Being Human

Harmon-Jones to Receive UAB Distinguished Alumni Award in Psychology
UAB News
The department also offers graduate programs in medical psychology, lifespan developmental psychology and behavioral neuroscience.

Another notice of a recent book, this time Nathan Bierma's Eclectic Encyclopedia of English (William, James & Co.), an assortment of material from five years of his "On Language" column in the Chicago Tribune (no longer a regular feature in the paper, alas). It's meant for a general audience; in fact, a number of the entries originated as responses to queries from readers.

Here's his point of view:

I used to be picky–really picky–about English grammar and usage. [illustrations of his earlier pickiness follow] (p. iv)

My new approach to language can be called joyous bewilderment. Rather than fretting about oddities, trends, and variations, I delight in them. The variation and change is exactly what makes language so interesting. I'm a work in progress, but gradually I'm learning to see quirks and changes in English and rather than respond with "How dangerous," to reply instead, "How cool!" or at least, "How interesting!" (p. viii)

I'm not exactly a disinterested party here: I supplied one of the blurbs for the book (Erin McKean and Geoff Nunberg wrote the others), I am thanked in the Introduction, and I'm quoted or cited five times in the book.

My blurb:

Bierma has been exceptionally careful in his research for stories involving language–starting by seeking out scholars who might have the information he's looking for and then actually listening. So his columns are both informed and informative. Oh yes, and entertaining.

Psychology Today (blog)
The psychology of Lego Star Wars I
Psychology Today (blog)
In the latest issue of Developmental Psychology, Maria Gräfenhein and her colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology investigated ...

Columbia University Press, 2008
Metapsychology
... and healing food and not merely "junk food") but also to the researchers in anthropology, psychological medicine, psychology, social psychology etc. ...

Profs Receive Grant to Explore Gender Gap in Sciences
Cornell University The Cornell Daily Sun
Stephen Ceci, the Helen L. Carr Professor of Developmental Psychology, have received a $1.4 million grant over four years from the National Institute of ...

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A fantastic study just published in Cognition reports that the motion aftereffect illusion, where staring at something constantly moving in one direction causes illusory movement in the opposite direction when you look away, can be caused just by imagining that the movement is happening.

The effect is occasionally called the 'waterfall illusion' because it can be triggered by staring at a waterfall for a few minutes and then looking at the nearby bank, which will seem as if it is moving upward, in the opposite direction to the falling water.

It was traditionally explained by the fact that direction-specific motion-detecting neurons in the brain's visual areas 'habituate' or adapt to constant movement by slowly becoming less active, as if they barely need to keep reporting with the same vigour because they're just detecting more of the same.

According to this explanation, when you look away, these 'habituated' neurons are caught off guard and the neurons that look out for motion in the opposite direction are relatively stronger and so, until the balance is readdressed, give the impression that the world is moving contrary to your past experience.

As with most of these things, it turns out not to be quite so simple, but the effect is so easily invoked that it is used widely in vision and motion research.

One of the key findings in this area is that visual imagery activates some of the same areas as actually seeing what you're thinking of. In other words, the brain seems to simulate the visual experience actually in the visual system.

Or at least, that's what it looks like from the brain scans, but just because the same areas are active during both tasks, it doesn't mean the same neurons are being used. It could be completely different processes at work that just happen to share the same neural office space.

So here's the cool bit. This new study, led by psychologist Jonathan Winawer, asked participants to briefly view a moving pattern. It only appeared briefly, not long enough to cause the effect, and then disappeared.

Then were then shown the same pattern, without any movement, and were asked to imagine that it was moving in the same way. After a short while, the pattern was replaced by a picture of motionless dots, and they were asked to indicate if they saw the dots moving in a particular direction.

If the effect appeared, participants should see the dots moving in the opposite direction.

The participants were asked to imagine different directions and types of motion and then were given the same task but where they didn't need to imagine anything, as the pattern moved by itself.

As expected, the moving pattern caused a clear motion aftereffect, but rather wonderfully, the effect appeared after participants had simply imagined the movement. It wasn't as strong but it was clearly there.

They researchers also asked the participants after which direction would they expect the dots to go in, to check they hadn't heard about the effect or were just doing what they thought was expected of them, and they couldn't reliably give the correct direction that the effect would cause.

This provides good evidence that when imagine visual experiences we're actually running a simulation in the same parts of the brain that are used to actually see the world.

Link to PubMed entry for study.
pdf of full text paper.

n+1 has an excellent article on how neuroscience is making an increasing appearance in novels, not only as a subject, but also as a literary device to explore characters and explain their motivations.

