I have good news and bad news and in our family we always do the bad new first so here goes…

Brains for Dinner Episode 3 does not come with a side order of dancing birds or babies! (never fear, you can always return to Episode 2 for this!) AND we went nearly 7 minutes over time. EEK!

The good news is that this episode is centered on a topic that is near and dear to my heart, language!

I was thrilled to learn—based on a recent survey I created and circulated—that learning a natural language was the most highly ranked answer to the question “What’s something you’d like to learn but aren’t currently working on?” But what gets in the way? (If you have 5 minutes to take the survey and tell me about your learning goals click here!)

In this episode of Brains for Dinner, Andrea Stocco and I discuss both former research, using quantitative EEG (aka brainwaves) to predict natural language learning and the ability to learn programming languages.

Here’s some media coverage of this work:

* Scientific American: Some People’s Brains are Wired for Languages

* Travel and Leisure: Why Learning a Second Language is So Difficult

You can find the original scientific papers here if you’re interested:

* French Learning

* Python Learning

We hope you enjoy the episode! Please leave us a note if you have questions or suggestions for what you would like to hear us think aloud about!

Cheers!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chantelpratphd.substack.com