Category: Analysis

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Mary Jane Spiller, Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Psychology, University of East London

I have a form of time–space synaesthesia, so the new year arrives for me in a very physical way. I feel myself move around the year, almost like I’m travelling along a structure. December sits low and to my left; January lifts and slides forward. The transition has a weight to it, as though the calendar itself shifts in space.

Synaesthesia is a perceptual condition where one sense triggers an experience in another sense. For some people, sounds trigger colours and shapes, or words might have tastes.

For others, like me, sequences such as months of the year or days of the week have precise places in space around our bodies. It is most commonly a developmental condition, which means that “synaesthetes” have experienced the world this way for as long as they remember. These synaesthetic experiences happen automatically, and are generally consistent over time for the person. Today is in front of me, tomorrow is to my left, and yesterday is to my right. If I ever woke up to find time had moved somewhere else, I would feel confused and lost.

For me, this makes the start of the new year feel like a physical transition, a time for new beginnings, as we move around the bend of time, leaving the old year behind me.

Like most people, between Christmas and new year, I completely lose track of what day it is — the whole week feels like a strange, timeless blur. Because of my time-space synaesthesia, this disorientation is amplified for me. The usual mental map I rely on to anchor dates and days seems scrambled, leaving me feeling unmoored.

As a cognitive psychologist, I have spent the last 20 years researching synaesthesia. I am fascinated by the way our minds help us experience the world around us, and particularly in the way we all experience the world differently. As well as helping to understand and document the synaesthetic experience itself, I am also interested in understanding the impact synaesthesia might have on other aspects of our lives.

Time-space synaesthesia provides an excellent way to explore how the brain organises time. For example, one of the benefits of these mental time-space calendars is an association with a better memory for historical events or important life events such as anniversaries or birthdays.

People with time-space synaesthesia may have cognitive advantages because their spatial mapping of time can serve as a powerful mnemonic aid. Research shows we learn skills like calendar calculation – such as knowing that December 1 1937 fell on a Wednesday, while December 1 2037 will be a Monday – faster and more accurately than people without synaesthesia. So our unique mental representations may help to boost memory and pattern recognition. This helps us understand the benefit of time being represented spatially and visually, rather than simply linearly.

Time-space synaesthetes also tend to have enhanced memory and attention for ordered information, such as dates and sequences, which may contribute to our strong performance in tasks involving time organisation, such as planning.

These mental timelines are so ingrained that they can override external cues — a phenomenon called the spatial Stroop effect. These automatic mappings can subtly influence decision-making when speed and spatial judgement matter.

It seems that it is not simply the effect of synaesthesia that drives these cognitive advantages. Research has highlighted differences between the brains of synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes. These differences may also give rise to wider cognitive differences unrelated to the sensory experiences. For example, time-space synaesthetes not only have good memories for times and dates, but also other aspects of memory too such as word lists, pictures or colours. Additionally, a 2015 study suggested time-space synaesthesia may be linked with more vivid mental pictures.

The question that has always fascinated me is, why doesn’t everyone have
synaesthesia? We now know that synaesthesia has a genetic basis, and around 4% of the population experience a form of it. If you experience it, mostly likely a few others in your family will too, although it may be a different combination of senses involved.

Our environment and learning also plays a part in its development. The influence of cultural norms can often be seen in the spatial layout of synaesthetes’ mental calendars. For synaesthetes with a language that is read from left to right for example, the passage of time will also often move from left to right, or vice versa for those who read right to left. My own shape for the year is a kind of oval shape, with January at one end and August at the other, and I can’t help but feel that my experience of growing up in the UK with the September starting school year influenced it.

All in your brain

Brain imaging research is also helping us understand what is happening in the brain during synaesthetic experiences. For example, people with synaesthesia have brains that are wired for extra connectivity. Brain regions that normally handle separate senses (like colour, sound and spatial processing) talk to each other more. Imaging studies show pathways in central nervous system tissue linking perception with higher-level thinking, which helps explain why synaesthesia feels so seamless. Brain imaging research published in 2020 adds another layer: synaesthetes use spatial-processing regions when working with numbers, showing that our brains literally integrate space and sequence.

Time is associated with space within many cultures, with people who grew up in the UK, Europe and US tending to think of the future in front of them and the past behind. Time-space synaesthesia helps us to remember that even within different cultures, there will be differences in the way we experience the “movement” of time, as scientists think synaesthesia exists in all cultures. The new year is a reminder that time is not only something we measure but also something we inhabit. And our personal journeys through time may have strikingly diverse landscapes.

