Our age is truly the age of Big Data. Every day we tweet, write posts and upload photos to Facebook and Instagram and send messages through WhatsApp to keep in touch with our friends and relatives. While doing this, we might not be aware that we are constantly producing new data, thus only increasing the amount that is already out there. As…
Waking up dead tired on a dreary Saturday morning is never fun, but even more so in November. The sky is grey and it never seems to stop raining, and for some reason only known to God herself (if you believe in that sort of thing) it has already started to freeze at night, adding the wonderful sensation of numbing cold to…
Two times a year, the clock changes. We either get an hour more or an hour less. We’re all so used to this that it doesn’t even strike us as odd anymore. Two times a year, out entire perception of time changes. We, as human beings, change time two times a year. One could argue that we –the human race- are also…
Pop a tab, slip under an MRI and what you would see might surprise you. Brain networks that normally handle vision, attention, movement and hearing communicate with each other in novel ways, leading to what looks like a “more unified brain”. What I would like to zoom into, however, is the Default Mode Network. Scans revealed a deactivation of the tightly linked…
In the last weeks, I tried to give you some insides in how the digital applies to linguistics in daily life and how all of us are involved with it. I already gave you some hints about its role in academic context and I thought it would be worth to have a closer look on how it changed research and academic work…
I got a notification on my phone. Some data needed to be deleted or my phone couldn’t function properly anymore, or something like that. We’ve all gotten that notification, and we’ve all ignored it. This time though, in the name of scientific research for this blog post, I chose to obey this command. So I dove deep into the deepest parts of…
As a child, we’ve all looked up at the night sky, trying to count the stars. But even that tiny piece of sky was so filled with stars that we couldn’t count them. The human mind cannot even begin to comprehend how many stars there are, and how enormous our universe is. This is perhaps not the best metaphor, but to a…
