Do we own our thoughts?

Helen Keller was not born deaf & blind, but became so at the age of about 1-1/2 years after a bout of meningitis. At the age of 7, she was freed by a teacher who was able to help her connect sign language to concepts representing reality.

Keller says of that experience that it was like an awakening. "Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten--a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me." Before this, her world seems to have been a swirl of thoughtless emotion, "This thought, if a wordless sensation may be called a thought, made me hop and skip with pleasure."

Hm. No thoughts without words? Then whose words create our thoughts?

Soon after her release from permanent isolation, Helen Keller wrote a story called "The Frost King" for one of her mentors, in appreciation for his efforts to reach out to her.

Unfortunately, the story was discovered to have much in common with a previously published story. Helen was so mortified by the unconscious plagiarism [cryptomnesia] that she never wrote fiction again. Her writings suggest that she never again really trusted her thoughts to be her own, either.

Helen is not alone--there are many examples of apparently innocent cryptomnesia in the field of intellectual property, including incidents involving George Harrison & Vladimir Nabokov.

Keller was a ravenous reader & catching up for lost time quickly, but she simply didn't have as much background to draw on & mix together, so the story similarities leaped right out.

But do any of us actually own our thoughts?

While clearly a "forbidden experiment", social isolation appears to result in psychosis, while language deprivation experiments seem to lead inevitably to muteness. Although problematic to interpret, so called, "wild children", who are raised apart from human contact do not develop normal mental lives.

Even when doing science, the most objective activity humans are capable of,

We are all a part of a cultural matrix, which, even if unconsciously, affects the way we think. As Schiebinger puts it "We cannot free ourselves of cultural influence; we cannot think or act outside a culture. Language shapes even as it articulates thought."

Some scientists have proposed--as in the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis--that "different language patterns yield different patterns of thought. This idea challenges the possibility of perfectly representing the world with language, because it implies that the mechanisms of any language condition the thoughts of its speaker community."

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the "real world" is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached ... We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. (Sapir, 1958 [1929], p. 69)

And in less objective activities, language is even more influential. Culture wars erupt over language used to oppress social factions. The never-ending flap over "political correctness" demonstrates this, even though PC itself originated as an overdue response to suppression of women & minorities through language. The irony is usually lost in the heat of battle.

So how, specifically, can words influence thought? Well, here's a way: "indirect relationships between unrelated concepts can be inadvertently triggered by a 'bridge' through a phonetic relationship", a process called homophone priming. So what might be the effect in a culture, say, whose word for "war" sounds similar to the word for "children"?

Certainly, manipulation of language is a common political tool used to exert control over populations. And its overwhelmingly effective use in advertising goes strangely unquestioned by its victims. Phillip K. Dick once said, “The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words."

But those are topics for a new post :)

Is it really that simple?

A mathematician has overturned numerous complex models of child word acquisition using a simple spreadsheet.

Apparently, it's just a simple bell-curve. Despite the miraculous sudden appearance of an avalanche of words out of the mouths of two-year-olds, toddler brains don't have magical powers.

Like filling a jar with jelly beans, we gotta hear a word a certain number of times before we own it, & the bigger the word, the more jelly beans it takes. Toddlers just have all the low-hanging fruit to learn first.

This is good news for adults trying to learn a new language :)

It's not efficiency, it's ADHD.

I knew it!

Twitchy multi-tasking isn't just annoying to everyone nearby, it's bogus.

Surgical checklists prove amazingly effective.

Wow!

A recent study by the World Health Organization & Harvard Public Health demonstrated that using simple checklists in surgery can reduce the rate of complications & death by almost a third.

Lack of control = delusions?

Seems the more powerless we feel, the more likely we are to see patterns where none exist. This has obvious pertinence to many social issues: law, politics, medicine, religion, psychology.

One group that seems to be feeling especially powerless these days is the Literati. Apparently, the internet is beginning to change the way we think, & also the way we read. "It makes it harder even when we're offline to read books, as skimming takes over and displaces our modes of reading," says Nicholas Carr.

In a longer article, he compares the internet--& Google in particular--to time-&-motion studies that transformed productivity in the industrial revolution, becoming & remaining "the ethic of industrial manufacturing" at the cost of human job satisfaction. Carr provocatively suggests that Google's information management efforts are new oppressive time-&-motion algorithms for intellectual thought & knowledge work. He worries about the loss of deep thinking associated with the loss of deep reading in favor of the internet's hyperactive skimming.

