About

Hello world!

In May 2009, I graduated from Brown University with an Sc. B. in cognitive science, and I spent the following year (Sept 2009-August 2010) working as a research assistant at the University of Provence in Marseille, France, which, as expected, was quite an adventure. Now, one year later, after having completed my first year of a PhD program in cogsci at UCSD, I’m back in my old Marseillaise haunts for a summer of research and more excitement. Now that I know all the good restaurants, the hidden markets, the un-populated beaches and the less-sketchy clubs, I’m incredibly excited to be back and do more language research and French experiences.

Psycholinguistics is the study of language processing: comprehension, production, language storage and access; the myriad of processes and evaluations and categorizations that are required to allow us to speak and understand without so much as a second (conscious) thought.

It’s something that we, fundamentally, know very little about. Biologists and chemists have mapped the human genome; physicists and astronomers have discovered other galaxies; geologists and climatologists have shown the earth will end in a fiery mass of carbon dioxide and pollutants if we continue on our current, wayward path. But for something nearly everyone in the world can do as unconsciously as we can speak and understand, we know surprisingly little about how it all works.

This blog is not for figuring that out. That’s what I plan to do with my life, so if you’re interested in some answers, stay in touch with me over the next few decades and I’ll keep you posted. Rather, the point of this blog is to document interesting experiences I’m having here in Marseille (heck, I’m living in the south of France!), perhaps with the occasional cool, accessible thing I’ve learned about brains and language processing.

If you have any suggestions for topics to write about, let me know. I’ve started a speech error submission page, so if you notice anyone making any good ones, write them down and send them in. Also, I’d really like to make this somewhat interdisciplinary, so if you do something else cool (as I’m sure you do) and have something insightful to say relating to your discipline and language or cognitive science in general, send me a note and that’ll be fun.

Thanks for reading (no idea if anyone’s out there, but I can have dreams, right?) and remember, cogsci is pretty awesome.