Last week, I talked a little bit about several times during our lifespan, called critical periods, where we are particularly sensitive to input from our environment. Input like light and eye muscle input to the eyes when we are developing our depth perception in early childhood. Input like hormones and other signal chemicals coming...
For most of us, if you’re exposed to more than one language as a young child, it’s much easier to become fluent in those multiple languages, and the language skills stick with you much better than if you try to learn another language in adulthood. We often think of this feat in childhood as...
When you concoct a marinade for a meal, you often marinate your meat or whatever for a length of time – 30 minutes, a few hours, overnight. Why? Presumably to give the chemicals time to infiltrate the tissue being marinated. When you add salad dressing to your salad and let it sit in the...
Ever wonder why deciduous trees drop their leaves when the weather turns cooler and the region heads into autumn and winter? Ever wonder why the leaves change color, to brilliant hues of yellow, red, and orange, before they drop? These two events- color change and leaf drop- are separate events and separate mechanisms, but...
Most of us think that we taste with our tongues. We can detect five categories of taste: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami (meatiness). Right? Well….. There’s a whole lot more to taste than is on the tongue! You could say that most of us only know the “tip” of taste. Let’s dip into...