But I wonder if all that deep reading wasn't at least partially because we were getting that information from a single author, & we needed to subconsciously assess the validity of the claims? We were also pretty much forced to wade through a lot of extraneous information to get to the meat of it, & then ultimately take or reject what we were given. Hopefully we could then tie what we kept to other reading, but no one can read everything--I think the last true "Renaissance Man" who actually held a good percentage of the knowledge of his time was probably Jefferson.

The internet helps resolve these issues, streamlining the process of information acquisition & interconnecting information to supporting & refuting arguments in a way no print source ever could. While much has been made of the dubious credibility of internet authors, is the situation really that different for printed authors, or are we assigning them more trust than perhaps we should due to the authority inherent in having access to esoteric means of distribution not available to everyone?

The internet--as all new technology tends to do--is certainly upsetting the applecart & redistributing power within society. Those who produce books seem to be one of the losers in this new arrangement.

So, is Nicholas Carr's fear grounded, or is he feeling powerless & seeing patterns where none exist?

Neandertals, too, missed the obvious.

There are many remains of the Neanderthals, since they performed primitive burials that prevented scavenging & destruction of the bodies.

So, we know that a lot of the Neanderthals carried "Rodeo lesion" skeletal injuries [scary adjective], suggesting "frequent close encounters with large ungulates unkindly disposed to the humans involved."

Combined with their burly stature & the fact that Neanderthal hunting tools are jab-style rather than projectile, this tells us that our closest relatives liked to stab pointy sticks into large animals, then hang on for the violent ride. They never figured out how to chuck a spear or arrow, then get out of the way.

This seems so simple & obvious that it boggles my mind to consider what absolutely critical information we humans have access to, yet utterly fail to process.

Researchers:
Thomas D. Berger and Erik Trinkaus
Department of Anthropology, University of New Mexico

Religion vs. Science.

America is lodged in a cultural battle that simply will not end: Religion vs. Science. There's some really fascinating science related to this conflict.

There's really no reason there should be a fight between two such valuable assets, but a conflict arises because our brains evolved to meet the demands of two very different worlds: "two mechanisms, one for understanding the physical world and one for understanding the social world, gives rise to a duality of experience. We experience the world of material things as separate from the world of goals and desires."

So, our rigid sense of right & wrong suggests that we have to choose, & we often have a really hard time seeing the forest through the trees. Why are we so belligerent, gullible & willfully stupid sometimes?

Probably because "thinking anecdotally comes naturally, whereas thinking scientifically does not". It is not costly in a survival sense to believe in connections that don't actually exist, whereas missing a real connection--say, between rustling bushes & lurking predators--can be deadly.

"Our brains are belief engines that employ association learning to seek and find patterns. Superstition and belief in magic are millions of years old, whereas science, with its methods of controlling for intervening variables to circumvent false positives, is only a few hundred years old."

We see what we expect to see, what we have "primed" our brains to spot, even if those things are just mythical figments of our imaginations, like angels or UFOs. These pre-beliefs, if you will, affect our perceptions of other people: "In our minds, attractive people are better people — and apparently thinking makes it so."

The dangerous, flip side of priming is that if we aren't specifically looking for something, we don't see it even when it's enormous & obvious. And some forms of priming are insidious & can easily be used to manipulate us.



Politicians use this to their advantage all the time. For instance, the best-looking candidates have a measurable statistical advantage [very few hairy, unkempt politicians out there], & effectively calling the constituency "sissies" leads to higher levels of support for belligerent foreign policy.

It makes sense: if you are looking to unite a group of people to support your bid for personal power, you need to identify something that is similar about those people that can be used to wrestle power away from whoever currently appears to hold it.

Since there actually is precious little biological difference between people, our tendency toward mythical thinking fits the bill nicely. Cultural differences arising from variations in our mythologies become useful: "the best leaders...exemplify what makes the group distinct from and superior to rival groups."

In its sheer, unrivaled ability to manipulate our environment to suit humans, science is powerful. So if you aren't a scientist, how do you take that power for yourself? Perhaps by recognizing that, "Followers may also shun an otherwise desirable trait such as intelligence if doing so helps the group differentiate itself from competitors." And that "the development of a shared social identity is the basis of influential and creative leadership. If you control the definition of identity, you can change the world."

With science sitting in the middle ground, New Age mysticism & Intelligent Design/Creation Science are two of the current tools used by the left & right wings respectively. They exploit our tendency toward perceptual errors & our fondness for anecdotal evidence to claim superiority for their in-group, calling into question the credibility & entire history of science in a blatant grab for power. While they do pick & choose, none of these people are seriously suggesting we give up ALL the benefits of science & go back to living in caves.

Here's a detailed rebuttal of many of the currently popular anti-science arguments. It includes staggering descriptions of some remarkable biological systems, like blood clotting, flagellum, & human-chimp chromosome comparison: