Say what? Better hearing takes practice

    This article is ordered from general to more specific things. The tone of this article is curious because the author sounds like he/she agrees with the scientists' idea. This article is explaining that it is very difficult to have a conversation in a noisy restaurant or loud environment, but with a little practice the brain can learn to hear above the noise.This article also explains how if elderly exercise their brain and memorize what different letters and words sound like then they are more likely to have a better conversation in a loud environment.  Studies show that when elderly practice they can actually hear and understand things better in a loud environment.
            "Neural slowing especially affects our ability to hear in a noisy background because the sounds we need to hear are acoustically less salient and because noise also taxes our ability to remember what we hear" says a Neuroscientist. Neural Slowing happens when you can't hear or understand what someone is saying over background noise. "They would listen to words and sentences—all with varying levels of background noise—and had to repeat back what they heard" the scientist experimented in a lab. The scientist would experiment to try to get people to exercise their brain. "Researchers also recorded brain activity to measure how quickly the brain registered hearing the syllable "da" over background noise" researchers studied how quickly the brain processed a sound or syllable. 
        From reading this article this means that for when we get older we need to exercise our brains and make sure that we can still hear people over background noises. This article taught me about why some people have a hard time hearing over loud noise.

Television really does make you less lonely, says scientists

      According to scientists television is a lonely person's best friend. Psychologists say that people who write negative reviews about shows are probably content with their life but the people who write positive reviews must be lonely and not have many friends. People who are more lonely study more facial expressions than most people would if they were not lonely.Lonely people would be able to make stronger connections to the characters in a T.V. show than people who already have a lot of people in their lives. But the downside of this is that focusing on T.V. shows decreases the time for people to make friends and have a social life.


1. Cause and effect

2. The author feels that the scientists are right about television making people less lonely.

3. This article is explaining that people who are "lonely" watch more television and that makes them less lonely. The scientists say that the T.V. becomes their friend instead of them having real friends. 

4. "T.V. really helps lonely people" the article says. T.V. seems to create some type of comfort for people. "T.V. serves the same role as friends or family." T.V. could be a humans "best friend" according to phsychologist T.V. is a friend when you are lonely. "People who write negative reviews are probably well-satisfied with the rest of their lives." according to the article the negative reviews about a show, shows that their lives are really very positive. 

5. This means for me that I am not very lonely because I don't watch a lot of T.V. and that I am ok with my life.