Being Human

Consciousness and the 'myth of the self' are tackled in an interesting discussion with philosopher Thomas Metzinger on this week's edition of ABC Radio National All in the Mind.

Metzinger is one of a relatively new breed of philosopher who actually gets his hands dirty with the business of experimental cognitive science and has co-authored some of the recent widely discussed studies that induced 'out of body experiences' in the lab.

The interview focuses on the material from his new book, Ego Tunnel, which seems to be getting quite a bit of attention recently.

I've not read it but it was reviewed very positively by Metapsychology, probably the best mind and brain book review site on the net. Nevertheless, I do have to agree with a point in the somewhat snarky New Scientist review that contrary to what the blurb says, this is neither a new nor radical approach and is accepted by most philosophers of mind.

The interview is fascinating though, not least because Metzinger is very articulate, but also because he gets wonderfully side-tracked into discussing his own experiences with altering his consciousness and how this relates to this work in understanding the mind.

I also recommend the extended discussions on the All in Mind blog where he explains his original look at an ethics of consciousness and discusses alien or anarchic hand syndrome.

Link to AITM discussion with Metzinger.
Link to AITM blog post with mp3s of extra discussions.

NIP to hold 3-day conference from Oct 13
The News International
... a three-day International Conference here from October 13 to 15, on “Developmental Psychology: Prevalence, Management and Prevention” in the country. ...

The latest xkcd is a brilliant way to introduce the topic of child language acquisition and cognitive development:

The trouble is, the first-year college students in this year's intro linguistics courses were only 9 on 9/11. And in about five more academic years, the entering students will be too young to remember 9/11 as a personal experience at all.

The University of Alberta, hosting the AACL 2009 conference where I'm spending a couple of days, has recently moved up in the Times Higher Education World University Ranking, from 133rd in 2006, 97th in 2007, and 74th 2008, to 59th in 2009.  (I believe that it comes out 4th in Canada, after McGill, Toronto, and UBC.) It's hard to make that kind of move — the responsible faculty and administrators should be congratulated.

And when I saw it for the first time yesterday, I thought that the motto on the University's seal expressed just the right attitude: quaecumque vera, or after translation from the Latin, "whatever". Well, I suppose literally it means "whatever [things are] true", but the "true" part is redundant, right? I mean, when you say "OK, whatever", isn't what you mean "OK, whatever is true, I'm fine with it"?

More seriously, the university senate's web site explains that

The University Motto, Quaecumque vera, is taken from the Latin Vulgate version of the Bible, the Epistle of St. Paul to the Philippians, Chapter 4, Verse 8:

De cetero, fratres, quaecumque sunt vera,quaecumque pudica, quaecumque justa, quaecumque sancta, quaecumque amabilia, quaecumque bonae famae, si qua virtus, si qua laus disciplinae, haec cogitate.

The same passage from the King James version is: Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and there be any praise, think on these things.

Right; whatever. Or to avoid using what is allegedly the most annoying phrase in English, quaecumque vera.

Saint Louis University
Consumer Psychologist to Discuss Ways to Influence Environmentalism
Saint Louis University
For his many contributions to the field of social psychology, he has earned numerous awards and honors during his career. He also has taught at Stanford ...

I'm at the AACL 2009 meeting in Edmonton — that's the meeting of the American Association for Corpus Linguistics, which is neither American nor an Association, as John Newman explained to me.  I'll report later on some of what I see and hear.

So far, the most notable thing has been the outside temperature of 20 F or so, experienced on a morning walk around campus — the conference itself hasn't started yet — but the program looks interesting.

It seems to me that no reputable naming consultant would have approved the choice of the word corpus – Latin for "body" — in corpus linguistics, which involves the study of "bodies" or "collections" of text.  There's an unfortunate resonance with corpse, which makes the whole enterprise sound faintly icky. (It isn't — the method is used on living languages as well as dead ones. Not that the dead ones are icky either…)

The OED gives citations back to the 18th century for corpus in the sense "A body or complete collection of writings or the like; the whole body of literature on any subject":

1727-51 CHAMBERS Cycl. s.v., Corpus is also used in matters of learning, for several works of the same nature, collected, and bound together..We have also a corpus of the Greek poets..The corpus of the civil law is composed of the digest, code, and institutes.

The more specialized sense "The body of written or spoken material upon which a linguistic analysis is based" is cited only back to the 1950s:

1956 W. S. ALLEN in Trans. Philol. Soc. 128 The analysis here presented is based on the speech of a single informant..and in particular upon a corpus of material, of which a large proportion was narrative, derived from approximately 100 hours of listening. 1963 Language XXXIX. 1 In the analysis of the data, the structural features of the corpora will first be described. 1964 E. PALMER tr. Martinet's Elem. General Linguistics ii. 40 The theoretical objection one may make against the ‘corpus’ method is that two investigators operating on the same language but starting from different ‘corpuses’, may arrive at different descriptions of the same language.

There's more to be said about the ideas involved — methodological issues can become quasi-religious for some people, as Geoff Pullum observed here a few years ago, and he was describing the mere residue of earlier battles that were much more bitter.  But as Moore's Law and the digitization of society have made it easier and easier to apply corpus-linguistics methods, the methodological arguments about whether, when and how to apply them have become much less violent.

Owen finds new terrain in 'The Boys are Back'
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
There's a truism in developmental psychology that fathers nudge their children up hills and mothers hug them when they fall back down. ...

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Nature IS Nurture
Canada.com
Ryan and two other researchers published their findings last week in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. The positive effects of being out in ...

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

Cutting-edge technology has renewed the search for a better lie detector. Some show promise, but they have yet to be tested in court. Excellent piece from law publication ABA Journal.

Newsweek has some remarkable brain images with the low-down on what they mean.

Monitoring your pulse during a gambling task can lead to better decisions, according to a study covered by Frontal Cortex.

Prospect Magazine ponders the relevance of neuroscience discoveries to left and right wing political assumptions about human nature.

Is it possible to visualise sensory impossibilities? asks The Splintered Mind.

The New York Times has a piece on 'How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect' which should be called how reading a short story by Kafka improves implicit learning on a pattern detection task.

The XMRV virus is detected in two thirds of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome, according to a great write-up by Not Exactly Rocket Science. Although as chronic fatigue is both a common post-viral symptom and also not tied to any one condition, whether this 'explains' chronic fatigue, as some media reports have claimed, is another matter,

Scientific American updates on one of our earlier posts on the development of a 'cocaine vaccine'. Let's hope they never need eye surgery, where cocaine is used medically. Also, great coverage from Neuroskeoptic.

Cut! The Neurocritic reviews the neurocinema hype.

The LA Times has a piece on the difficulties with assessing and treating 'mild traumatic brain injuries' on the sports field and battlefield.

There's a useful summary of talks on the anthropology of psychiatry over at Somatosphere.

The Guardian has a good Chris French piece on the waking nightmare of sleep paralysis.

The placebo effect works for high definition TVs too, according to research covered by New Scientist.

The Independent has a piece on arachnophobia.

fMRI willy waving or next step in neuroimaging technology? Clearly both. Medill Reports covers the University of Illinois at Chicago's prototype 9.4 Tesla MRI machine.

Nature has an excellent piece on the greatest hits and misses of new genetics technique genome wide association studies, including a discussion of the recent research on schizophrenia.

Proving once again that peevology is the most popular form of metalinguistic discourse in the U.S., the media yesterday was all over a poll from the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, purporting to reveal the words and phrases that Americans find most annoying. As was widely reported, whatever won with 47%, followed by you know (25%), it is what it is (11%), anyway (7%), and at the end of the day (2%). As was not so widely reported, those were the only options that respondents to the poll were given, so it's not like half of Americans are really tearing their hair out about whatever.

For more on the poll and its media reception, see my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus. And check out recent Language Log posts on whatever (here) and at the end of the day (here, here, and here).

Research Says Sitting Straight Boosts Confidence
MedIndia
... people who slumped on their desks were not able to do so. The study details are published in the October issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology.

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SASS Seminar
EMU News
After graduating from Eastern Mennonite, he earned his Ph.D. from the famed social psychology program at the Ohio State Univeristy. ...

The latest Nature NeuroPod podcast has just been released and covers the use of the hot new genetics technique genome-wide association studies in neuroscience, sections on colour-blindness and stroke, and a recent study on learning in patients in coma-like states.

The discussion of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) is interesting in light of some headline studies that have come along recently on schizophrenia, autism and Alzheimer's disease. There's also a fantastic article in this week's Nature that discusses the successes and failures of the technique, including in recent studies on the genetics of schizophrenia.

Perhaps the most interesting section is the discussion on how patients in a coma-like 'persistent vegetative state' (PVS) can show conditioned learning where they can associate different sensations. Not all unconscious patient could show learning, but the ones that did showed much better recovery from their severe brain damage.

Link to NeuroPod page.
mp3 of this edition.

Money Can Buy Happiness — If You're Paid By the Hour
Miller-McCune.com
In the "Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin," researchers report that present evidence that being paid by the hour leads workers "to rely more on ...

There are a couple of excellent posts on Neurophilosophy covering recent studies that demonstrate the powerful effect of vision on the perception of physical sensations in our body.

The first covers an interesting study that found that looking directly at your hand reduces laser-induced pain compared to a condition where you are only looking at a visual substitute created with a mirror reflection of the other hand (akin to a mirror box set up).

