Wise discourse in deliberative spaces requires rational thinking. This chapter presents a revised dual-process theory that integrates heuristic reasoning and Bayesian updating. The model envisions multiple intuitive systems and a metasystem that resolves conflicts among intuitions, selects strategies, and directs the search of evidence and hypothesis spaces. Reflecting bounded resource rationality, these searches are often inadequate (and overly passive) due to uncertainty about the benefits of further inquiry. Environmental feedback can prompt quasi-Bayesian updating of intuitions and strategies, but such feedback is often missing, leading to cognitive biases. Additional biases stem from memory sampling, misinformation, poor adaptation to environmental change, nonepistemic goals like identity protection, and ad hoc auxiliary assumptions. The relationship to argumentation and deliberative spaces is also analyzed. The chapter concludes that most people are basically rational but must learn which strategies are adaptive in particular environments – a task made harder in today’s rapidly changing digital landscape.

In spoken communication, one can observe a near-constant presence of both communicative gestures and noncommunicative movements, involving the limbs for actions or locomotion. This suggests that the physical underpinning of spoken communication extends beyond the articulatory system. It may find its roots in breathing, a pivotal element that plays a crucial role in the control and rhythms of both speech and limb movement. This hypothesis has recently garnered attention in interdisciplinary research. Within this framework, this chapter examines evidence of the impact of breathing and limb movements on speech rhythms. First, it highlights breathing as a fundamental rhythm unique to speakers, acting as a conductor for the temporal organization of speech at various linguistic levels. The chapter then further explores the influence of co-speech gestures and noncommunicative motions on the temporal organization of speech. The intricate interplay between speech and breathing, as well as speech and motion, conceptualizes breathing as a potential bridge connecting speech and limb motions at different levels.

Chapter 9 synthesizes the book’s core themes on the waning of wisdom, human rationality, and wise deliberative spaces. Since the 1960s, wise spaces have declined due to eroding social capital, weakening trust in social institutions, shrinking civics education, diminished investigative journalism, media fragmentation, social media’s addictive design, and a revival of relativistic notions of truth. Rationality is compromised by cognitive biases, poorly adapted heuristics, digital misinformation, and insufficient search of evidence and hypothesis spaces. Groups can overcome these limits when deliberations follow wise discourse practices. The chapter offers cautious optimism. Human reasoning is guided by a reflective metasystem – pursuing accuracy or directional goals – and by intuitive subsystems, some quasi-Bayesian. This core capacity for rational thought is often obscured by biased views of outgroups, which wise deliberative spaces can counter by fostering understanding and finding common ground. Moreover, new face-to-face and online forums are being designed to strengthen civic discourse and bridge divides. A growing public appetite for such solutions signals potential for renewal.

Music, like language, relies on listeners’ ability to extract information as it unfolds in time. One key difference between music and language is the strong rhythmic regularities of music relative to language. Despite a wealth of literature describing the rhythms of song as regular and the rhythms of speech as irregular, the acoustic features and neural processing of rhythmic regularity in song and (lack thereof) in speech are poorly understood. This chapter examines acoustic, behavioral, and neural indices of rhythmic regularity in speech and song. Our goal is to review which features induce rhythmic regularity and examine how regularity impacts attention, memory, and comprehension. This work has the potential to inform a wide range of areas, including clinical interventions for speech and reading, best practices for teaching and learning in the classroom, and how attention is captured in real-world scenarios.

Reading is not just a cognitive skill; it is neural training. It fine-tunes attentional focus, oculomotor coordination, and the coupling of deep-brain circuits with visual cortex regions. Moreover, the direction and complexity of writing systems shape spatial cognition and aesthetic preferences. This makes literacy a powerful cultural force that rewires ancient neural networks to enhance how we see, search, and attend to the world.

Melodic intonation therapy (MIT) is a prominent music-based treatment for people with nonfluent aphasia that has numerous potentially active treatment ingredients. These include a simplified, predictable rhythm, slow rate, and unison production of spoken language. Evidence supports the effectiveness of MIT for improving repetition ability but is more modest regarding improvements in functional communication. This chapter reviews MIT’s treatment ingredients, including how they are used and how they are thought to work. With these numerous ingredients, MIT is flexible and can be customized for a particular individual’s needs, but group-level studies using standardized treatment protocols may not allow for this. A treatment taxonomy specifying treatment targets, ingredients, and mechanisms of action is a promising tool to organize the existing evidence, further investigate MIT, and implement it in clinical practice. This approach will allow for a balance between customization and standardization of the treatment protocol.

All theories up to now relate consciousness to neural processes, circuits, etc. Quantum theories, such as orchestrated objective reduction (OrchOR), propose that proto-conscious events occur in the entire universe and full consciousness occurs only at the subcellular level in the microtubules of neurons. We outline challenges with this approach.