It marks the start of the trend from Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love and notes that in more recent years books such as Richard Powers’s The Echomaker, Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances have all drawn heavily from the medical and brain science literature for their main hooks.

What makes so many writers try their hands and brains at the neuronovel? At the most obvious level, the trend follows a cultural (and, in psychology proper, a disciplinary) shift away from environmental and relational theories of personality back to the study of brains themselves, as the source of who we are. This cultural sea change probably began with the exhaustion of “the linguistic turn” in the humanities, in the 1980s, and with the discredit psychoanalysis suffered, around the same time, from revelations that Freud had discounted some credible claims of sexual abuse among his patients. Those philosophers of mind who had always been opposed to trendy French poststructuralism or old-fashioned Freudianism, and the mutability of personality these implied, put forth strong claims for the persistence of innate ideas and unalterable structures.

And in neuroscience such changes as the mind did endure were analyzed in terms of chemistry. By the early ’90s, psychoanalysis—whether of a Lacanian and therefore linguistic variety, or a Freudian and drive-oriented kind—was generally considered bankrupt, not to mention far less effective and more expensive than the psychiatric drugs (like Prozac) that began to flow through the general population’s bloodstream. The new reductionism of mind to brain, eagerly taken up by the press—especially the New York Times in its science pages—had two main properties: it explained proximate causes of mental function in terms of neurochemistry, and ultimate causes in terms of evolution and heredity.

It's really well researched piece and neatly outlines the play between literature, science writing, culture and neuroscience through the development of numerous popular novels in the area.

Link to n+1 article 'The Rise of the Neuronovel'.

Bring the outdoors inside to promote better living
DVM 360
A new study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin says that getting in touch with nature makes people feel and behave better. ...

What does "Complimentary High-speed Internet access on the lobby level" mean? You can see the phrase on the website of the Hilton Washington Dulles Airport hotel. Did you imagine it meant that if you opened your laptop on the lobby level of the hotel a wireless Internet network would come up and you could connect for free? Oh, you are so naive. You are not a sophisticated jet-setter like Robert Langdon and me.

Actually, until a few minutes ago I was like you. I imagined, trustingly, that after checking out of my room and doing my morning recording session at The Teaching Company, I would be able to sit in the lobby of my hotel and continue to work on academic and administrative tasks until my evening flight out of Dulles, and I would have complimentary high-speed wireless Internet access courtesy of the hotel. But instead the usual "Now agree to a $9.99 charge on your room bill" screen came up as soon as I pointed the browser in the direction of Language Log.

I went and asked at the registration desk. And here is what Hilton Hotels thought "complimentary high-speed Internet access" meant: if you are a guest, and you register for Internet access in your room, and agree to have the $9.99 charged thereto, then after that you can also use your laptop in the lobby for no extra charge. So if you pay $9.99 for the relevant 24 hours it's free.

I think that's a pretty weird interpretation of "complimentary". Suppose (I invited the assistant manager to imagine) they said there were complimentary apples on the lobby level, and when you went to get some they explained that they actually meant that if you went up to your room and paid for an order of room-service apples to be brought up and signed for, you could then bring one down and eat it in the lobby area. Would you not be mildly surprised? Or even modestly irked?

It is only the linguistic point I am concerned with here. I had picked this hotel after reading its Internet access policies; they were important to my plans. I am a native speaker of English, and I felt that I the text they published had genuinely misled me on an important point.

I don't tell this story to criticize Hilton Hotels. The assistant manager immediately saw the force of my logic and the misleading character of the website language. What she did was to reopen my bill, get me registered as agreeing to pay $9.99 for another 24 hourse, and then she used her discretion to take $9.99 off the bill. Net money changing hands: zero dollars, zero cents. Net cost to hotel (where the wireless router is on all the time no matter what), zero. Another satisfied customer, at no expense.

But the composer of the website boilerplate really does need to be taken back to truth-in-advertising school. The notion that "complimentary Internet access" might mean "complimentary Internet access for those guests who have paid for Internet access" is going a semantic bridge too far. Isn't that right? Is it me, or is it them?

The pain of torture can make the innocent seem guilty
EurekAlert (press release)
The research, published in the "Journal of Experimental Social Psychology," was conducted by Kurt Gray, graduate student in psychology, and Daniel M. Wegner ...

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One of the key examples in Ruth Millikan's influential 1984 book Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories was the "canid play bow". This piece of doggie-language, exemplified in the photo on the right, is "a highly ritualized and stereotyped movement that seems to function to stimulate recipients to engage (or to continue to engage) in social play."