Mary Jane Spiller does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. How my time-space synaesthesia affects how I experience and ‘feel’ the new year – https://theconversation.com/how-my-time-space-synaesthesia-affects-how-i-experience-and-feel-the-new-year-272465

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lianganzi Wang, PhD Candidate, Sound and Music Computing, Queen Mary University of London

I was walking in Alice Holt Forest on England’s Surrey-Hampshire border when I stopped to listen. Despite there being nobody nearby, a slow “breathing” sound filled my ears. This was not a trick. An artwork was turning live forest data into sound, making the air feel like it was gently rising and falling. In that moment, “climate change” stopped being abstract and became something I could hear.

The piece I could hear is called Dendrophone by composer Peter Batchelor. It maps sunlight, humidity and carbon dioxide readings into a multichannel sound field in real time. Wetter air sounds “stickier”, drier air “crisper”, bright light introduces a fine hiss. When CO₂ uptake is high, you can hear longer, steadier “breaths”.

This is part of a soundscape installation called Sensing the Forest that has been produced by a cross‑disciplinary team at Queen Mary University of London, De Montfort University and the public agencies, Forest Research and Forestry England. The aim is straightforward: to help people make sense of forests and climate through listening, not screens.

Dendrophone captures three easy‑to‑tell textures from live data. Humidity is heard as a “dry/wet” sound; sunlight energy as a subtle hiss (more juddery when activity is high, smoother when calm); and carbon dioxide uptake as “breathing” that becomes longer and steadier when uptake is higher, shorter and more uneven when uptake is lower.

Played over several speakers around the site in the woods, these sounds blend with birds, wind and visitors’ footsteps so people can hear the forest’s state as it unfolds in real time.

The team also installed two DIY, solar‑powered off‑grid audio streamers (essentially tiny radio stations) that broadcast the forest online and auto‑record at sunrise, midday, sunset and the midpoint between sunset and the next sunrise. Recordings are uploaded and stored online, building a long‑term installation soundscape dataset.

Sounds can also include species cues, the noises that various animals make. Tree Museum, by sound artist Ed Chivers, is another installation in the same exhibition that uses artificial woodpecker drumming to draw attention to the lesser-spotted woodpecker (an endangered species down in numbers by 91% since 1967 in the UK). If a sound disappears, what else do we lose?

The mix of the soundscape changes constantly. Listen at different times and you’ll notice the balance of natural sound, human sound and installation sound shifting. Weeks of rain make everything feel “wetter”; bright days bring out the hiss; busy weekends sound busier. Each is a clue to what the forest is experiencing at that moment.

In the forest, there’s a survey QR code to capture instant reactions, plus a guided walk to make “how to listen, what to notice” clear for everyone.

Sensing the Forest doesn’t claim to fix the climate crisis, but it offers something valuable – a sensory language for data and a not‑so‑distant threat. In a time of ecological strain, technology here is less about control and more about translation; a way to foster ecological empathy.

Next time you step into a forest, pause and listen. You might hear not just the present, but the future we share.

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?

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Lianganzi Wang is pursuing a PhD at the Centre for Digital Music (C4DM), Queen Mary University of London, supported by the China Scholarship Council (CSC).

– ref. How to listen to a forest – https://theconversation.com/how-to-listen-to-a-forest-268225

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Adam Taylor, Professor of Anatomy, Lancaster University

As Christmas fades into memory, many of us turn our attention to the new year and the promise of a fresh start. For millions of people, that means joining a gym in the hope of exercising more and improving their health.

In the UK alone, more than ten million adults hold gym memberships, and January attendance is around 28% higher than in December as people act on new year resolutions.

And it is a good idea. In the depths of January, physical activity can give you an endorphin kick, caused by the release of natural brain chemicals that improve mood and reduce stress. Regular exercise is also linked to a lower risk of serious conditions including cancer, heart disease, stroke, type-2 diabetes and many more.

The problem is not exercise itself. It is how people start.

The body adapts to exercise gradually. When it is pushed beyond what it is ready for, the risk of injury rises sharply, and pain does not always appear straight away.