The second post discusses the possibilities of taking advantage of the 'rubber hand illusion' to allow us to feel like we're physically inhabiting virtual bodies.

Numerous experiments have shown that we look at a rubber hand being touched simultaneously and in the same way as our real hand, the sensation seems to be located in the fake.

This new experiment attempted something similar but in virtual reality, demonstrating that a synchronised 'touch' could be perceived as arising from an avatar hand in a 3D computer generated environment.

While the same research team had demonstrated this effect before this new study showed how the effect could transfer, albeit more weakly, to a virtual arm controlled by a brain-computer interface driven solely from EEG readings.

Both of these studies demonstrate how vision is integrated with tactile information from the body to create our sense of body image, ownership and sensation and both get a great write-up from Neurophilosophy.

Link to Neurophilosophy post visual pain reduction.
Link to Neurophilosophy on the 'virtual hand illusion'.

This clip, from the US version of comedy show The Office, shows Jim training co-worker Dwight to expect a sweet everytime he reboots his computer.

From Vodpod.

Psychologists everywhere will recognise this an an application of classical conditioning. The 'scientist' Jim has heard of is, of course, Ivan Pavlov.

Thanks to Russ Fazio for showing us this clip during his keynote at the recent BPS Social Psychology Section conference.

A couple of days ago, in "Fact-checking George F. Will, one more time", I noted that Will complained about the

…  egregious cliches sprinkled around by the tin-eared employees in the White House speechwriting shop. The president told the Olympic committee that: "At this defining moment," a moment "when the fate of each nation is inextricably linked to the fate of all nations" in "this ever-shrinking world," he aspires to "forge new partnerships with the nations and the peoples of the world."

While admitting that "I don't have a program ready to hand for measuring cliche-density, much less cliche egregiosity ", I nevertheless offered the opinion that "in speeches prepared for ceremonial occasions like this one, the cliche density of presidential rhetoric has been fairly constant for decades if not centuries".

I still don't have a metric for cliche-density, but we can learn something by exploring the site http://www.presidentialrhetoric.com/ for certain fixed phrases.

For example, there's no question that "defining moment" is a defining phrase for Barack Obama, who has used it ten  times in texts indexed on that site. The only other president who has ever used it (in texts indexed there, anyhow) is, interestingly, George W. Bush, who used it once.

As for that "ever-shrinking world", Obama has used this phrase once before the Olympic pitch, and no other president (or presidential speech-writer) has ever done so.

And no other president has apparently ever aspired in so many words to "forge new partnerships". But George W. Bush ("America and China: Address in Thailand", 8/7/2008) promised to "forge new relationships with countries that share our values". In fact, that phrase came from a sentence notably dense in the high-sounding abstract phrases that George Will seems to dislike so much in Barack Obama's speech:

America has pursued four broad goals in the region: reinvigorate our alliances, forge new relationships with countries that share our values, seize new opportunities for prosperity and growth, and confront shared challenges together.

Interestingly, presidents Bush and Obama are the two only presidents to voice the aspiration to "confront * challenges": Obama three times, and Bush four times. Many other presidents have confronted challenges, but only these two have used those words.

And even more than confronting challenges, George W. Bush was fond of (talking about) confronting problems: the string "confront problems" occurs 36 times in his texts, and — amazingly — not once in the texts of any other American president.

GW Bush was also fond of (talking about) seizing things: "seize new opportunities" (W 2, no others), "seize this|that opportunity" (W 2, Gore 1, no others), "seize opportunities" (W 2, Clinton 2, no others) "seize this moment" (W 3, Kerry 1, no others), "seize the moment" (W 4, no others), "seizing this moment" (W 1, no others), "seize the initiative" (W 1, no others), "seize control" (W 4, Carter 1, no others).

Overall, such phrases often seem to be associated with particular time periods and with particular presidents. Thus James Munroe and Andrew Jackson were each "deeply impressed" three times, and James Polk and Martin van Buren once each. The only other presidents to have been "deeply impressed" were — again — that unlikely pair George W. Bush and Barack Obama, once each.

It would be interesting to run a collocation-detection algorithm over the whole collection of presidential speeches. This might give something approximating a cliche-density metric (though really there should be some normalization relative to usage patterns in the wider world). But the eigenstructure of the president-by-cliche matrix might tell us whether Barack and W are really rhetorical brothers beneath the skin, and reveal other hidden (or at least amusing) affinities.

