new research shows that

Living in tree-filled neighborhoods may reduce risk of heart disease, study shows

Living in a tree-filled neighborhood may be as beneficial to the heart as regular exercise, new research shows. 

Researchers at the University of Louisville designed a clinical trial that followed hundreds of people living in six low- to middle-income neighborhoods in South Louisville, Kentucky. They used blood and other samples to better understand how their heart risks changed before and after the team planted thousands of mature trees near their homes. 

Results from the Green Heart Louisville Project ’s HEAL Study , released Tuesday, showed that people living in neighborhoods with twice as many trees and shrubs had lower levels of a blood marker associated with heart disease, diabetes and some types of cancer compared with those who lived in more tree-bare neighborhoods. 

“We are trying to see if we can decrease the rates of heart disease in a community,” said Aruni Bhatnagar, a professor of medicine at the University of Louisville, who led the project.

Most previous studies showing the effects of nature on mental and physical health are observational and can’t answer whether people who live in green communities are healthier because they’re wealthier and have access to better health care. 

The HEAL study was set up with a control group and an intervention, meaning something measurable that some of the participants were exposed to during the study but not before. 

Bhatnagar and his team recruited about 750 people living in a 4-mile area of South Louisville cut by a highway. The residents were 25 to 75 years old. 

Nearly 80% were white, and 60% identified as female. Half reported average household incomes of $50,000.

The researchers collected blood, urine, nail and hair samples, as well as health data, from each person before they began their intervention. 

Then, from 2019 to 2022, they planted nearly 8,500 evergreen trees, 630 deciduous trees — the type that lose leaves in the fall — and 45 different types of shrubs in parts of the 4-mile study area, leaving others untouched. 

Last year and this year, they took new samples from residents living in both areas. 

People living in the intervention areas had 13% lower levels of high-sensitivity C-reactive protein , a blood marker associated with heart disease, including stroke, coronary artery disease and heart attack. The drop was similar to starting a regular exercise routine, Bhatnagar said. 

“I wouldn’t have expected such a strong biomarker response, and that speaks to maybe something truly is causal here with how trees impact health,” said Peter James, director of the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health at the University of California, Davis School of Medicine, who wasn’t involved in the new research. 

How trees can improve physical health

Previous research has shown spending time in green spaces boosts mental health .

The new study showed the connection between living among more trees and physical health. 

Trees provide shade and cool the areas where they’re planted, helping quell the urban heat effect that disproportionately affects low-income neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color. Hot weather aggravates heart disease and can cause heatstroke in people without pre-existing conditions. 

Trees also buffer noise, which is linked to higher rates of cardiovascular disease, James said. 

“They provide areas for people to relax, exercise, and probably more importantly, socialize,” Joan Casey, an environmental epidemiologist and associate professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Washington, said in an email. 

“They also replace other health-harmful land uses, like industrial sites,” she said.

Because one of the city’s major highways cuts through the study area, Bhatnagar and his team believe, trees’ ability to filter air pollution and buffer neighborhoods from constantly breathing in harmful particles could be a primary way the tree-planting intervention appeared to lower inflammation markers in people living in greened areas. 

During the study, the project planted trees only in the parts of South Louisville that had the worst air quality. It took air quality samples before the project, and it is still analyzing how the new tree cover has affected pollution. It’s a complex undertaking, because air quality fluctuates based on the weather — a windy day might increase or decrease air pollution in certain areas, depending on the direction of the wind, and air pollution is worse on hotter days. 

The project plans to plant trees in the control group neighborhoods in another three or four years if the intervention neighborhoods continue to show positive results. It also wants to determine whether tree cover improves sleep or children’s immune systems by encouraging outside play. 

“There is no sort of ultimate proof,” Bhatnagar said. “But this is the strongest evidence of any study that’s ever been done on trees and their relationship to health.” 

Growing evidence shows the importance of ensuring green spaces are equitably distributed around cities, which is currently not the case . 

