Being Human

Sit straight to boost your confidence!
Times of India
... convincing yourself by the posture you're in," Petty added. The research was published in the October issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology .
Study: Posture Affects Personal ConfidenceOzarks First
The Instant Confidence BoostAllure Magazine
Good posture boosts self confidence: StudyTheMedGuru
Tonic -Reuters
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Here are some excerpts from “Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of our Ancestors” by New York Times reporter Nicholas Wade:

Out of Africa
It must have a required a … genetic revolution … to make possible the emergence of behaviorally modern humans [from Africa] (p. 31)  Religion, language and reciprocity ... all seem to have emerged [there] some 50,000 years ago. (p. 168) 

Between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago much of Africa was depopulated … The reason may have been a long period of dry climate … The ancestral population itself … shrank to as few as 5,000 people. (p. 50-51) Those departing, a group of perhaps just 150 people, planned to leave Africa altogether. (p. 12) [They] crossed over the Red Sea … traveled along the coasts of southeast Asia, arriving in Australia some 46,000 years ago. (p. 8)

Modern language probably evolved only 50,000 years ago [in Africa] … all languages are probably offshoots of a single mother tongue. (p. 226) The propensity for religious belief [also dating from that time] may be innate … wired into the human mind. (p. 164)

50,000 years ago – the evolution of behaviorally modern humans
After the dispersal of the ancient population from Africa 50,000 years ago, human evolution continued independently in each continent. (p. 9) For much of the period during which the exodus from Africa unfolded, from 50,000 to 30,000 years ago, people everywhere may have looked pretty much the same … It seems likely that the first modern humans who reached Europe 45,000 years ago would also have retained black skin and other African features. (p. 95)

It has long been assumed by historians, archeologists and social scientists that human evolution was completed in the distant past … It now appears the opposite is the case. The human genome has been in full flux all the time. (p. 267)  The genome evolves so fast that whenever any community starts to breed in isolation … within a few centuries its genetics assume a distinct signature. (p. 10)

[For example,] a new version of the microcephalin gene appeared around 37,000 years ago … and is now carried by most people in Europe and East Asia. [Another] gene, a new version of ASPM, emerged 6,000 years ago and is now carried by 44% of Caucasians. Both genes are thought to be involved in determining the number of neurons formed in the cerebral cortex [conferring some cognitive advantage]. (p. 271)

The human genome bears many marks of recent evolution, prompted by adaptation to events such as cultural changes or new diseases. (p. 9)  From a historical point of view, the most interesting class of evolutionary [genetic] changes are those that occurred in response to human culture. (p. 270)

The last 15,000 years – the evolution of less violent humans
Human societies have progressed through several major transitions in the last 15,000 years … accompanied by evolutionary [genetic] as well as cultural changes. (p. 178)  Each … major cultural transition … could have become genetically embedded as the individuals who best adapted to each new social stage left more children. (p. 179)

There is a 45,000-year delay between the time of the ancestral human population [who departed Africa 50,000 years ago] and the first great urban civilizations … A suite of genetic changes [may have led to less aggressive behavior] that made people readier to live together in larger groups, to coexist without constant fighting and to accept the imposition of chieftains and hierarchy. (p. 129) 

Warfare was a routine preoccupation of primitive societies. Some 65% were at war constantly … A typical tribal society lost about 0.5% of its population in combat each year. (p. 151) If warfare was the normal state of affairs, it would have shaped almost every aspect of early human societies. (p. 157)  A willingness to kill members of one’s own species is apparently correlated with high intelligence. (p. 148) When they grow beyond a certain size, of 150 or so people, disputes [in tribal societies] became more frequent, and with no chiefs or system of adjudication, a group would break up into smaller ones along lines of kinship. (p. 72) 

It required … a diminution of [innate] human aggression and probably the evolution of new cognitive faculties, for the first settlements to emerge, beginning 15,000 years ago, and it was in the context of settled societies that warfare, trade and religion attained new degrees of complexity and refinement. (p. 265)  With [innately] tamer people, the path was now set for larger and more complex societies … that would transcend the limited horizons of the hunter-gatherer band. (p. 177)

