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RESULTS: While it didn’t cause them to experience more deep sleep cycles, the pink noise appeared to prolong deep sleep and to increase the size of the subject’s brain waves during that period, as evinced by their EEGs.

The slow brain waves that characterize deep sleep are implicated in information processing and memory formation, and sure enough, on the mornings after those brain waves appeared to have been enhanced […]

IMPLICATIONS: Sound stimulation has been tried before, unsuccessfully. The key here, write the researchers, is that the frequency of the sounds was in sync with the subjects’ brain waves. Were this technique to be further developed, it could potentially be used to improve sleep in general, and possibly even to enhance brain activity when we’re awake. Although it’s even less viable, for now, than electric brain stimulation, the latter has been proposed as a way of treating Alzheimer’s, fighting depression, easing pain, and the ever-popular “boosting creativity.”

Several years ago, more or less on a lark, a group of researchers from England used a computer program to analyze the emotional content of books from every year of the 20th century — close to a billion words in millions of books.

The original idea was to have the computer program track the use of these words over time. The researchers wanted to see if certain words, at certain moments, became more popular.

“We didn’t really expect to find anything,” he says. “We were just curious. We really expected the use of emotion words to be constant through time.”

Instead, in the study they published in the journal PLOS ONE, the anthropologists found very distinct peaks and valleys, Bently says. “The clarity of some of the patterns was surprising to all of us, I think.”

He found that interesting because the books the computers searched in the Google database included an incredibly wide range of topics. They weren’t just novels or books about current events, Bentley says. Many were books without clear emotional content — technical manuals about plants and animals, for example, or automotive repair guides.

“It’s not like the change in emotion is because people are writing about the Depression and people are writing about the war,” he says. “There might be a little bit of that, but this is just, kind of, averaged over all books, and it’s just kind of creeping in.”

Which brings us to the most surprising finding of the study: We think of modern culture — and often ourselves — as more emotionally open than people in the past. We live in a world of reality television and blogs and Facebook — it feels like feelings are everywhere, displayed to a degree that they never were before. But according to this research, that’s not so.

“Generally speaking, the usage of these commonly known emotion words has been in decline over the 20th century,” Bentley says. We used words that expressed our emotions less in the year 2000 than we did 100 years earlier — words about sadness and joy and anger and disgust and surprise.

If you’re a kid learning how to write, or an adult speaker of a language with sensible spelling, English spelling can seem like a cruel prank. And even if you’re a completely literate adult native speaker of English, you will still run into situations that make you wonder how English spelling ever got so messed up. Here are some answers for the next time you clutch your hair yelling, “WHYYYYYYYY?!?!?” They may not comfort you, but they may make you see English as less of an arbitrary meanie and more of a victim of history.

1. Spelling was established while big pronunciation changes were underway

Before the printing press came along, there was a lot of flexibility in English spelling. Look at some of the ways beauty used to be spelled: bealte, buute, beuaute, bewtee, bewte, beaute, beaultye. People did their own thing, trying their best to match up tradition with current pronunciation. But after the printing press came to England in the late 1400s, texts could be spread more widely, and printers started to standardize spelling. The unlucky thing for English spelling is that during the very same time, huge changes in pronunciation were happening. […]

2. The literate class used French until the 15th century

When the Normans invaded England in 1066, they brought their own words with them. While the general population carried on speaking English, French was used in universities and the courts, eventually leaving its imprint on the whole of English vocabulary. […]

3. It was cool to change spellings during the classical craze

In the 16th and 17th centuries, a craze for the ideas and artifacts of antiquity caused some writers to introduce spellings for English words based on Latin and Greek, even when those words had never been pronounced according to those spellings. They thought it looked more educated and fancy to write February; (on analogy with Latin Februarius) rather than Feverere, and receipt (like Latin receptum) rather than receyt. This is also how debt and doubt got their b, salmon and solder got their l, and indict got its c. […]

4. We let words keep their spellings when we borrow them

[…] French isn’t the only language we’ve borrowed from. When we see something we’ve got use for, we take it as is. Guerrilla, piñata, llama, angst, kitsch, fjord, Czech, gnocchi, and zucchini have been welcomed into the fold.

Read the article for more details.