Casey said it’s important that city planners be careful not to create “green gentrification” when they create more equitable access to green spaces in cities — that is, when spaces such as water fronts are restored and housing prices increase as a result, making it unaffordable for current residents to continue living there once a green space is completed.

“The take-home message here is that nature is not an amenity; green spaces are not a perk for the wealthy. They are essential for us as human beings,” James said. 

Kaitlin Sullivan is a contributor for NBCNews.com who has worked with NBC News Investigations. She reports on health, science and the environment and is a graduate of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at City University of New York.

Anne Thompson is NBC News’ chief environmental affairs correspondent. 

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New Research Shows Antarctic Uplift Could Reduce Sea Level Rise by 40%

The study finds that the effects will vary depending on the level of control over global warming.

A new study suggests that the uplifting terrain beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet could significantly impact sea level rise in the future.

Despite feeling like a stationary mass, most solid ground is undergoing a process of deformation, sinking, and rising in response to many environmental factors. In Antarctica, melting glacial ice means less weight on the bedrock below, allowing it to rise. How the rising earth interacts with the overlying ice sheet to affect sea level rise is not well-studied, said Terry Wilson, co-author of the study and a senior research scientist at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at The Ohio State University .

In the new study, Wilson’s colleagues at McGill University developed a model to predict how these interactions could impact global sea level, finding that if humans can lower greenhouse gas emissions and global warming is slowed, upward shifts in the solid earth could reduce Antarctica’s contribution to sea level rise by about 40%, significantly bolstering the best case scenarios for global sea level rise. In this low-emissions scenario, land uplift slows the flow of ice from land to ocean, allowing for more of the ice sheet to be preserved.

Conversely, if humans are unable to lower carbon emissions in time, ice retreat will outpace uplift, pushing ocean water away from Antarctica and amplifying sea level rise. These events could significantly worsen the most dire models of projected sea level rise along populated coastlines, said Wilson.

Rapid Changes in the Antarctic Ice Sheet

“Our measurements show that the solid earth that forms the base of the Antarctic ice sheet is changing shape surprisingly quickly,“ said Wilson. “The land uplift from reduced ice on the surface is happening in decades, rather than over thousands of years.”

The study was published in Science Advances .

To arrive at these conclusions, the team developed a 3D model of the Earth’s interior using geophysical field measurements from the Antarctic Network (ANET) of the Polar Earth Observing Network (POLENET) project. The mission is focused on studying the changing polar regions by collecting GPS and seismic data from an array of autonomous systems across Antarctica.

Researchers then performed a number of simulations to capture many possible evolutions of Antarctica’s ice sheet and the extent of global sea level rise Earth may experience until the year 2500, according to those parameters.

“We can project what difference it actually will make if we all contribute to a low-emission scenario now, versus what’s come to be called ‘business as usual’ emissions,” said Wilson, who is also the lead investigator of the ANET-POLENET project.

She attributes the model’s unprecedented level of detail to how deftly it incorporates data from Antarctica. GPS stations monitor how the land is moving and seismometers measure how fast seismic waves from earthquakes travel through the earth, yielding important insight into where the land uplift will be fast or slow.

Surprisingly, according to some of the team’s GPS observations processed by researchers at Ohio State, Wilson said, the Antarctic Ice Sheet is currently experiencing a solid earth uplift of about 5 centimeters per year, about 5 times the rate that North America experiences.

Impact on Coastal Populations and Global Importance

Another significant aspect of the study is how the changes in Antarctica under different carbon emissions scenarios will impact coastlines around the world. Because sea level change will not be uniform, the study notes that nearly 700 million people around the world living in coastal regions will be most impacted by rising seas due to Antarctic ice loss.

Since some regions, such as small island nations, will be more vulnerable than others, mitigating environmental conditions like atmospheric and ocean warming is a vital issue for society, said Wilson.

“Many people are now more aware they’re experiencing the effects of climate change,” she said. “This work reinforces that our actions as individuals, nations, and globally can make a difference in what kind of Earth our offspring will experience in their lifetimes.”

