Find out why Flannery O’Connor, an American novelist, is known as a master of the grotesque in Southern Gothic literature. -- Flannery O’Connor scribbled tales of outcasts, intruders and misfits staged in the world she knew best: the...

In this fun, short talk from TEDYouth, lexicographer Erin McKean encourages — nay, cheerleads — her audience to create new words when the existing ones won’t quite do. She lists out 6 ways to make new words in English, from compounding...

Megan Washington is one of Australia's premier singer/songwriters. And, since childhood, she has had a stutter. In this bold and personal talk, she reveals how she copes with this speech impediment—from avoiding the letter combination...

Outside of China, Mandarin and Cantonese are often referred to as Chinese dialects, despite being even more dissimilar than Spanish and Italian. On the other hand, speakers of Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, which are three distinct...

All animals communicate. But do they have language? Michele Bishop details the four specific qualities we associate with language and investigates whether or not certain animals utilize some or all of those qualities to communicate.

Have you ever seen a kid talk to her friends in English, but to her mom in Spanish? Learning a second language can be really hard for adults, so how do bilingual babies learn two at the same time?

You may have heard about a study that found pigeons can visually recognize what printed words look like. Does that mean these birds can read?

We’ve all been tripped up by tongue-twisters. That’s the whole point! But at a neuroscientific level, they’re as difficult to understand as they are to say.

In which John Green concludes the Crash Course Literature mini-series with an examination of the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Sure, John explores the creepy biographical details of Dickinson's life, but he also gets into why her poems have...

Over the course of human history thousands of languages have developed from what was once a much smaller number. How did we end up with so many? And how do we keep track of them all? Alex Gendler explains how linguists group languages...

What if one day you woke up and were suddenly speaking with a completely new accent from somewhere you’ve never lived? It sounds like a movie plot, but this rare condition is known as foreign accent syndrome.

From the "I have a dream" speech to Steve Jobs' iPhone launch, many great talks have a common structure that helps their message resonate with listeners. In this talk, presentation expert Nancy Duarte shares practical lessons on how to...

For as long as we've had language, some people have tried to control it. And some of the most frequent targets of this communication regulation are the ums, ers, and likes that pepper our conversations. These linguistic fillers occur...

Your brain relies a lot on context to tell you what sounds are bouncing around in your ears, and without enough of that context it can get a little confused.

Today, Clint Smith will teach you about the legendary writer Toni Morrison. Morrison is best known for her novels which chronicle the experiences of Black Americans throughout history. She was the first Black American Woman to win a...

Without realizing it, we're fluent in the language of pictures, says illustrator Christoph Niemann. In a charming talk packed with witty, whimsical drawings, Niemann takes us on a hilarious visual tour that shows how artists tap into our...

The average 20-year-old knows between 27,000 and 52,000 different words. Spoken out loud, most of these words last less than a second. With every word, the brain has a quick decision to make: which of those thousands of options matches...

Your body language can communicate a lot of information to other people, but can striking a power pose revolutionize your life?

People all around the world tend to represent time via space, but there’s no consensus on which way time goes.

You know what's amazing? That we can talk to people, they can make meaning out of it, and then talk back to us. In this episode of Crash Course Psychology, Hank talks to us and tries to make meaning out of how our brains do this thing...

What we call language is something more specific than communication. Language is about sharing what's in our minds: stories, opinions, questions, the past or future, imagined times or places, ideas. It is fundamentally open-ended, and...

In which Mike teaches you about the creation of the universe, with sex. This week we're talking about creations stories from Egypt, West Africa, Greece, China, and Persia that have a lot in common with human sexual reproduction. And also...

The task sounds like it should be pretty easy, but the Stroop task is a fantastic, and very well studied, example of how your brain’s automatic processing can trip you up!

Have you ever tried to write or color with both hands at the same time? It seems like it would save a ton of time, right? But for most people, one of their hands is way better at drawing or writing than the other!