Delayed onset muscle soreness (Doms) is the stiffness and tenderness that typically shows up one to three days after unfamiliar or intense exercise. It occurs because exercise causes tiny microscopic damage to muscle fibres, especially when you are returning after a long break or trying a new type of movement.

Doms is common and usually harmless, but it is also a useful warning sign. It signals that your body needs time to adapt before you increase intensity, weight or volume.

Shoulder injuries

Some parts of the body are more prone to injury than others. Joints that move a lot or carry heavy loads are particularly vulnerable.

The shoulder is often top of the list for gym-related injuries. Its wide range of movement is ideal for daily tasks but risky under load. Anatomically, the shoulder connects the arm to the torso and is not designed to carry heavy weight.

When people suddenly start lifting weights or doing pull-ups, strain often falls on the rotator cuff, a group of tendons that stabilise the joint. These tendons are easily irritated, slow to heal and rarely get a rest, as most exercises for the arms, chest, back and even some leg exercises place load through the shoulder.

Knees and lower back

The knees are generally well adapted to everyday movement, but long periods of inactivity weaken the muscles that support the joint. When those muscles waste away, the knee can move in ways it should not. Starting intense exercise on top of this instability raises the risk of serious injury, including damage to the cruciate ligaments.

Going too heavy in weight, too early is a common trigger. Squats, lunges and leg extensions are frequent culprits.

The lower back is another major injury hotspot. Even before exercise begins, the spine already carries a high load from body weight and posture alone. The pelvis links the upper and lower body, so weakness or instability in the legs can transfer strain upwards to the back. Add heavy lifting or poor technique, and the spine can quickly become overloaded.

Read more:
Pelvic floor dysfunction: what every woman should know

Lower back pain from muscle strain is so common among weightlifters that it has its own label, “weightlifter’s back”. Exercises most often linked to back injuries include sit-ups, squats and deadlifts, burpees and movements that involve twisting while holding weight.

In gyms, free weights are more likely than machines to cause fractures, dislocations and soft tissue injuries. The group most likely to get hurt is not complete beginners, but young men under 41 who already have several months of training and exercise regularly. Confidence, it seems, can be as risky as inexperience.

Home discomforts

Injuries are not limited to gyms. In the US, more than 70,000 emergency department visits over a four-year period were linked to home exercise equipment. Treadmills accounted for 66% of these injuries. Older women were more likely to sustain serious head injuries and were 14 times more likely to require hospital admission.

Among adults over 25, the most common injuries were strains and sprains affecting the legs. For those over 65, stationary bikes were a more frequent source of harm.

Some equipment carries rarer but severe risks. Abdominal rollers have been linked to spinal cord injuries. For people over 40, especially those returning to exercise after years of inactivity, there is also a small but real risk of a heart attack. This is why gradual progression matters.

The good news is that safe options do exist. Many apps and online programmes are designed to build fitness gradually, including for people with existing health conditions. Any movement is better than none, as sedentary behaviour carries its own serious risks.

Adam Taylor does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. New year, new gym injuries – https://theconversation.com/new-year-new-gym-injuries-271412

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Annemieke Apergis-Schoute, Lecturer in Psychology, Queen Mary University of London

Most of us have experienced it: a deadline approaches, the task is perfectly doable, yet instead of starting, we suddenly feel compelled to tidy a drawer or reorganise the apps on our phone. Procrastination feels irrational from the outside but gripping from the inside. Although it’s often framed as a failure of discipline, research shows it is far more linked to how flexibly (or inflexibly) our brains respond to discomfort and uncertainty.

In other words, procrastination isn’t a time-management problem – it’s an emotion-regulation problem. People don’t delay because they lack planning skills; they delay because their brains want to escape a difficult internal state. When I ask students why they procrastinate, their answers are strikingly consistent: “I don’t know where to start”, “I feel lost”, “I get anxious”, “I’m overwhelmed”. Not one says, “I don’t care” – procrastination usually comes from caring too much.

Crucially, avoidance prevents the brain from discovering something important: that starting is often rewarding. Even a tiny first step can release dopamine. This helps motivation increase after we begin – not before. But when we avoid the task, we never experience that reward signal, so the task continues to feel just as threatening the next day.

Cognitive flexibility

Cognitive flexibility is the ability to update expectations when circumstances change, shift strategy and break out of unhelpful patterns. It’s a basic building block of learning: the brain predicts, receives new information and adjusts accordingly.

