Being Human

In what sounds like a plot from an animated sci-fi film, I've just found a remarkable study where Japanese researchers put a Yoga Master in a brain scanner and fired lasers at him because he claimed not to be able to feel pain while meditating.

It turns out that he showed significantly less brain activity in areas typically activated by pain when meditating.

Intracerebral pain processing in a Yoga Master who claims not to feel pain during meditation.

Eur J Pain. 2005 Oct;9(5):581-9.

Kakigi R, Nakata H, Inui K, Hiroe N, Nagata O, Honda M, Tanaka S, Sadato N, Kawakami M.

We recorded magnetoencephalography (MEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) following noxious laser stimulation in a Yoga Master who claims not to feel pain when meditating. As for background MEG activity, the power of alpha frequency bands peaking at around 10 Hz was much increased during meditation over occipital, parietal and temporal regions, when compared with the non-meditative state, which might mean the subject was very relaxed, though he did not fall asleep, during meditation.

Primary pain-related cortical activities recorded from primary (SI) and secondary somatosensory cortices (SII) by MEG were very weak or absent during meditation. As for fMRI recording, there were remarkable changes in levels of activity in the thalamus, SII-insula (mainly the insula) and cingulate cortex between meditation and non-meditation. Activities in all three regions were increased during non-meditation, similar to results in normal subjects. In contrast, activities in all three regions were weaker during meditation, and the level was lower than the baseline in the thalamus.

Recent neuroimaging and electrophysiological studies have clarified that the emotional aspect of pain perception mainly involves the insula and cingulate cortex. Though we cannot clearly explain this unusual condition in the Yoga Master, a change of multiple regions relating to pain perception could be responsible, since pain is a complex sensory and emotional experience.

I have an image of scientists shielding their eyes as lasers fail to penetrate the force field of the Yoga Master who serenely hovers a few inches above the ground, although I suspect that's because I've read too many manga comics

Link to PubMed entry for study,

RadioLab has a brilliant short podcast on the psychological role of blinks, based on a study that found that when watching a film our blinks are remarkably synchronised.

The programme dispels the myth that blinking serves only to keep our eyes wet as apparently studies have shown that we don't blink any more or less in different humidities.

Instead, it explores a fascinating new study that found that blinks became synchronised when watching a film of another person, but not when watching landscapes or listening to stories.

Interestingly, blinks seems to be controlled so they occur at the start and end of meaning actions.

This is from the study abstract:

Synchronized blinks occurred during scenes that required less attention such as at the conclusion of an action, during the absence of the main character, during a long shot and during repeated presentations of a similar scene. In contrast, blink synchronization was not observed when subjects viewed a background video or when they listened to a story read aloud. The results suggest that humans share a mechanism for controlling the timing of blinks that searches for an implicit timing that is appropriate to minimize the chance of losing critical information while viewing a stream of visual events.

Blinking helps us comprehend the world. I find that quite amazing.

We know that blinking is also tied to some quite fundamental functions of the brain. For example, the higher the amount of spontaneous blinking you do, the higher the amount of dopamine you produce in the striatum, a deep brain area.

This is also links to your ability to stop unwanted actions, with a recent study linking higher blink rates to slower stop times.

As always the RadioLab programme is gripping audio velvet. I really recommend some headphones and 15 minutes of undisturbed time to lose yourself.

Link to RadioLab short podcast 'Blink'.
Link to full text of blink synchronisation study.

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In this Sunday's "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine (already available online here), I take a look back at the legacy of the column's founder, William Safire. As I write there, "Safire's acute awareness of the limits of his own expertise was often lost on fans and critics alike." Indeed, the "language maven" title that he liked to use was intended to be self-deprecating. (Some might say "self-depreciating," but let's not open that can of worms.)

Part of that self-awareness was a willingness to acknowledge his errors in judgment. In that spirit, I follow up the "On Language" tribute with my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, taking a look at one of Safire's early miscues: declaring, in 1979, that could care less was a "vogue phrase" on its way to extinction. Thirty years later, the verdict is: not so much. Fortunately, Safire didn't often confuse his language mavenry with futurology.

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Earlier this year we covered a study on REM sleep behaviour disorder (RBD) where normal sleep paralysis breaks down and sleepers act out their dreams. The Journal of Forensic Science has just published a study on the dark side of the disorder, where affected sleepers experience nightmares and can unknowingly damage themselves or their partners in fits of dream world violence.

The researchers examined all the published cases on violence in REM sleep behaviour disorder with potential for a lethal outcome and found they fall into three groups: choking or headlock attacks, throwing someone or throwing yourself through a window, and diving from the bed.