I mentioned it in a LL post a few years ago, quoting from Marc Bekoff and Colin Allen, "Intentional Communication and Social Play: How and Why Animals Negotiate and Agree to Play":

From the intentional stance, if a believes that b believes that a desires to play (third-order) it would seem that ideal rationality would also require that a believes that b has a belief (second-order). But from a Millikanian perspective this more general second-order belief, if it requires a to have a general belief detector, may actually be more sophisticated than the third-order belief which supposedly entails it. A general belief detector may be much more difficult to evolve than a specific belief detector, for the detection of specific beliefs may be accomplished by the detection of correspondingly specific cues.

If this is correct, then on Millikan's account Jethro (Marc's dog) may be capable of the third-order belief that (or, at least, a state with the intentional content that) Sukie (Jethro's favorite canid play pal) wants Jethro to believe that her bite was playful not aggressive, even though Jethro is perhaps limited in his ability to represent and hence think about Sukie's second-order desires in general.

And according to Marc Bekoff, "Play signals as punctuation: The structure of social play in canids", Behaviour 132:419-429, 1995, the sequence patterns of bows with other actions, observed in a study of young wolves, coyotes, and domestic dogs, suggests that for canids in general,

signals such as the bow can reinforce ongoing social play when it is possible that it could be disrupted due to the aggressive, predatory, or sexual behavior of one of the interacting animals. […] Play in canids (and in other animals) requires a mutual sharing of the play mood by the participants. This sharing can be facilitated by the performance of bows immediately before or immediately after an individual performs actions that can be misinterpreted […]

(I'm adding "sharing of the play mood" to the list of inadequately investigated phenomena headed by "group glee"…  Why, amid all the thousands of flowers in the gardens of academia, are there no departments of Play Mood Studies?)

Bekoff concludes that

In addition to sending the message "I want to play" when they are performed at the beginning of play, bows performed in a different context, namely during social play, might also carry the message "I want to play despite what I am going to do or just did — I still want to play" when there might be a problem in the sharing of this information between the interacting animals.

Bekoff speculates:

How might information between sender and recipient be shared? It is possible that the recipient shares the intentions (beliefs, desires) of the sender based on the recipient's own prior experiences of situations in which she performed bows. In an important paper on human behavior that has yet to find its way into comparative ethological circles, Gopnik (1993, p. 275) has argued that " . . . certain kinds of information that comes, literally, from inside ourselves is coded in the same way as information that comes observing the behavior of others. There is a fundamental cross-modal representational system that connects self and other." Gopnik claims that others' body movements are mapped onto one's own kinesthetic sensations, based on prior experience of the observer, and she supports her claims with discussions of imitation in human newborns.

[The reference is to A Gopnik, "Psychopsychology", Consciousness and Cognition 2(4): 264-280, 1993.]

Against this background, I was interested and slightly puzzled to read this blog post by a dog trainer, Kelley Filson, "The Play-Bow: Not Just A Cute Trick", 7/14/2009:

Many of my clients dogs have a hard time playing with and interacting with other dogs. These dogs often play well with well-known, "buddy-dogs" and demonstrates good play-skills in comfortable situations, but do poorly with new dogs or in new places.

With work the dog can learn to meet and greet the novel dogs without being inappropriate, but there is often no play. In these cases the dog-in-training often starts getting jumped by the other dogs (in a not so friendly way). This happens after the Meet-&-Greet, because the dog-in-training sniffs a hello and then just stands there stiffly. This is awkward and invites aggressiion - a sort of preemptive strike against the dog who is standing stiffly and giving everyone the willies.

In these cases teaching a PLAY-BOW can bridge the gap between meeting and becoming friends. It gives the dog-in-training something to do (besides standing awkwardly). Furthermore, despite its trained-awkwardness it gives the other dogs something to do too - they can respond with more playfulness.

"Teaching a PLAY-BOW"? Why do some dogs need to be trained to produce this instinctual signal?

The most likely explanation, I guess, is that they know how to perform it, but not when to perform it. In particular, initiating or maintaining play with unfamiliar adults is perhaps not a natural reaction, except for animals in whom the behavioral effects of neoteny are especially strong.  Or maybe animals that are mostly "only dogs", raised without much conspecific company, are inadequately drilled in the "fundamental cross-modal representational system that connects self and other"?

In any case, dogs are not the only ones who sometimes need help with this sort of thing.  Unfortunately, not all forms of communicative training are equally effective: see, for example,  M.E. Herron et al., "Survey of the use and outcome of confrontational and non-confrontational training methods in client-owned dogs showing undesired behaviors", Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 117:47-54, 2009.

