Explore the brain structures of babies that give them their extraordinary auditory abilities, and why it's so difficult for adults to learn new languages. Discover how exposure to our native language actually changes our brain, removing our ability to access objective auditory information in the environment, and why we each perceive a uniquely distorted world.

In 24 fascinating episodes, Dr. Spencer Kelly, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Colgate University, takes you on a fascinating journey to explore questions about the origin of the human mind, what makes our communication so much different than other animals, whether or not language itself influences thought, and how babies learn their native language without direct teaching.

What did the very earliest forms of human language sound like? Learn why many researchers believe hand gesture was actually our first attempt at language. From embodied brains to the widespread prevalence of gesture, from its human uniqueness to its many benefits for us, the evidence suggests that language was born in the body and grew up from there.

Explore the several mechanisms babies use in the formidable task of identifying discrete words from the streams of sound in language. Look closely at their innate ability to employ the cognitive constraints of whole object assumption, mutual exclusivity bias, and taxonomic assumption. And learn why the sing-song rhythm and pitch of parental "baby talk" is exactly what babies need to hear.

While there is no single gene for language or any other complex human system, specific aspects of the human genome and our biology create the perfect biological environment for the development of language. Explore the important relationship between the brain's Broca's and Wernicke's areas and the significance of the gene FOXP2. Could language be "a new machine built out of old parts"?

What are the potential by-products of speaking multiple languages? Learn what relatively recent research has shown about the ways in which having multiple languages opens up different emotional, cognitive, and social worlds, and how the mind travels back and forth between them. And consider the controversial claim that becoming a bilinguist can actually improve your cognitive reserve.

Investigate how the plasticity of the brain allows us to "cobble together" a neural network for reading and writing as we mature, using dyslexia and synesthesia to illustrate this networking property. This network develops at different times for different people, but no one is born with it; our "reading brain" is truly a technological transformation.

Since English speakers have relatively few words for snow, is it impossible for us to experience snow in all its forms? If an African tribe has fewer color names than English, is their vision different than ours? Does language influence our perception, or does our perception influence language? Investigate the fascinating arguments on all sides of this still-ongoing debate about language.

Journey through a series of fascinating experiments developed to determine whether or not language can influence thought independent of culture. Perhaps not unexpectedly (and working with individuals from preverbal infants to adults), these experiments reveal that language and culture both influence thought, often working in tandem.

Learn about the fascinating aspects of language we take for granted every day: our ability to use symbols, understand rules, generate novel utterances, speak about the past and future, and even purposefully lie. All of these universals, and more, have allowed language to become our greatest tool.