Imagine waiting for a bus that’s stuck in traffic. A flexible thinker quickly switches to a normally longer but now faster tube route. An inflexible thinker keeps waiting – not because they don’t know the alternative, but because switching feels effortful or “wrong”, and their mind stays locked on the original plan.

I see this pattern clearly in my research on obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). While very different from procrastination, both involve difficulty shifting out of an initial prediction, especially when uncertainty or the risk of mistakes is involved. When the brain can’t update, it gets fixated.

Students today face a perfect storm. Phones and social media shrink attention spans. Perfectionism magnifies self-criticism. And anxiety is at record levels across UK universities. Together, these factors weaken the brain’s ability to update and adapt – exactly the ability needed to begin a challenging task.

Neuroscientifically, procrastination is a tug-of-war between two systems. One is the threat system, activated when a task feels uncertain, effortful or evaluative. This gives rise to thoughts such as “What if this is terrible?”, “What if I fail?”. The other is the reward system, activated by anything that feels good right now (scrolling, tidying, messaging with friends).

When the threat system dominates, it can be impossible to get started. For rigid thinkers, in particular, the brain struggles to update its initial prediction that the task is threatening or overwhelming. Avoidance becomes the only option – and that tiny hit of relief teaches the brain to repeat it.

Indeed, research shows procrastination is essentially a short-term mood repair: a quick escape from discomfort that creates more stress later.

A generation ago, procrastinating required creativity. You had to find distractions. Today, they find you. Social media is engineered to trigger dopamine-driven novelty seeking. For someone already anxious or overloaded, the phone becomes an ever-present escape hatch. As one student put it: “It is easier not to do the work.” Not because the work doesn’t matter – but because the alternative offers instant reward.

Flexibility can be trained

So how can we avoid procrastination? It isn’t about becoming more disciplined, but rather strengthening the brain systems that allow you to begin. Here are a few ways to do that.

1. Shrink the task. Break the work into concrete, manageable units – write a title, draft a few bullet points, or read one page. This reduces the perceived threat of a large, “amorphous” task and gives the brain small, frequent dopamine rewards for each step completed.

2. Use micro-shifts. Micro-shifts are tiny initiation actions – opening the document, placing your notes on the desk. They don’t shrink the task itself, but they interrupt the “stuck” state and gently nudge the brain into motion.

3. Shift perspective. Reframe the task as if advising someone else: “What would I realistically tell a friend in this situation?” This softens rigid, threat-focused thinking and helps the brain generate alternative, more flexible interpretations.

4. Build emotional tolerance. The discomfort of starting peaks quickly, then drops. Reminding yourself of that can make avoidance less compelling.

5. Make rewards immediate. Pair the task with something enjoyable – music, a warm drink, or working alongside others – so that the first step feels less punishing and more rewarding.

Taken together, these strategies strengthen the form of cognitive flexibility most relevant to procrastination – the ability to shift out of avoidance and into action when a task feels uncomfortable. Other forms of cognitive flexibility (such as rule-switching or motor flexibility) can be improved too, but through different kinds of training.

If you recognise yourself in the students describing feeling “anxious”, “overwhelmed” or “not sure where to start”, it doesn’t mean you’re lazy. It means your brain is struggling to shift state. Procrastination tells us far less about willpower than about how our minds cope with uncertainty and discomfort.

And the encouraging part is that procrastination isn’t fixed. Flexibility improves with practice. Every time you take even a tiny step – opening the file, writing the first line – you’re not just progressing on the task. You’re showing your brain that starting is doable, survivable and often rewarding.

Over time, those small shifts accumulate into something powerful: a mind that moves toward what matters, rather than away from discomfort.

Annemieke Apergis-Schoute received funding from The Wellcome Trust for previous OCD research.

– ref. Why procrastination isn’t laziness – it’s rigid thinking that your brain can unlearn – https://theconversation.com/why-procrastination-isnt-laziness-its-rigid-thinking-that-your-brain-can-unlearn-270838

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Simon Rodway, Lecturer in Celtic Studies, Aberystwyth University

The Celtic languages spoken today – namely Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Cornish and Breton – all descend from Celtic languages once spoken across Britain and Ireland in antiquity. While the modern languages are well documented from the early middle ages onwards, what came before is far more mysterious.