The Neurocritic has compiled a collection of interesting neurological studies where a number of patients seems to have experienced a profound change in their sexual preferences as a result of brain disturbance.

One of the most well-known of these studies is a recent case of a man who was convicted of paedophilia late in life, but was later found to have a brain tumour, and on removal of the tumour his sudden interest in children disappeared. It reappeared again when the tumour once more began to grow.

The case has raised questions about free will and self-determination in light of the fact that such morally reprehensible acts seemed only to occur when a tumour was affecting brain function.

It's importantly to mention that brain damage rarely causes such tragic events, although sexual difficulties, in general, are not uncommon. Problems can range from difficulties with arousal and enjoyment, to behavioural disturbances and inappropriate behaviour.

In some rare cases, preferences themselves seem to be affected, although it's never clear whether it's actually that the person has different desires, or whether they always had them but now are, perhaps, less able to stop themselves acting on them.

It's easier to think that damage has changed people's desires when the behaviour markedly unusual, such as this case of a man who was, to put it bluntly, screwing the coin return tray of a public telephone after brain deterioration.

But one thing we know from the forensic literature and cases of healthy people who accidentally die during sexual practices (for example, these two), is that no matter how strange the attraction seems to you, someone is out there expressing it.

Not all of the cases of changes sexuality after brain damage are where people act outside of the norm, of course. In one, admittedly, not brilliantly detailed case, an apparently exclusively homosexual man found he developed heterosexual attraction after a stroke.

Sadly, this area is massively under-researched so we really know relatively little about how different aspects of desire, emotional attachment and sexual behaviour are handled by the brain, but these case studies give us a window into the possibilities.

Link to The Neurocritic on 'Unusual Changes in Sexuality'.

Road rage, aggressive driving plague region
Delmarva Daily Times
... negative moods and how being put into a negative mood can lead to aggression," said Mark Walter, a social psychology professor at Salisbury University. ...

and more »

Universities' virtual campuses growing fast
News-Leader.com
Soon, some Drury instructors will lead similar virtual classes on religious history, astronomy, social psychology and the Arab-Israeli conflict. ...

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I've just discovered a curious medical finding that can be detected on MRI brain scans called the 'face of the giant panda sign' where, quite literally, it looks like there's a panda face in the middle of the brain, indicating a specific pattern of neural damage.

The image you can see on the left is the 'face of the giant panda sign' that appeared in a brain scan of a patient with multiple sclerosis who started showing unusual sexual behaviour and is taken from a 2002 study. Click the image if you want to see the whole scan.

The pattern is apparently caused by "high signal in the tegmentum, normal signals in the red nuclei and lateral portion of the pars reticulata of the substantia nigra, and hypointensity of the superior colliculus".

It is most associated with Wilson's disease, a genetic condition which causes a toxic build-up of copper in the body, but obviously can appear in other disorders as well.

Thanks to Twitter user @sarcastic_f for alerting me to this.

It's not just pandas that appear in brain scans of course, the Virgin Mary has also been known to make an appearance.

Link to PubMed entry for MS study.
Link to brief description from Neurology.

Texting, IM-ing doesn't affect spelling
Lincoln Journal Star
One report published in the March issue of the British Journal of Developmental Psychology said that children who use "textisms" on mobile phones may in ...

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Language Log readers may recall the link I gave to the Vulture Reading Room discussion of The Lost Symbol on the New York Magazine website, where I made some comments on the extraordinarily heavy use Dan Brown's book makes of redundant (either pointless or already implicit) attributive modifiers. I illustrated from an early passage about renowned Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon's arrival at the Washington Dulles Airport: the Falcon 2000EX corporate jet, the soft leather seats in the luxurious interior, the cold January air, the white fog on the misty tarmac, the middle-aged woman with curly blond hair under stylish knit wool hat who babbles boringly to him about his own choice of attire, and then:

Mercifully, a professional-looking man in a dark suit got out of a sleek Lincoln Town Car parked near the terminal and held up his finger.