Some of the descriptions are pretty intense:

A 63-year-old man with RBD and delayed-onset Shy-Drager Syndrome reported "a progressive 10-year history of abnormal behavior during sleep. He would at various times choke, kick, punch, and spit on his wife while he was asleep. In addition, complex behaviors such as getting out of bed and running into walls while asleep were reported by family members. This behavior occurred while the patient was dreaming, usually of being attacked.

A 67-year-old man had a 3-year history of progressive stiffness and slowing of his left side. Five years before the onset of these symptoms, he began having vivid dreams together with violent movements during sleep. Once he dreamed of being trapped in a house on fire, and he almost jumped out of the window, if not for his wife awakening and restraining him.

A 25-year-old woman with multiple sclerosis "presented with a 6-month history of sudden awakenings from fearful, often vivid…dreams and with terrified screams or violent behavior such as kicking, running to the door or to the window, crying and falling out of bed. If awakened, she always recalled a fighting dream. Once she repetitively banged her head against the floor, inducing a large facial hematoma. On that occasion, she was dreaming that a man was knocking her against the wall.

The idea that someone could be violent during sleep without any awareness was initially treated with suspicion but it has since been confirmed in sleep labs where patient are video-taped and wired up to an EEG to confirm they are in REM sleep.

There have now been numerous legal cases where 'sleepwalking violence' has been used as a defence for murders or attempted murders, and at least one case where it led to a successful acquittal.

Link to summary of RBD lethal violence study.

The Reverend Angela Tilby ended her scandalously unresearched little "Thought for the Day" talk of 1 October 2009 (part of which I have already discussed in this recent post) by suggesting that during the British political party conference season (i.e., right about now) we should try taking a blue pencil and editing out all the adjectives from the political speeches so that we could "see what is really being said about people, places, things, deeds and actions". She holds to the ancient nonsense about how nouns tell us the people, places, and things while verbs give us the deeds and actions but adjectives give us nothing but qualifications and hot air and spin — they contribute no content. And she is clearly implying that she (cynically) expects political speeches to be full of adjectives. But as before, she hasn't done any checking at all, she has just spouted her conjectures straight into the microphone. So let's try a second breakfast experiment, shall we?

I examined the first few paragraphs of the transcript of Prime Minister Gordon Brown's speech to the 2009 Labour Party Conference the other day (curiously, he seems to have begun with the coordinator and). Here is the first part of the text, with the adjectives underlined (and again, I am counting them very conservatively, ignoring many items that traditional grammars include under the adjective heading):

And so today, in the midst of events that are transforming our world, we meet united and determined to fight for the future.

Our country confronts the biggest choice for a generation. It's a choice between two parties, yes. But more importantly a choice between two directions for our country.

In the last 18 months we have had to confront the biggest economic choices the world has faced since the 1930s.

It was only a year ago that the world was looking over a precipice and Britain was in danger. I knew that unless I acted decisively and immediately, the recession could descend into a great depression with millions of people's jobs and homes and savings at risk.

And times of great challenge mean choices of great consequence, so let me share with you a little about the choices we are making.

The first choice was this: whether markets left to themselves could sort out the crisis; or whether governments had to act. Our choice was clear; we nationalised Northern Rock and took shares in British banks, and as a result not one British saver has lost a single penny. That was the change we chose. The change that benefits the hard working majority, not the privileged few.

And we faced a second big choice — between letting the recession run its course, or stimulating the economy back to growth. And we made our choice; help for small businesses, targeted tax cuts for millions and advancing our investment in roads, rail and education. That was the change we chose - change that benefits the hard working majority and not just a privileged few.

And then we had a third choice, between accepting unemployment as a price worth paying, or saving jobs. And we in Britain made our choice, it's meant half a million jobs saved. And so, Conference, even in today's recession there are 29 million people in work. 2 million more men and women providing for their families than in 1997.

That's 23 adjectives in 332 words, or 6.9 percent. Decisively less than the scientific paper analyzed earlier, and roughly the frequency one would expect from any ordinary text.

What the Rev. Tilby says is that we should try deleting all the adjectives, which is really absurd (though in fact it is exactly what Alistair Cooke seems to have thought, delusionally, that he used to do to all his radio scripts).

The self-appointed writing gurus who preach in these extreme terms against adjectival modification seem to forget that sometimes adjectives are there because they are crucial not only to the sense but to the structure. Delete the adjectives in this sentence of Brown's and you get a result that doesn't even seem grammatical, and certainly doesn't have anything like the truth conditions of the original. These two are not synonymous:

In the last 18 months we have had to confront the biggest economic choices the world has faced since the 1930s.
In the 18 months we have had to confront the economic choices the world has faced since the 1930s.

Another example, where the result is not even grammatical:

[T]he challenge of change demands nothing less than a new model for our economy, a new model for a more responsible society and a new model for a more accountable politics.
*The challenge of change demands nothing less than a model for our economy, a model for a more society and a model for a more politics.

To make any sense of the claim that such prose could be improved by removing adjectives one would have to propose completely removing all traces of the adjective phrases to which they belong. That would give us the following:

The challenge of change demands nothing less than a model for our economy, a model for a society and a model for a politics.

Why is the Rev. Tilby suggesting that we would understand his proposals better if he couldn't draw the distinction between models and new models, between societies and responsible societies, between politics and accountable politics?

Not that the Prime Minister would have been totally unable to convey his drift, of course. He could in principle have rephrased using only abstract nouns, thus completely avoiding the anti-adjective critique:

[T]he challenge of change demands nothing less than a model for our economy that has novelty, a model (with novelty) for a society that has responsibility to an extent exceeding the responsibility of society as it now exists and a model (with novelty) for a politics with a degree of accountability that exceeds the degree of accountability that politics has today.

Is the Rev. Tilby expecting us to believe that this is an improvement, bringing greater clarity? Has she completely lost her wits? Or did she simply not give any thought to what she was saying?

The notion that you can better see what is being said when the adjectives are removed is simply (yes, I do have to use an adjective here) asinine. Gordon Brown says at one point:

[T]hese are my values — the values I grew up with in an ordinary family in an ordinary town. Like most families on middle and modest incomes we believed in making the most of our talents.

Deleting the adjectives from it yields this:

These are my values — the values I grew up with in a family in a town. Like most families on incomes we believed in making the most of our talents.

What is the point of this ridiculous pretense that it would be a better political world if Brown were blocked from distinguishing ordinary families from unusually affluent ones, not allowed to draw the distinction between having an income and having a median-level income?

Here's why I bothered to write anything at all about a pathetic little 500-word radio sermon: I am so sick of seeing stupid writing advice handed out by pusillanimous pseudo-experts on language — dim-witted vicars like Angela Tilby, pontificating authoritarians like E. B. White in the chapter he added to The Elements of Style, and all the English teachers who have (while hypocritically making free to constantly using adjectives in their own writing) poisoned the reputation of adjectives down the centuries (see the first chapter of Ben Yagoda's delightful little book on the parts of speech, When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It).

These people are wasting educational time and effort, and helping to drive students into a state that I have written about before, characterized by "vague unease instead of a sense of mastery," and feeling "less sure of themselves, yet no better informed," so that their writing ability is "probably being harmed rather than enhanced" — in short, a state of nervous cluelessness about language.

Repeating the falsehood that adjectives are bad in general makes people less able to see what is wrong when they really are over-used. For a remark about the real lesson of Dan Brown's over-use of adjectives, with a diagnosis of what is wrong, see my piece "He doesn't trust us" on the New York Magazine site. There's a real point to be made, I think; but it's not about the adjective category per se.

Adjectives are neither good nor bad. The dumb usage pundits who recommend eschewing them totally are handing out advice that is at best exactly what Angela Tilby wrongly claims adjectives are (vapid, empty, and superfluous), and at worst clearly mistaken.

The BPS Research Digest has a fantastic feature where they've invited some of the world's leading psychologists to discuss one nagging thing they still don't understand about themselves.

Some take the challenge as a query about themselves as human beings, others about them personally, and the answers are a wonderful mix of the scientific and personal, the profound and ephemeral.

This is one of the many highlights, from social psychologist Norbert Schwartz, cursing his inability to detect his own biases:

One nagging thing I don’t understand about myself is why I’m still fooled by incidental feelings. Some 25 years ago Jerry Clore and I studied how gloomy weather makes one’s whole life look bad -- unless one becomes aware of the weather and attributes one’s gloomy mood to the gloomy sky, which eliminates the influence. You’d think I learned that lesson and now know how to deal with gloomy skies. I don’t, they still get me. The same is true for other subjective experiences, like the processing fluency resulting from print fonts [pdf] – I still fall prey to their influence. Why does insight into how such influences work not help us notice them when they occur? What makes the immediate experience so powerful that I fail to apply my own theorizing until some blogger asks a question that brings it to mind?

In fact, there are several pieces where psychologists gently bemoan their inability to apply their research findings to their own life, giving the series a slightly wistful feel.

Link to BPS Research Digest 'One nagging thing...' series.