The study results highlight how complex the relationship between the solid earth and the processes that happen atop it is, as well as the importance of continuing to gather enough data to make prompt and accurate predictions about what the next few centuries of our planet will look like.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty in every model and every prediction that you make,” said Wilson. “But to document how fast our world is changing, it’s very important to continue advancing our ability to make predictions that are more certain, which is the only path that will allow us to tend to our future in a meaningful way.”

Reference: “The influence of realistic 3D mantle viscosity on Antarctica’s contribution to future global sea levels” by Natalya Gomez, Maryam Yousefi, David Pollard, Robert M. DeConto, Shaina Sadai, Andrew Lloyd, Andrew Nyblade, Douglas A. Wiens, Richard C. Aster and Terry Wilson, 2 August 2024, Science Advances . DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adn1470

Wilson completed the study with colleagues from McGill University, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Columbia University , Washington University, Colorado State University and the Union of Concerned Scientists. This study was supported by the U.S National Science Foundation and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

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“…, the Antarctic Ice Sheet is currently experiencing a solid earth uplift of about 5 centimeters per year, about 5 times the rate that North America experiences.”

The same order of magnitude as crustal plate motion.

Once again, they seem to be unaware of the fore-bulge (or are ignoring it) associated with isostatic adjustment under heavy ice loads.

“We can project what difference it actually will make if we all contribute to a low-emission scenario now, versus what’s come to be called ‘business as usual’ emissions,”

How does she propose to calculate the “difference” if there is no agreement on the temperature change for a doubling of CO2?

More than one study has called into question the ‘business as usual’ (RCP8.5) scenario because of the improbability of there being sufficient fossil fuel resources to maintain it for the amount of time necessary to accomplish the model projections.

A whole lot of arm waving going on.

“Under RCP2.6 and with 3D viscous effects included, sea-level rise is up to 0.20 m lower in 2150 and 0.80 m lower in 2500 along global coastlines away from Antarctica … relative to the Elastic Earth model or reference 1D viscoelastic Earth model.”

Scattered through the peer-reviewed article are statements as above, notably lacking a margin of error (uncertainty range) where the extreme of a range or a nominal value are presented but there is nothing about the shape or variance of the predicted outcome distribution. It has often been said that “The language of science is mathematics.” It would seem that many climatologists have a limited vocabulary.

Greetings, uplift in anartica seems similar to uplift after last iceage melting.

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New Research Shows Learning Is More Effective When Active

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New research shows why you don't need to be perfect to get the job done

by Howard Hughes Medical Institute

When neuroscientists think about the strategy an animal might use to carry out a task—like finding food, hunting prey, or navigating a maze—they often propose a single model that lays out the best way for the animal to accomplish the job.

But in the real world, animals—and humans—may not use the optimal way, which can be resource-intensive. Instead, they use a strategy that's good enough to do the job but takes a lot less brain power.

In new research appearing in Science Advances , Janelia scientists set out to better understand the possible ways an animal could successfully solve a problem, beyond just the best strategy.

The work shows there is a huge number of ways an animal can accomplish a simple foraging task . It also lays out a theoretical framework for understanding these different strategies, how they relate to each other, and how they solve the same problem differently.

Some of these less-than-perfect options for accomplishing a task work nearly as well as the optimal strategy but with a lot less effort, the researchers found, freeing up animals to use precious resources to handle multiple tasks.

"As soon as you release yourself from being perfect, you would be surprised just how many ways there are to solve a problem," says Tzuhsuan Ma, a postdoc in the Hermundstad Lab, who led the research.

The new framework could help researchers start examining these "good enough" strategies, including why different individuals might adapt different strategies, how these strategies might work together, and how generalizable the strategies are to other tasks. That could help explain how the brain enables behavior in the real world.

"Many of these strategies are ones we would have never dreamed up as possible ways of solving this task, but they do work well, so it's entirely possible that animals could also be using them," says Janelia Group Leader Ann Hermundstad. "They give us a new vocabulary for understanding behavior."