Music rhythm and speech rhythm share acoustic, temporal and syntactic similarities, and neuroscience research has shown that similar areas and networks in the brain are recruited to process both types of signals. Rhythm is a core predictive element for both music and speech, allowing for facilitated processing of upcoming, predicted elements. The combined study of music and speech rhythm processing can be particularly insightful, considering the stronger regularity and predictability of musical rhythm. Although speech rhythm is less regular, it still contains regularities, notably at syllabic and prosodic levels. In this chapter, we outline different research lines investigating connections between music and speech rhythm processing, including the recently proposed processing rhythm in speech and music framework, as well as music rhythm interventions and stimulations that aim to improve speech signal processing both in the short term and the long term. Implications for developmental language disorders and future research perspectives are outlined.

Biological theories claim that consciousness occurs in specific neural circuits. Based on a wealth of neural data, the dendritic integration theory (DIT) claims that consciousness occurs when information in the dendrites of neurons is gated to higher-level neurons under the control of the thalamus. Based on patient studies, the felt uncertainty theory (FUT) claims that consciousness is not related to sensation and cognition but to emotions. We will also introduce the ‘other systems argument’, which holds that biological theories may not generalize to other kinds of systems.

Reading leads to the development of an extensive and sophisticated vocabulary, which increases the size, complexity, and interconnectivity of information stored in long-term memory. Frequent reading helps maintain this stored information and supports efficient retrieval. In addition, reading enhances short-term memory skills, particularly the ability to actively manipulate temporary information in working memory.

Infant-directed communication has been proposed to facilitate early language development, not only by providing infants with ample native language input but also by tailoring this input to infants’ individual developmental needs. In particular, extensive research has investigated prosodic and phonetic adaptations in caregivers’ infant-directed speech proposed to support early language acquisition, but more recently, research focus has shifted to the rhythmical properties of this register. This chapter reviews this recent evidence, and argues that rhythmic optimization is not limited to infants’ early speech input. Instead, it is present across the auditory, visual, and tactile domains of caregiver–infant communication. We will argue that infants enjoy access to optimized intersensory rhythmic input, which scaffolds their ability to segment the continuous speech signal into meaningful linguistic units, even when these units occur with weak regularity in naturally produced adult-directed speech.

The term “prosody” encompasses properties of speech that span several timescales and levels of linguistic units, from the intensity and pitch of phonemes and syllables to the overall timing and intonation of utterances and conversations. Hierarchical temporal structure was introduced as a measure of clustering in sound energy that quantifies the relationship among timescales of prosody and related aspects of speech and music. The present chapter reviews several studies showing that the degree of hierarchical temporal structure in speech signals, as measured by the rate of increase in clustering with timescale, reflects the degree of prosodic composition. Prosodic composition can serve different purposes in communication, including linguistic emphasis and chunking in infant-directed speech, scaffolding of spoken interactions with children whose speech abilities are relatively less developed, and stricter timing in formal interactions. Prosodic composition as expressed by hierarchical temporal structure may serve as a control parameter in speech production and communication.

Argumentation is essential to human reasoning. Chapter 4 explores the nature of argumentation and distinguishes among consensual, disputational, and deliberative forms. The chapter focuses on critical discussions as a type of deliberation and introduces the idea of wise deliberative spaces, grounded in psychological research on wisdom. These spaces promote truth-seeking and moral inquiry. They employ wise discourse practices that support cognitive diversity, face protection, and reduced status hierarchies – through using ground rules, facilitators, active listening, critical questioning, and integrative argumentation. The chapter then explores examples relating to classroom discourse, informal dialogue across divides, deliberative democracy, deliberative polling, and tribal societies. It concludes by discussing institutional wisdom – how institutions like investigative journalism and constitutional democracy can support wise deliberation – though both face mounting challenges today.Argumentation is essential to human reasoning. Chapter 4 explores the nature of argumentation and distinguishes among consensual, disputational, and deliberative forms. The chapter focuses on critical discussions as a type of deliberation and introduces the idea of wise deliberative spaces, grounded in psychological research on wisdom. These spaces promote truth-seeking and moral inquiry. They employ wise discourse practices that support cognitive diversity, face protection, and reduced status hierarchies – through using ground rules, facilitators, active listening, critical questioning, and integrative argumentation. The chapter then explores examples relating to classroom discourse, informal dialogue across divides, deliberative democracy, deliberative polling, and tribal societies. It concludes by discussing institutional wisdom – how institutions like investigative journalism and constitutional democracy can support wise deliberation – though both face mounting challenges today.