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Josh Fruhlinger sends along today's entry in the "crash blossom" sweepstakes, a headline from the BBC News website:

SNP signals debate legal threat

Crash blossoms (as we've discussed here and here) are infelicitously worded headlines that cause confusion due to a garden-path effect. Here we begin with SNP, which British readers at least will recognize as the abbreviation for the Scottish National Party. Then comes signals, which can be a plural noun or a singular present verb; following a noun, most readers would expect it to work as a verb. The third word, debate, can be a singular noun or a plural verb, and if you've parsed the first two words as Noun + Verb, then you'll be inclined to take debate as the direct object of the verb. So far, so good. But then comes legal threat. What to do now?

Well, you could go back to the beginning of the headline for a reparsing, now construing signals as a plural noun modified by SNP. That would allow you to continue on with debates as a plural verb and legal threat as the object of the verb. But what in the world are SNP signals and why are they debating a legal threat?

Turns out the first path was moving in the right direction. Signals is indeed the verb here, and the object of the verb is debate legal threat — one of those wonderfully opaque compound nouns that British headlines are prey to. You see, debate legal threat refers to threatened legal action that could be taken if the SNP isn't permitted to take part in televised debates before the next UK election. And the SNP is now signaling that it may follow through on this threat.

We've had fun with such outrageous compounding in previous posts (Geoff Pullum in "Noun noun noun noun noun verb," "Canoe wives and unnatural semantic relations," and "Dentist fear girl," and Mark Liberman in "UK death crash fetish?"). This one's a bit different in that the second element of the compound noun, legal threat, is a noun phrase consisting of an adjective modifying a noun. That makes debate legal threat unusually hard to parse.

Noun-Adjective-Noun compounds are possible in English, of course — think of such constructions as Minnesota Supreme Court, Obama White House, Guardian front page, or Microsoft legal team. In those cases, however, the Adjective-Noun component is a set phrase (Supreme Court, White House, front page, legal team), which makes the addition of a premodifying noun unproblematic. But legal threat is not such a set phrase, and debate is not an immediately obvious choice for an attributive noun ready for grafting (certainly not compared to the proper nouns in my examples: Minnesota, Obama, Guardian, Microsoft). So these factors, plus the ambiguous syntactic role of the preceding word, signals, conspire to make this crash blossom particularly crashy.

"Thought for the Day" is a four-minute reflective sermon delivered each morning on BBC Radio 4 at about ten to eight by some representative of one of the country's many religious faiths. On the first day of October the speaker was the Reverend Angela Tilby, Vicar of St Bene't's in Cambridge, England. (Bene't is an archaic shortened form of Benedict.) Developing a familiar theme from prescriptivist literature, she preached against adjectives. It was perhaps the most pathetic little piece of inspirational prattle I have ever heard from the BBC (read the whole misbegotten text here).

"Adjectives advertise," claims the Rev. Tilby, and "brighten up the prose of officialdom", but she was always "encouraged to be a bit suspicious" of them when she was a girl: "Rules of syntax kept them firmly in their place" (as if the rules of syntax left everything else to do what it wanted!). This was good, she seems to think, because "For all their flamboyance they don't really tell you much." Adjectives "float free of concrete reality" like balloons, and are guilty of "not delivering anything except, perhaps, hot air." Which aptly describes her babbling thus far. But now, inflated with overconfidence, she risks some factual statements. And steps from the insubstantial froth of metaphor into the stodgy bullshit of unchecked empirical claims about language use.

I shall deal with only one such claim in this post. Another will be dealt with later.

Because adjectives are so airy-fairy, the Rev. Tilby holds, "you don't find many adjectives in scientific prose and when you do they are precise and exact." I'm sure that Language Log readers will realize instantly that it is time for what Mark Liberman calls a breakfast experiment.

Keep in mind, as I undertake the experiment, that in most kinds of English prose about 6% of the words are adjectives (see Douglas Biber et al., Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, London: Longman, 2002, p. 506). In academic prose it's a little higher, around 8%.

I turned to the home page of what is arguably the most important general science journal in the world, Nature, picked the second article title from the top of the page ("Cheater resistance is not futile", by Anupama Khare, Lorenzo A. Santorelli, Joan E. Strassmann, David C. Queller, Adam Kuspa, and Gad Shaulsky, doi:10.1038/nature08472; it just looked somewhat more interesting to me than the first one), and did just a little bit of counting.