Looking beyond perfection

The research began three years ago when Ma started wondering about the different strategies an animal could possibly use to accomplish a simple but common task: choosing between two options where the chance of being rewarded changes over time.

The researchers were interested in examining a group of strategies that fall between optimal and completely random solutions: "small programs" that are resource-limited but still get the job done. Each program specifies a different algorithm for guiding an animal's actions based on past observations, allowing it to serve as a model of animal behavior.

As it turns out, there are many such programs—about a quarter of a million. To make sense of these strategies, the researchers first looked at a handful of the top-performing ones. Surprisingly, they found they were essentially doing the same thing as the optimal strategy, despite using fewer resources.

"We were a little disappointed," Ma says. "We spent all this time searching for these small programs, and they all follow the same computation that the field already knew how to mathematically derive without all this effort."

But the researchers were motivated to keep looking—they had a strong intuition that there had to be programs out there that were good but different from the optimal strategy. Once they looked beyond the very best programs, they found what they were looking for: about 4,000 programs that fall into this "good enough" category. And more importantly, more than 90% of them did something new.

They could have stopped there, but a question from a fellow Janelian spurred them on: How could they figure out which strategy an animal was using?

The question prompted the team to dive deep into the behavior of individual programs and develop a systematic approach to thinking about the entire collection of strategies. They first developed a mathematical way to describe the programs' relationships to each other through a network that connected the different programs. Next, they looked at the behavior described by the strategies, devising an algorithm to reveal how one of these "good enough" programs could evolve from another.

They found that small changes to the optimal program can lead to big changes in behavior while still preserving performance. If some of these new behaviors are also useful in other tasks, it suggests that the same program could be good enough for solving a range of different problems.

"If you are thinking about an animal not being a specialist who is optimized to solve just one problem, but rather a generalist who solves many problems, this really is a new way to study that," Ma says.

The new work provides a framework for researchers to start thinking beyond single, optimal programs for animal behavior. Now, the team is focused on examining how generalizable the small programs are to other tasks, and designing new experiments to determine which program an animal might be using to carry out a task in real time. They are also working with other researchers at Janelia to test their theoretical framework .

"Ultimately, getting a strong grasp on an animal's behavior is an essential prerequisite to understanding how the brain solves different types of problems, including some that our best artificial systems only solve inefficiently, if at all," Hermundstad says. "The key challenge is that animals might be using very different strategies than we might initially assume, and this work is helping us uncover that space of possibilities."

Journal information: Science Advances

Provided by Howard Hughes Medical Institute

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Human-aware A.I. helps accelerate scientific discoveries, new research shows

Uchicago study explores how a.i. can predict discoveries and who will make them.

A new study explores how artificial intelligence can not only better predict new scientific discoveries, but also to usefully expand them. The researchers, who published their work in Nature Human Behaviour , built models that could predict human inferences and the scientists who will make them.  

The authors also built models that avoided human inference to generate scientifically promising "alien" hypotheses that would not likely be considered until the distant future, if at all. They argue that the two demonstrations — the first allowing for the acceleration of human discovery, while the second identifies and passes over its blind spots — means that a human-aware A.I. would allow for movement beyond the contemporary scientific frontier. 

“If you build in awareness to what people are doing, you can improve prediction and leapfrog them to accelerate science,” says co-author James A. Evans, the Max Palevsky Professor in the Department of Sociology and director of the Knowledge Lab. “But you can also figure out what people can't currently do, or won't be able to do for decades or more into the future. You can augment them by providing them that kind of complementary intelligence.” 

A.I. models that have been trained on published scientific findings have been used to invent valuable materials and targeted therapies, but they typically ignore the distribution of human scientists involved. The researchers considered how humans have competed and collaborated on research throughout history, so they wondered what could be learned if A.I. programs were explicitly made aware of the human expertise: Could we do a better job of complementing the collective human capacity by pursuing and exploring places humans haven’t explored? 

Predicting the future of discovery 

To test the question, the team first simulated reasoning processes by building random walks across research literature. They began with a property, such as COVID vaccination, then jumped to a paper with that same property, to another paper by the same author, or a material cited in that paper.