Only fragments of earlier evidence survive, leaving major questions about where these ancient Celtic languages came from and how they connect not only to each other, but also to related languages once spoken on the European mainland, such as Gaulish.

Much of this early linguistic story unfolded before widespread writing reached the islands. Before the Romans arrived, Britain was barely known to the literate cultures of the ancient Mediterranean. Only a handful of early travellers recorded anything about the languages spoken there.

So, we have only sparse clues as to the languages spoken in Britain, notably a handful of plausibly Celtic place names recorded by Greek voyagers such as Pytheas of Marseilles, who visited Britain around 325BC.

Once Britain became part of the Roman empire, everything changed. We have plenty of written material from and about Roman Britain. It is almost all in Latin, the official language of the empire. But scattered within it are Celtic place names and ethnic names, along with a small number of inscriptions in Celtic itself.

Of huge interest to scholars are the handful of inscriptions in Celtic from Bath and Uley in Gloucestershire. These small traces may offer rare glimpses of the languages spoken by local people at the time.

Ireland and its settlers

Ireland presents a different picture. As it was never incorporated into the Roman empire, written evidence appears later. Not until the middle of the second century AD do we get a substantial amount of data in the form of the place and ethnic names recorded by the Greek geographer Ptolemy.

Literacy, like Christianity, arrived late in Ireland through contact with Roman or sub-Roman Britain. The earliest written material from Ireland dates from the early fifth century, or perhaps a bit earlier. It mostly consists of inscriptions on stone in the Ogham alphabet which, despite its exotic appearance, seems to have developed from a cipher based on the Roman alphabet.

Irish settlers later took Ogham to parts of western Wales and Cornwall. Though short and simple, these inscriptions are vital because they capture an early stage of Irish at the edge of the historical record.

Together, these fragments form the puzzle pieces through which we try to understand how Celtic languages spread across Britain and Ireland. But the Celticity of Britain and Ireland has been questioned in recent decades.

Some archaeologists have argued that the people of Britain and Ireland may never have been “Celtic” in the same sense as communities on the continent. They have pointed to differences in material culture and a lack of clear evidence for major prehistoric migrations.

They also noted that classical authors from the Greek geographer and historian Strabo (born around 64BC) onwards contrasted Britain and Celtica on the continent. This led a rejection of the mid-20th century orthodoxy of hordes of warlike Celts from central Europe pouring in to these islands during the iron age.

It has been supposed that Indo-European may have arrived early in the islands and developed there into Celtic, or that Celtic languages may have spread from the continent without much movement of people. The argument even spilled into popular commentary, most recently in a polemical and misleading book by journalist Simon Jenkins in 2022, who, contrary to all evidence, cast doubt on whether the Celts, as a people, even existed at all.

Reshaping the debate

But recent research is challenging those assumptions. Recent studies of ancient DNA have revealed waves of migration into Britain from regions that are now in France during the late bronze age and to a lesser extent, the iron age. These movements of people were not visible to archaeologists.

Of course, you cannot guess someone’s language from their genes. But these migrations provide a plausible vehicle by which Celtic speech may have arrived in Britain. And a recent study has shown that Pytheas, in the fourth century BC, placed Celts in Britain.

Read more:
Ireland, Wales and the scholar who helped unravel their Celtic connections

When taken together, these findings may support the old idea that Celtic languages were brought to the islands by migrating Celts after all. It’s certainly an exciting time to be studying ancient Celtic in Britain and Ireland.

This is the backdrop to new research underway by myself and colleagues at Aberystwyth University. We are gathering every surviving piece of evidence for early Celtic languages in Britain and Ireland before around 500AD. We shall compile the first comprehensive dictionary of the ancient Celtic languages of these islands.

Bringing all of this material together will help answer longstanding questions about how the Celtic languages are related and how they fit into the wider Celtic world of ancient Europe.

We will never recover the full picture of the Celtic languages spoken in Britain and Ireland more than 2000 years ago. But by piecing together the clues left behind, we can begin to understand the linguistic landscape that shaped the Celtic languages still spoken today.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org; if you click on one of the links and go on to buy something, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Simon Rodway receives funding from Leverhulme Foundation. He is affiliated with Plaid Cymru.

– ref. How Celtic languages spread across Britain and Ireland: why we need to reconsider the early story – https://theconversation.com/how-celtic-languages-spread-across-britain-and-ireland-why-we-need-to-reconsider-the-early-story-271338