Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘science and lit’

Shop Talk |

Maybe just one more cup…

I know few writers who need another reason for another cup of coffee. But if you need more convincing, how about your health? The reasoning isn’t yet understood, but it’s possible that coffee has health benefits beyond the mental satisfaction of finishing that chapter. This week, the New York Times Wellness blog cited researchers at the National Cancer Institute who have found a correlation between increased coffee intake and decreased risk of colon cancer.  LiveScience also wrote this week about the possibility that drinking coffee could “reduce the risk of basal cell carcinoma, the most common form of skin cancer.” […]


Shop Talk |

At a loss for words

Yesterday we talked about a tool to help you analyze your writing for “flabbiness” or “fitness” based on your use of prepositions, adjective and adverbs, and so on. But could analyzing your writing tell you something about your mental fitness, too? Researchers now believe that they may be able to detect the early signs of Alzheimer’s from a writer’s language. In a recently published paper, scientists at the University of Toronto examined the output of three writers for signs of the disease. From the study (titled “Longitudinal detection of dementia through lexical and syntactic changes in writing: a case study […]