They ran millions of these random walks and their model offered a 400% improvement of predictions of future discoveries beyond those focused on research content alone, especially when relevant literature was sparse. They could also predict with greater than 40% precision the actual people who would make each of those discoveries, because the program knew that the predicted individual was one of only a few whose experience or relationships linked the property and material in question.  

Evans refers to the model as a “digital double” of the scientific system, which allows simulation of what is likely to happen in it, and experimentation of alternative possibilities. He explains how this highlights the ways in which scientists hew close to the methods, properties, and people with which they have experience. 

“It allows us to also learn things about that system and its limits,” he says. “For example, on average, it suggests that some aspects of our current scientific system, like graduate education, are not tuned for discovery. They're tuned for giving people a label that helps them get a job — for filling the labor market. They do not optimize discovery of new, technologically relevant things. To do that, each student would be an experiment — crossing novel gaps in the landscape of expertise.” 

In the paper’s second demonstration, they asked the A.I. model not to make the predictions most likely to be discovered by people, but to find predictions that are scientifically plausible, but least likely to be discovered by people.  

The researchers treated these as so-called alien or complementary inferences, which had three features: They’re rarely discovered by humans; if discovered, it won’t be for many years into the future when scientific systems reorganize themselves; and the alien inferences are, on average, better than human inferences, likely because humans will focus on squeezing every ounce of discovery from an existing theory or approach before exploring a new one. Because these models avoid connections and configurations of human scientific activity, they explore entirely new territory.  

Radically augmented intelligence 

Evans explains that looking at A.I. as an attempt to copy human capacity — building on Alan Turing’s idea of the imitation game where humans are the standards of intelligence — does not help scientists accelerate their ability to solve problems. We're much more likely to benefit from a radical augmentation of our collective intelligence, he says, rather than an artificial replication. 

“People in these domains — science, technology, culture — they're trying to stay close to the pack,” Evans said. “You survive by having influence when others use your ideas or technology. And you maximize this by staying close to the pack. Our models complement that bias by creating algorithms that follow signals of scientific plausibility, but exclusively avoid the pack.” 

Using A.I. to move outside existing methods and collaborations, rather than reflecting what human scientists are likely to think in the near future, expands human capacity and supports improved exploration. 

“It's about changing the framing of A.I. from artificial intelligence to radically augmented intelligence, which requires studying more, not less, about individual and collective cognitive capacity,” Evans said. “When we understand more about human understanding, we can explicitly design systems that compensate for its limitations and lead to us to collectively know more.” 

—This story originally appeared on UChicago's Social Sciences Division website.

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New Research from University of Chicago’s NORC Shows Communicating Online with Friends Brings Happiness for Teens & Young Adults

Every day hundreds of millions of people use Snapchat to communicate with their closest friends and express themselves. That’s why Snapchat opens to a camera, not a feed of content, so anyone can share a Snap of how they’re feeling or what they’re doing in the moment. Conversations aren’t stored forever, they delete by default, just like the conversations we have in-person or over the phone. 

We’ve often heard from our community that Snapchat helps people stay close with their friends, even when they’re physically apart. We know how important these relationships are to health and happiness, and we always want to better understand how using Snapchat can make a positive impact by supporting real friendships.

To further explore this, we recently commissioned the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago to conduct new research into the role of online communications platforms in interpersonal relationships among teens (ages 13-17) and young adults (ages 18-40) and how specific features of online platforms make people feel. NORC published their full study today and found that: 

Communicating online with close friends and family, using direct messaging features, is a key source of happiness for young people. According to NORC, about two-thirds of young people say direct messaging with family and close friends makes them feel extremely or very happy. This is the only feature of online communications platforms that makes a majority of both teens and young adults happy.

Online platforms can produce a range of feelings, both positive and negative, depending on the different features used . Eighty percent of teens and young adults report that online communications platforms help them feel more in touch with what is going on in their friends’ lives. At the same time, over half of respondents say platforms can make them feel overwhelmed; 45% report feeling pressured to only post content that makes them look good to others; and more than a third feel pressured to post content that will get lots of likes or comments. 

