via eflclassroom.com
These are all great issues for teachers, administrators, and policymakers to consider. “Common sense” isn’t always the best approach in education.
Many of the questions are phrased in a way that could easily be either true or false, but you’ll get the idea. The great justifications will help.
Scientists at work on rewiring human brains
Scientists in the Midwest are researching ways to rewire the brains of people who’ve suffered traumatic brain injuries. We speak with Pedram Mohseni and Randolph J. Nudo about their work, which has recently been given a $1.44 million grant by the Defense Department.
The Department of Defense has granted $1.44 million to a program run by Pedram Mohseni at Case Western Reserve University and Randolph J. Nudo at Kansas University Medical Center. The two have been working for three years already on a method of essentially rewiring the human brain to bypass the parts that have been damaged.
You’ve got to listen to this. You get the main idea by reading the headline, but the interview and report at a little extra.
Can you imagine this a few years down the road. Aside for tremendous uses for victims of injuries and disease (think Alzheimer’s), this is the next designer surgery in 20 years. Imagine repurposing sections of your brain to carry more load. This is brain optimization down the road.
Yes. I could be reading too much into this, but I think that this assumption isn’t far off. Even beyond storage implants, this is making best use of the matter we already have. Fascinating.
The question at hand: do the things that all languages have in common reflect certain universals of human thought and experience, or do they reflect the workings of a universal language faculty? Fifty years ago a third answer dominated: languages are learned from scratch and have no universals. That position, however, is still so out of favor that it is not much proposed in the current quarrel.
The latest dispute arises from a stark denial that languages have any peculiar grammatical universals of their own. It amounts to a total rejection of Chomsky’s core idea that the syntax of any individual language reflects an instance of a universal grammar (UG). Nicholas Evans and Stephen C. Levinson have published a paper in the wonderful journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, “The Myth of Language Universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science” (uncorrected final draft available here). Also published with the paper were a series of responses including many sharp retorts from generative grammarians who still firmly believe in UG. They score their points, but the fact that the issue has returned underlines the basic fact: after fifty years of proclaiming the existence of a UG, we still don’t know what it is. All in all the paper and responses make for a brutal slugfest.
This is a great post, not just for it’s overview and discussion of the topic, but also for pointing to such a great discussion. I’ve always regretted not reading up more on UG and criticisms, beyond basic linguistic courses. This could be a good start to get back in the game 🙂