You'll notice that the last word of the title (futile) happens to be an adjective, so that's 20% in the title. The first word of the opening sentence of the abstract (cooperative) is also an adjective, and so is the second, and so is the 5th (that's over 15% so far). Here is the whole of the abstract, with the adjectives underlined (I've been very conservative, not counting many items that traditional grammars classify as adjectives: articles, demonstratives, numerals, other determinatives, genitive pronouns, or nouns functioning as attributive modifiers):

Cooperative social systems are susceptible to cheating by individuals that reap the benefits of cooperation without incurring the costs. There are various theoretical mechanisms for the repression of cheating and many have been tested experimentally. One possibility that has not been tested rigorously is the evolution of mutations that confer resistance to cheating. Here we show that the presence of a cheater in a population of randomly mutated social amoebae can select for cheater-resistance. Furthermore, we show that this cheater-resistance can be a noble strategy because the resister strain does not necessarily exploit other strains. Thus, the evolution of resisters may be instrumental in preserving cooperative behaviour in the face of cheating.

That's over 9% adjectives. A bad sample? I took the first paragraph of the text and did the same:

Dictyostelium cells propagate as unicellular amoebae in the soil. Upon starvation, they aggregate into multicellular structures and differentiate into viable spores and dead stalk cells. Stalk-cell differentiation supports spore maturation and dispersal, but this altruistic behaviour can be exploited by cheaters that make more than their fair share of spores in chimaeric fruiting bodies. The genetic potential for cheating is high and cheaters abound in nature, but cheating behaviour can be restrained by various mechanisms, such as intrinsic lower fitness of the cheater, pleiotropy of the cheater gene, high genetic relatedness in natural populations, and kin discrimination.

That's 16 adjectives in 97 words of that paragraph, or over 16%. In total, the title and abstract and opening paragraph of the first scientific paper that I picked — genuinely a random choice — are nearly 13% composed of adjectives, well over double the frequency that you find in most prose.

Now, I could check a few hundred more words, of course. But wait: why me? Why am I doing the work for her? What am I, an unpaid assistant curate of St. Bene't's? Did the Rev. Tilby do even as much elementary checking as I have done so far — glancing at a couple of hundred words in a random paper — before spouting her ridiculous remark? Of course not. Her method is a time-honored one in amateur writing on language: she just makes stuff up. On the basis of nothing but prejudice about science, she invented her data and went straight to the microphone with it.

Her suggestion that in science the adjectives are "precise" is further evidence of uninformed stereotyping. There's nothing precise about the meanings of words like cooperative, social, viable, altruistic, fair, lower, high, natural… These are vague terms, in the classic technical sense: in any situation there will be clear cases for their application, but also a border area where the appropriacy of applying them is in doubt.

There is of course nothing wrong with vague terms, with denotations partly set through common sense and reference to context; we use them literally every minute that we speak or write. Their logic and semantics can be studied with ruthless precision (see, for an example of the technical literature, Stewart Shapiro's lucid and masterful Vagueness in Context). Science is replete with them, and has to be. (Think of global warming, for heaven's sake: there's a truly vague concept. How warm? How global? Yet it's an important one, and serious science is being done every day to flesh it out and give it clearer content.)

It is merely one more sign of the the Rev. Tilby's contempt for truth, and cluelessness about science, that she thinks science is all precision. Scientists live their lives floating in a probabilistic soup of uncertainty and unclarity, murky associations and ill-defined tendencies, statistical degrees and extents.

Tilby sees herself as a minister of religion and thus a professional talker; and she therefore assumes (the crucial fallacy) that she is an expert on language; so she doesn't need to check a thing. As a vicar, she thinks she can go into the Radio 4 studio and simply invent her facts.

It is not that she lied; it is worse than that. Tilby didn't know what the facts about adjectives in scientific prose were, and state untruths about them to mislead her audience: she simply didn't care whether she was uttering untruths or not. It wasn't lies; it was bullshit, in the sense defined by Harry Frankfurt. And as Frankfurt notes, the purveyor of bullshit is worse than a liar, in virtue of caring less about truth. The liar at least keeps track of what's true and recognizes its special status. (That is precisely why it is a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive: the committed liar has to attempt to remain consistent.)

A recent xkcd:

In the case of power, the original ordinary-language meaning is still dominant for most people, especially in a frame like "With great __ comes great __". But it's easy to forget how recently words (and concepts) like speed, distance, and duration took on their current "literal" meanings as aspects of ordinary-language physics rather than as terms referring to prosperity, dissension, endurance, and so on.

The physicists' sense of power as "work per unit time" seems to date from the early 19th century, and the specifically electrical sense, featured in this strip's caption, is somewhat later. But it was only a century or two earlier that today's meanings for words like distance came into general use, replacing earlier meanings that (like power) had more to do with personal struggle than with physical interaction.