THE hardest people to fool are those who can’t understand whole sentences,
says a team of researchers in Boston.
Nancy Etcoff of the Massachusetts General Hospital and her colleagues asked
10 aphasic patients—who can understand single words but not whole
sentences—to identify who was lying on a videotape. The tape showed
student nurses trying to speak cheerfully as they watched either pleasant nature
films or gruesome amputations. The researchers also asked 10 patients with other
types of brain damage, 10 healthy controls and also 48 undergraduates to do the
test.
Only the aphasic patients were better than chance…