Snapchat helps support and deepen friendships. According to the NORC data, respondents who use Snapchat report higher satisfaction with the quality of friendships and relationships with family than non-Snapchatters. Snapchatters also report positive feelings around creativity and self-expression compared to those who don’t use Snapchat, with 69% of Snapchatters saying they feel like they have a place where they can show their creative side on these platforms, compared to just 58% non-Snapchatters.

You can read NORC’s full report here [ LINK ]. While this is just one study, it offers more insight into the ways that Snapchat supports friendship and well-being. We’re excited to see that many of the design decisions we have made over the years can contribute to closer relationships and more happiness, especially at a time when people are feeling more lonely and increasingly concerned about mental health. We believe that technology can help us grow closer together when we design products in a human-centered way.

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Research: How to Build Consensus Around a New Idea

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Strategies for overcoming the disagreements that can stymie innovation.

Previous research has found that new ideas are seen as risky and are often rejected. New research suggests that this rejection can be due to people’s lack of shared criteria or reference points when evaluating a potential innovation’s value. In a new paper, the authors find that the more novel the idea, the more people differ on their perception of its value. They also found that disagreement itself can make people view ideas as risky and make them less likely to support them, regardless of how novel the idea is. To help teams get on the same page when it comes to new ideas, they suggest gathering information about evaluator’s reference points and developing criteria that can lead to more focused discussions.

Picture yourself in a meeting where a new idea has just been pitched, representing a major departure from your company’s standard practices. The presenter is confident about moving forward, but their voice is quickly overtaken by a cacophony of opinions from firm opposition to enthusiastic support. How can you make sense of the noise? What weight do you give each of these opinions? And what does this disagreement say about the idea?

• DP Devon Proudfoot is an Associate Professor of Human Resource Studies at Cornell’s ILR School. She studies topics related to diversity and creativity at work.
• Wayne Johnson is a researcher at the Utah Eccles School of Business. He focuses on evaluations and decisions about new information, including persuasion regarding creative ideas and belief change.

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Map Shows Which States Have The Highest Crime Rate

Understanding crime rates across different states is crucial for policymakers, law enforcement, and the general public, and a new map gives fresh insight into the social and economic factors impacting safety across the U.S.

According to a February report from Pew Research Center, 58 percent of U.S. adults - around 70 percent of Republicans and 50 percent of Democrats – believe reducing crime "should be a top priority for the president and Congress ." This figure has risen from 47 percent at the start of the Biden presidency in 2021.

Crime rates become an especially hot topic during election cycles , with candidates brandishing their "tough on crime" credentials in an effort to win over the U.S. public.

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However, while the national crime rate has been steadily falling since the 1990s, according to Pew, rates of crime vary greatly from state to state.

Using research by Data Pandas, Newsweek created a map showcasing which states have the highest, and lowest, reported crime rates in the U.S.

New Mexico topped the list of states by reported crime rate, at 6,462 per 100,000 residents, more than double the bottom 11 states on the list.

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This is perhaps unsurprising, as the state performs poorly in measures, such as education and wealth, that have historically been linked to higher crime rates.

New Mexico ranks as the worst state in the U.S. in terms of educational quality, according to the U.S. News & World Report.

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U.S. Census Bureau data also lists New Mexico one as of the nation's poorest states , with around 18 percent of its residents living below the poverty line.

In mid-July, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham called for "immediate legislative action" to address the state's crime problem, and submitted an 11-bill proposal to the state legislature focused on mental health treatment, crime reporting, and gun violence, among other things.

However, New Mexico lawmakers not pass any of the governor's proposed bills during a special session on July 18.

New Mexico is closely followed by Louisiana, with a reported crime rate of 6,408 per 100,000.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, Louisiana has the third-highest homicide rate in the country, bested only by Mississippi and Washington D.C.

Notably, large states such as California and Texas and the densely populated states of New Jersey and Rhode Island had relatively low crime rates.

