I Said, and We Heard

What do your emails reveal about your relationships with those around you? More that just the details of the subject, apparently. Psychologist James Pennebaker has been studying the use of pronouns in written language, and he has uncovered a startlingly robust correlation: in correspondence between people of unequal rank, the lower ranked person will use more “I,” “me,” and “my” pronouns, and the higher ranked person will use more “we,” “us,” and “our” pronouns. This gives a whole new spin to the “royal we.”

Read more here: The Secret Language Code via Scientificamerican.com

Signs of Intelligence?

Anthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger is constructing a database of our earliest signs and symbols - markings drawn or painted by humans on cave walls up to 60,000 years ago. The interesting thing about this work is that certain symbols recur at different caves, geographically distant, and across tens of thousands of years. What does all this mean? Petzinger has no solid answer, but she does have some interesting theories. Entoptic patterns very similar to these symbols are seen by shamans in altered states of consciousness, and it could be that these oddly common cave art symbols arose directly from the human brain, and were accessed via religious trance.

Read more here: Human Ingenuity: A 100,000-Year-Old Story via forbes.com