As it tops bestsellers' lists, Dan Brown's new book, The Lost Symbol, catapulted into the mainstream the frontier science he calls "Noetics," an area of active research for over twenty-five years ...

A mysterious encrypted manuscript of a secret society, meticulously written in abstract symbols and Roman letters, has finally been deciphered more than three centuries after it was first ...

Clearly, they both have their advantages - generic examples seem easier to apply, while real-world ones are easier to pick up at the start. Even so, students who only learned the abstract symbol ...