 'intonation units'
Aug 2025, phys.org
Human speech across the world pulses to the beat of what are called intonation units, short prosodic phrases that occur at a consistent rate of one every 1.6 seconds.Intonation units play a critical role in helping listeners follow conversations, take turns speaking, and absorb information.The research analyzed over 650 recordings in 48 languages spanning every continent and 27 language families.
via Hebrew University: Maya Inbar et al, A universal of speech timing: Intonation units form low-frequency rhythms, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2425166122
What's in a name? Information structure parallels discovered across cultures—with repercussions for Asian names
Feb 2026, phys.org
(ie, Name Entropy)
Fixing of Western last names around the 1600's meant a loss of information within the naming system, which had to be compensated for - which is why first names now convey more and more information (there's more first names than there used to be).Naming systems must allow for the separate identification of a large number of people, while keeping the total number of words required by the system manageable so that they don't overtax people's brains as they process them.In England, in every 50-year period between 1550 and 1880, half of the male population was given the first names John, William, or Thomas, and half the female population Ann, Mary, or Elizabeth.
Today, in Korea, it's the opposite, in both ways, because half the population still has 6 names, and in Asia, they come first, not last - Kim Jong Il would be called Jong Il Kim in the West. And I can't find it in the paper but I think the 6 names would be something like Kim, Park, Lee, Son, ...
From the paper itself, using badminton player Simon Archer and the basketball player Yao Ming 姚明 - Simon and Yao are names, whereas Archer is an English word for someone who shoots arrows with a bow, and Ming is a Chinese word meaning brightness.
The problem is that, because of the focus on inherited names in the Western system, the order of names of researchers from East Asian countries is reversed for publication. For Asian researchers, this means that the part of the name that conveys more information is initialized, and the part that conveys less is written out in full."For researchers from China today, it is as if Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, and Charles Dodgson had all been forced to publish their works under the name Charles D."
via University of Tübingen, MIT, UC Irvine, U of Texas at Austin: Michael Ramscar et al, Cross-cultural structures of personal name systems reflect general communicative principles, Nature Communications (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-67079-8
Study suggests people are losing 338 spoken words every year and have been for at least 15 years
Apr 2026, phys.org
(Surprise) We were replicating an earlier paper on gender differences in how many words men and women speak per day. My collaborator, Valeria Pfeifer, came to me with the word counts from the replication analyses using the same methodology as our 2007 paper, but with 2,200 new participants across 22 studies. Our estimate of daily spoken word average came in at around 12,700 words. Our 2007 estimate had been 15,900. I told her there had to be a mistake. But she rechecked everything, and the number held. Something had genuinely changed.These studies were conducted for entirely different purposes—coping with breast cancer, adjustment after divorce, the social effects of meditation, relationship dynamics. None of them were designed to track how much people talk over time. Participants had no idea their word counts would ever be analyzed this way, which rules out any concern that people adjusted their behavior to fit a hypothesis.Young adults under 25 showed a steeper decline, about 452 words per year, compared to 314 for older adults.
via University of Arizona and University of Missouri–Kansas City: Valeria A. Pfeifer et al, Sliding Into Silence? We Are Speaking 300 Daily Words Fewer Every Year, Perspectives on Psychological Science (2026). DOI: 10.1177/17456916261425131
Small talk shapes big trends: Physics predicts how language patterns spread
May 2026, phys.org
The model is a step towards understanding the "statistical physics of language" - Professor Burridge tested his approach against large-scale survey data on American dialects collected by the Cambridge Online Survey of World Englishes, created by Bert Vaux, a professor of linguistics at the University of Cambridge.In 1950, the term roly-poly for a woodlouse was largely confined to a relatively small group of speakers in the American South. By 1995, the term had spread dramatically, becoming almost universal across much of the United States."Splinter is used across almost all of England, except around Newcastle, where people still say spelk. Although Newcastle itself is densely populated, it is surrounded by more sparsely populated areas, which helps the local form hold its ground and prevents splinters from taking over.
University of Portsmouth: James Burridge, Statistical field theory for dialectology, Physical Review E (2026). DOI: 10.1103/7f86-mxf2.
On arXiv: DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2512.17668
Post Script: I was thinking about the word zig-zag, and whether or not I actually made up the word wiggle-waggle or if I heard it somewhere. And after that I was thinking why have one and the other but not ziggle zaggle or wig-wag.
