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Michael Graziano suggests our brains have evolved something he calls an "attention schema" ( 21 September, p 34 ). In an earlier issue, Donald Hoffman explained how we may see the world as a series of "icons" that represent real objects in the world but aren't those objects, because if we saw an object for …

Jessica Hamzelou reports on a smartphone app that could spot signs of schizophrenia in facial expressions and speech ( 28 September, p 7 ). This may be confounded by the fact that medication, notably neuroleptics, can alter voice and facial expressiveness. Alcohol and other drugs can have similar effects. A bigger issue is the notion …

I enjoyed reading Donna Lu's article on a solar-powered airship scheme while my wife Margaret and I returned to Glasgow from Â鶹´«Ã½ Live ( 12 October, p 15 ). It concludes with the view that low speeds would be a deterrent to using airships for passenger transport. Instead of our 5-hour rail trip, we …

Several answers in Almost the Last Word refer to the gyroscopic effect of bicycle wheel rotation helping to maintain balance (Almost the Last Word, 5 October ). This has been discussed before (Last Word, 9 December 2006 and 3 February 2007 ). Michael Brooks reported experiments showing it to be false ( 28 May 2011, …

Meaning seems to be partially independent of language . Bilingual people can often remember what was said without knowing in which language it was said. Within as little as a minute, my children may have forgotten which language they spoke in, but still be capable of recalling the meaning of what was said.

When my son was about 14 months old, we let him sit on the doorstep of our house in the Canary Islands with another child of a similar age, eating ice cream. Then, we heard a cry. We found him on one side of the mosquito net door with his friend on the other. He …

Apparently, speech conveys 39 bits of information per second ( 14 September, p 17 ). This is supported by a quick calculation for reading. At a reading rate of 250 words per minute, where each word has an average of five letters and each letter conveys an average of 1.8 bits of information, a reader …

Andrew Scott suggests we may need fossil fuels to keep warm in the far future (Letters, 12 October ). We have to stop thinking of them as fuels. In a future of clean energy, we will still need them to make medicines and plastics. Future generations will never forgive us for burning them.

You report that the Home Office is using flawed and biased face-recognition technology ( 19 October, p 12 ). It shows its attitude by calling the public "customers". In a healthy market, a customer can choose between providers. Even if I don't use any of its public services, I can't choose not to pay for …

On the day of the UK's referendum on EU membership in 2016, you asked whether bad weather would have an impact on the vote (online, 23 June 2016 ). Little has yet been said about the impact that weather could have on the UK election in mid-December. Instead of influencing the electorate with electronic seeding …