jwong's blog

Becoming British Overnight: the Foreign Accent Syndrome

While greeting one of my friends who had just returned from a semester abroad, I was intrigued not by the excitement in her voice as she described London, but rather the lilting British accent she was using to recount the stories. I was baffled to imagine that she picked up such a heavy accent in such a short period of time; she herself mentioned that she hadn’t even noticed that she’d picked it up until she came back to the States. Was it possible to acquire a foreign accent so quickly?

The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently... and Why

Richard E. Nisbett (2003)

One of the common things I’ve heard from friends returning from their junior study abroad was how much they missed being away in the foreign country. On occasion, a few friends even confessed to feeling a crushing sense of distance between their time abroad and their return to school, that they wished they could have taken a semester off because they did not feel mentally prepared to come back to “reality” just yet. These symptoms surprised me because they definitely seemed a large step beyond the typical post-vacation depression. What exactly was it that seemed to make so many peers coming back from their study abroad to feel

Beauty is often viewed as a sore topic to debate over because it is an element with no fixed definition. In society, beautiful people are often viewed as more successful, more popular, and overall as happier people. Endeavors towards achieving the ideal of physical perfection are significant because they demonstrate not only a cultural but a biological influence on the brain geared towards survival. Among others, a major question becomes apparent; what makes beauty, or the perception of beauty, such a variable factor in the human brain? Scientists have attempted to define a more scientific reasoning for beauty perception based on various neurological experiments.