PsychCentral.com
Good posture boosts self confidence: Study
TheMedGuru
... can train yourself to do, and it has psychological benefits." The research was published in the October issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology.
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My view on the classic prescriptive bugaboo known as dangling modifiers or dangling participles (henceforth, danglers) is, I think, a bit unusual. I don't regard danglers as grammatical mistakes; that is, I think the syntax of English does not block them. Yet I do think they constitute mistakes, in a broader sense, so in a way I am with the prescriptivists on this one. A dangler is an error in a domain that I have compared (for want of a better way to put it) to courtesy or manners. I regard danglers as minor offenses against communicational etiquette, but not against grammar. The argument against danglers being grammar errors is simple: they are too common in even careful published writing, and come too fluently to the keyboards of even excellent writers, and are accepted without remark by too many educated readers. If you ask what evidence there is that, for example, verbs come before objects in English, the answer is that it is overwhelmingly clear from just about all of everybody's usage just about all the time, and from the blank "What's gone wrong with you?" reactions if you try putting the object before the verb. The evidence on danglers goes entirely the other way. Here, for example, is an example in the carefully edited prose of The Economist (October 3rd, 2009, p. 79):

A report to the British House of Commons this year highlighted the case of an elderly British citizen called Derek Bond, who was arrested, at gunpoint, in February 2003 while on holiday in South Africa. After being held for three weeks, it turned out that the American extradition request was based on a fraudster who had stolen Mr Bond's identity.

The only relevant thing the syntax says, I believe, is that subjectless non-finite clauses, and preposition phrases having such clauses as complement of the preposition, and predicative constituents such as adjective phrases, may be used as adjuncts.

And all the semantics says is that the target of predication in such cases is filled in by reference to a grammatically salient noun phrase (NP) in the immediate vicinity. That's it.

Consider in this light the task of interpreting the second sentence in the quotation above. After what? Somebody being held for three weeks. Who was held? We're guessing thus far, so let's wait and see what the subject of the matrix clause is… Hmm, the pronoun it. That's not very promising: what non-human could have been held? Let's go on. It turned out that… This makes it clear that the it was a dummy — a meaningless placeholder in a context where a complement clause is in extraposition (postponed till the end of the clause containing it). Well, what's the subject of the clause in extraposition? The American extradition request. But surely that is not what was held. Let's go on. Was based on a fraudster… Could the target of predication be a fraudster? No, that makes no sense. Any other NPs? Well, there is one more (though we're down to NPs that could hardly be called grammatically salient now): the object of stolen, namely, Mr Bond's identity. But that doesn't make sense either: this isn't about the South Africans holding the man's identity.

Wait a minute, though: if we look inside that NP we see that its determiner is the genitive NP Mr Bond's. Perhaps the thing to do is to ignore the genitive case on that and try Mr Bond as the target of predication. After Mr Bond had been held for three weeks. Yes, that would make sense. We'd better assume that.

You can get there. But what a struggle. Floundering around for what could be as much as an extra second, which in language processing is a very long time, there were four different false leads planted in the text for us to pursue — four NPs that were not the right choice for the target of predication we needed to plug together with the being held clause.

It is true that if we had looked back at the previous sentence instead of plowing on we would have noticed that there was an indefinite NP, an elderly British citizen called Derek Bond, which was a prime candidate. If we had happened to be still holding onto that, and we had tried plugging in a definite version of that ("the aforesaid elderly British citizen called Derek Bond"), it would have worked like a charm. But that NP was embedded in a larger one (the case of an elderly British citizen called Derek Bond), and following it we had read four other NPs (gunpoint; February 2003; holiday; and South Africa. Any syntactic salience that NP might have had was lost before we began the next sentence.

Hearers and readers can't be expected hold onto every NP they run across, keeping all of them live and active in short-term syntactic memory just in case perhaps one of them might be suddenly needed to make a subjectless clause adjunct interpretable. That's not how we work, or so it seems to me. Mostly we expect the sentences we encounter to be parsable independently: take any one of them on its own and you should be able to understand it down to the level where all that remains is assigning antecedents to pronouns and filling in gaps due to ellipsis. And that second sentence does not meet the condition. We had to fumble around and look all over the place to find a target of predication for the subjectless clause in the initial PP.

That's a shortcoming on the part of the writer. Not a disastrous blunder or a major display of ignorance; just a minor discourtesy to the reader. That's what I think danglers are.

But they are extraordinarily common, and they occur now and then even in what is in general terms excellent writing. The more sensitive to syntax you are, the more you will be struck by them and incommoded by them. The more you exercise your common sense rather than your syntactic sense when figuring out what a subjectless non-finite clause adjunct must mean, the less you will notice them. But they will be out there, in everything you read (somewhat less frequently in conversation because of its lower syntactic complexity — we don't use non-finite clause adjuncts so much when chatting about who's going to pick up the milk).

Just for fun (but not out of a lack of courtesy) I embedded a deliberate dangler in the paragraphs above. Now you will know how careful a reader you are. If you didn't notice it, that underlines my point that you probably do not operate by a set of syntactical rules that forbid danglers. And if you did notice it, and experienced that odd extra second of squirming around looking for a target of predication, then you'll know what I've been talking about.