California sits at number 19 on the rankings, while Texas holds the 15 th spot.

New Jersey, the most densely populated state according to Census Bureau data, has the fifth lowest crime rate in the nation at 2,512, contradicting the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which lists population density as one of the key variables impacting regional crime rates.

On the bottom on the list, and taking the title for least crime-ridden state is New Hampshire.

The Granite State's success can be attributed to a combination of factors, including strong socio-economic conditions and high levels of education.

U.S. News & World Report had New Hampshire seventh in its list of richest states, with a median household income of $89,992, and places it ninth in the rankings of educational quality.

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About the writer

Hugh Cameron is Newsweek Live News Reporter based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on international politics, conflict, and crime. Hugh joined Newsweek in 2024, having worked at Alliance News Ltd where he specialised in covering global and regional business developments, economic news, and market trends. He graduated from the University of Warwick with a bachelor's degree in politics in 2022, and from the University of Cambridge with a master's degree in international relations in 2023. Languages: English.

You can get in touch with Hugh by emailing [email protected]

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How do we separate the factual from the possible? New research shows how our brain responds to both

Our brains respond to language expressing facts differently than they do to words conveying possibility, a team of neuroscientists has found. Its work offers new insights into the impact word choice has on how we make distinctions between what's real vs. what's merely possible.

"At a time of voluminous fake news and disinformation, it is more important than ever to separate the factual from the possible or merely speculative in how we communicate," explains Liina Pylkkanen, a professor in NYU's Department of Linguistics and Department of Psychology and the senior author of the paper, which appears in the journal eNeuro.

"Our study makes clear that information presented as fact evokes special responses in our brains, distinct from when we process the same content with clear markers of uncertainty, like 'may' or 'might'," adds Pylkkanen, also part of the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute.

"Language is a powerful device to effectively transmit information, and the way in which information is presented has direct consequences for how our brains process it," adds Maxime Tulling, a doctoral candidate in NYU's Department of Linguistics and the paper's lead author. "Our brains seem to be particularly sensitive to information that is presented as fact, underlining the power of factual language."

Researchers have long understood that the brain responds in a variety of ways to word choice. Less clear, however, are the distinctions it makes in processing language expressing fact compared to that expressing possibility. In the eNeuro study, the scientists' primary goal was to uncover how the brain computes possibilities as conveyed by so-called "modal" words such as "may" or "might" -- as in, "There is a monster under my bed" as opposed to, "There might be a monster under my bed."

To explore this, the researchers used formal semantic theories in linguistics to design multiple experiments in which subjects heard a series of sentences and scenarios expressed as both fact and possibility -- for example, "Knights carry large swords, so the squires do too" (factual) and "If knights carry large swords, the squires do too" (possible).

In order to measure the study subjects' brain activity during these experiments, the researchers deployed magnetoencephalography (MEG), a technique that maps neural activity by recording magnetic fields generated by the electrical currents produced by our brain.

The results showed that factual language led to a rapid increase in neural activity, with the brain responding more powerfully and showing more engagement with fact-based phrases and scenarios compared to those communicating possibility.

"Facts rule when it comes to the brain," observes Pylkkanen. "Brain regions involved in processing discourse rapidly differentiated facts from possibilities, responding much more robustly to factual statements than to non-factual ones. These findings suggest that the human brain has a powerful, perspective-adjusted neural representation of factual information and, interestingly, much weaker, more elusive cortical signals reflecting the computation of mere possibilities."

"By investigating language containing clear indicators of possibility compared to factual utterances, we were able to find out which regions of the brain help to rapidly separate non-factual from factual language," explains Tulling. "Our study thus illustrates how our choice of words has a direct impact on subconscious processing."

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Materials provided by New York University . Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

• Maxime Tulling, Ryan Law, Ailís Cournane, Liina Pylkkänen. Neural Correlates of Modal Displacement and Discourse-Updating under (un)Certainty . eneuro , 2020; ENEURO.0290-20.2020 DOI: 10.1523/ENEURO.0290-20.2020

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