The movie 2001: A Space Odyssey famously opens with an ancient apelike human ancestor suddenly realizing that he could use large bones as weapons. Others in his group who see him quickly adopt the ...

Human communication is a complex weave of words and gestures — a mix of vocal and visual signals. "People use vocal and visual communication in a very rich and combined way," says Joseph Mine, a ...

Social singing and dance are often assumed to be hard-wired into the human condition; studies have supported the conclusion that these are common across cultures. But new research from a University of ...

According to a new study led by Harvard researchers in Nature Neuroscience, this so-called "learning machine" speaks in two different codes—one for recently-acquired learned movements and another for ...

It is interesting to consider the difference between animals and humans and how they respond to situations. One of the reasons I write for Psychology Today is because of the useful information that ...

The basal ganglia are a group of interconnected structures, located in the midbrain below the cerebral cortex, that play a crucial role in motor control, reward processing, and cognition. This region ...

Unusually among human cultures, the Northern Aché people of Paraguay do not practice communal singing or dancing or sing to their children. (Photo of Aché building a traditional fishing dam by Kim ...