“Cognitive attraction” is the theory that humans’ neurological processes favor certain cultural forms — invoked to explain things as varied as people’s interest in video games and the evolution of religion. >>Read More

Evolutionary developmental psychologist maintain that evolutionary psychological theory should be regarded as an overarching framework for studying the ways in which youngsters’ developing cognitive and social skills may be adaptive or maladaptive in school environments. >>Read More

Such biological metaphors seem apt, because much of the research is a quantitative examination of words. Just as genes are the fundamental building blocks of biology, words are the raw material of ideas. >>Read More

We need to combine our understanding of the natural world with great stories. Evolution designed humans to see the world in fictional story mode. >>Read More

A bird listening to birdsong may experience some of the same emotions as a human listening to music, suggests a new study on white-throated sparrows, published in Frontiers of Evolutionary Neuroscience. >>Read More

They say that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. But why don’t we dance to paintings— or for that matter, buildings— anyway? The latest research hints at why. >>Read More

Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like “knight.” No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today. >>Read More