Mateusz Wiącek

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Memory consolidation: Matthew Walker and why we learn during sleep (2017)

Matthew Walker is a neuroscientist and professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for his research on sleep and its impact on human…
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Pirahã language: Daniel Everett an why language is a cultural invention (2017)

Daniel Everett is a linguist who is best known for his studies of language in the Amazon and author of the book How Language Began. He began as a missionary…
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The bilingual brain: Arturo Hernandez and why native language is different from foreign language (2013)

Arturo Hernandez is a neuroscientist and cognitive psychologist known for his research on the neural basis of language and cognition, particularly in the context of bilingualism. In 2013 Hernandez published…
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Steven Pinker: Language is an instinct (1994)

Steven Pinker is a cognitive scientist and linguist who has made significant contributions to the study of language and cognition. In 1995 in his book The Language Instinct, Pinker explored…
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Benny Lewis and the polyglot community: Language learning is global (2013)

Before the web and social media, polyglots tended to be solitary creatures. In 2009, an Irish polyglot, Benny Lewis, started his blog “Fluent in 3 months”. Lewis was documenting his…
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Duolingo: Expansion of language apps (2011)

Luis von Ahn, a Guatemalan entrepreneur and a consulting professor in Computer Science, founded Duolingo in 2011. It is the most downloaded education app worldwide and has over 500 million…
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The learning styles: VAK is dead (2009)

In 2009 a group of scientists (incl. Robert Bjork) published an essay on “Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence”. The authors examined the evidence supporting the idea that matching instruction to…
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Motivation and goal setting: Dan Ariely (2008)

Dan Ariely is an Israeli-American behavioral economist known for his research on irrational behavior and decision-making.  Ariely published the book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions in…
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Formulaic sequences: Language consists of chunks (2005)

Michael Lewis described the early 1990s a so-called “lexical approach” in language teaching which was based on the idea that language is made up of lexical units rather than grammar…
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Desirable difficulties: Robert A. Bjork (1994)

Robert A. Bjork is a cognitive psychologist known for his research in the areas of learning, memory, and forgetting. His work has focused on understanding the factors that influence human…