(No, I don't know which finger.) Well, by a weird coincidence (truth is stranger than even very strange fiction), last night I myself was flown into Dulles Airport at the invitation of people I have not met. And guess what…

I didn't come in on a corporate jet (though I did upgrade my scheduled flight from economy to a sort of extra-legroom enhanced economy, and that helped). And I wasn't actually greeted planeside by a personal greeter in a stylish knit wool hat. But I'm here to do a trial video-recording of a lecture on grammar for The Teaching Company, and (as my Language Log colleague John McWhorter promised) they treat their professors very well. As I emerged from the hell of the Dulles baggage hall (and my god, it was third-world chaos in there), I noticed, mercifully, holding up not a finger but a sign saying "GEOFFREY PULLUM", there was a professional-looking man in a dark suit, and yes, he had a Lincoln Town Car parked near the terminal! Whoa, I'm Professor Robert Langdon, arriving at the nation's capital in a professionally-driven limo!

And you know, I couldn't help noticing that it was sleek.

Just like Dan said. That is the problem with his over-use of attributive modifiers, of course. He tells us things we knew. Lincoln Town Cars are always sleek. That's the whole point of them. Sleek things to park near terminals so that professional-looking men in dark suits can collect professors and senators in them. That's what they are. There aren't any chunky, boxy little Lincoln Town Cars, like glassed-in 1948 Studebaker pickup trucks. Sleekness is of the very essence, and we all know that. The modifier served no purpose at all.

I should add that my visit is so far going much better than Robert Langdon's visit to Washington in The Lost Symbol. He is whisked to the Capitol to give a lecture, but it is a total bust (there is nobody there; it was a trick to get him to come to Washington), and almost immediately he encounters the severed hand of a beloved friend and mentor in the middle of the floor of the Capitol rotunda.

I have been much luckier. No mutilated mentor. And I am quite sure that there is no modifier-bestrewed, hideously tattooed, multi-disguised, Arabic-named, masonically-inducted, revenge-driven, symbolic clue-dropping, sadistic torturer tracking my every move in or under the city… Wait a minute, there's someone at the door.

Psychology Today (blog)
The Coevolution of Society and Media
Psychology Today (blog)
Asian Journal Of Social Psychology, 2(1), 21-41. Kuhn, TS (1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

In the days following my accidental Annie Lennox sighting in Edinburgh, a gorgeous picture of the honoree in her doctoral robes was published, and I have added it here; don't miss it. And (returning to phonology) Julian Bradfield (who normally studies things like fixpoint logic and concurrent programming, and teaches operating systems and programming, in Edinburgh's School of Informatics) gave a talk on the phonology and phonetics of the utterly spectacular Khoisan language sometimes known as "Taa" but more usually referred to (at least by those who can pronounce the voiceless postalveolar velaric ingressive stop [k!] followed by a high tone [o] and a nasalized [o], which Julian can) as !Xóõ (the ASCII spelling is !Xoon).

This language, Julian quietly remarked, "knocks Dinka into a cocked hat" — by which he meant that the Nilotic languages of the Dinka group, such as Thok Reel, have less complex systems of vowel contrasts (despite the 3-way length contrasts of Dinka et al.). Vowels in !Xóõ can be plain, murmured, pharyngealized, epiglottalized, or nasalized, and some of the vowels can combine some of these effects. There seem to be at least 31 vowel phonemes in the East !Xóõ dialect. Plus !Xóõ has a consonant system so world-famously complex that its very existence suggests there is something wrong with our phonological theories. And Julian suggested a way to reduce the apparent complexity very dramatically. It was exciting.

Meanwhile, the Linguistics and English Language program of which I am the head advertised what we believe may be the first job in the history of the world to be explicitly advertised as Lecturer in Language Evolution. Yet more excitement.

It was all so exciting that I was almost reluctant to throw my things into a suitcase and rush to the airport on a trip to Washington DC, where I am now. About 17 hours from Edinburgh (one on the plane to Heathrow; many hours of waiting around in Heathrow's Terminal 5 sneaking laptop power from unobserved electrical outlets near gates with no current flight departure; seven hours on the plane to Dulles Airport; much waiting in chaotic baggage area) was decidedly dull compared to being back at work. Though when I got out of customs and immigration at Dulles, there was one thing that happened that was sort of exciting, in fact almost sort of creepy… I wish I had time to tell you about it. Maybe later on, OK?

Geoff out.

Before there was yaourter, there was Prisencolinensinainciusol, an amazing 1972 double-talk proto-rap by Adriano Celentano, channeling the Elvis of some parallel universe:

Here's the earlier (?) black-and-white sound-stage version, with a nice harmonica solo at the end:

And a more recent TV version, in which Celentano's hair has considerably receded, and there is some discussion (in Italian) afterwards:

Sasha Frere-Jones ("Stop making sense", The New Yorker, 4/29/2008) suggests: "[M]ore classroom settings for pop stars to parse their own material, please. An hour a month would be enough."

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