Your View of Time Creates Your World

This 10-minute video can teach you more about why younger people's mind-set is so different than older people's than any other instructional presentation I've ever seen. Period.

The whole Past/Present/Future schematic explains much more than I'd ever imagined ~ affecting geographical locations, generational age, and educational potential. The discussion about video games and their impact on educational systems is just one astounding example.

This is one video I'll watch over and over to make sure I understand its finer points, which are very powerful and meaningful. My sincere thanks to psychologist Philip Zimbardo for sharing his thoughts and findings!

Nearly 3,000 Languages Endangered

The world’s human languages are disappearing about about as quickly as species are going extinct. Of the 6,900 languages spoken in the world, 2,500 are now endangered, according to the United Nations.


That’s a huge increase from the last atlas compiled in 2001, which listed 900 languages threatened with extinction.

• There are 199 languages in the world spoken by fewer than a dozen people, including Karaim with six speakers in Ukraine, and Wichita, spoken by 10 people in Oklahoma.
• The last four speakers of Lengilu talk among themselves in Indonesia.
• Some 178 other languages are spoken by between 10 and 150 people.

More than 200 languages have become extinct over the last three generations, such as Ubykh that fell silent in 1992 when Tefvic Esenc passed on, Aasax in Tanzania, which disappeared in 1976, and Manx in 1974.

India tops the list of countries with the greatest number of endangered languages, 196 in all, followed by the United States, which stands to lose 192 and Indonesia, where 147 are in peril.

Click here for the complete Discovery article.

Amazon Tribe Defies Numbers Concept

A Pirahã woman at one of her tribe's rain forest shelters.

A tribe of hunter/gatherers in the Amazon rain forest have disproven a belief long held by the world’s linguists – that counting and having words for numbers are essential to human cognition.

The Pirahã people in Brazil have no words to express numerical concepts such as “one,” “two,” or “many.”

“They don’t count and they have no number words,” says MIT cognitive scientist Edward Gibson, who headed a study published in the journal Cognition.

Discover Magazine reports that the researchers spent eight days in a Pirahã rain forest village conducting counting tests on adult members of the tribe. Sometimes the experimenter placed varying numbers of spools of thread on a table and asked the participant to perform a simple one-to-one task, such as laying down the same quantity of uninflated balloons. Other tasks required remembering how many spools had been placed inside a can.

Inconsistent References to Quantities

A previous—and contested—study of the Pirahã had reported that they used the words hói, hòi, and baágiso to represent “one,” “two,” and “many,” respectively. But Gibson’s tests revealed that the Pirahã actually used these words in a more relative way to mean “few,” “some,” and “more.” In some instances hói was used for quantities as large as six, and sometimes hòi—a similar but separate word—was used for quantities between four and ten.

“None of the three words that the Pirahã produced were used consistently to refer to any particular quantity,” the researchers reported.

Click here for the Discover Magazine article.