In the Near East, around 15,000 years ago, people at last accomplished a decisive social transition, the founding of the first settled communities. (p. 9) The first evidence of a successful and long term settled community comes from people called the Natufians, who lived in the Near East from about 15,000 to 11,500 years ago. (p. 126)  The first cities started springing up in southern Mesopotamia [Iraq] some 6,000 years ago … As societies became more intricate, their operations demanded … more specialized cognitive abilities.  The invention of writing around 3400 BC opened the way to the beginning of recorded history. (p. 234) 

Though they were probably egalitarian at first, they soon developed a hierarchical form, with elites, leaders and specialization of roles. (p. 178)  Without specialized roles and some kind of hierarchy, a human society cannot grow beyond a certain level of size or complexity. (p. 69) 

Genetics and race
Today’s races did not appear until about 12,000 to 10,000 years ago [after the glaciers began their final retreat 15,000 years ago.]. (p. 200)  People can be assigned to racial groups based on sampling just a few hundred sites in their genome. (p. 194)

Genghis Khan had nearly 500 wives and concubines … An astonishing 8% of males throughout the former lands of the Mongol empire carry the Y chromosome of Genghis Khan [which] raises the question whether grandiose procreation wasn’t just a perk of Genghis Khan’s power but a motivation for it. (p. 236-7)

Richard E. Nisbett, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan, believes there are “dramatic differences in the nature of Asian and European though processes” … Did rice farming encourage the conformity for which eastern societies are known and small-scale farming the rugged individualism of the west? (p 274)

The future of human evolution
For social species the most important feature of the environment is their own society. So to the extent that people have shaped their own society, they have determined the conditions of their own evolution. (p. 267)

The inhabitants of the far future are always portrayed as looking and behaving exactly like people today. [But] all that is certain about future evolution is that people will not remain the same as they are today. (p. 275)  Future evolution will differ from that of the past … new genes inserted into the human genome on a widescale basis to replace existing genes [may supplant] the quaint and hazardous method of conceiving at random. (p. 277)  When the first generation of [genetically modified] humans … turn out to be entirely normal and robustly healthy, various enhancements of desirable traits [like intelligence] are allowed … With germline modification … human intervention can reach a desired outcome much more quickly. (p. 278)

The genes that influence human social behavior are inscribed somewhere in the genome but have not yet been recognized. (p. 141) “The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology,” writes Edward O. Wilson.  (p. 266)

Vaccination drive could use a pollster
The Hill
... 07:08 PM ET One of the dark secrets of the polling trade is that our historical roots are deeply intertwined with the social psychology of propaganda. ...

and more »

George F. Will, "An Olympic Ego Trip", WaPo, 10/6/2009:

In the Niagara of words spoken and written about the Obamas' trip to Copenhagen, too few have been devoted to the words they spoke there. Their separate speeches to the International Olympic Committee were so dreadful, and in such a characteristic way, that they might be symptomatic of something that has serious implications for American governance.

Both Obamas gave heartfelt speeches about . . . themselves. Although the working of the committee's mind is murky, it could reasonably have rejected Chicago's bid for the 2016 Games on aesthetic grounds — unless narcissism has suddenly become an Olympic sport.

In the 41 sentences of her remarks, Michelle Obama used some form of the personal pronouns "I" or "me" 44 times. Her husband was, comparatively, a shrinking violet, using those pronouns only 26 times in 48 sentences. Still, 70 times in 89 sentences conveyed the message that somehow their fascinating selves were what made, or should have made, Chicago's case compelling.

The last time George F. Will trotted out his opinion that president Obama is "inordinately fond of the first-person pronoun", I did some counts ("Fact-checking George F. Will", 6/7/2009). As I explained:

…since I'm one of those narrow-minded fundamentalists who believe that statements can be true or false, and that we should care about the difference, I decided to check. …

I took the transcript of Obama's first press conference (from 2/9/2009), and found that he used  'I' 163 times in 7,775 total words, for a rate of 2.10%. He also used 'me' 8 times and 'my' 35 times, for a total first-person singular pronoun count of 206 in 7,775 words, or a rate of 2.65%.

For comparison, I took George W. Bush's first two solo press conferences as president (from 2/22/2001 and 3/29/2001), and found that W used 'I' 239 times in 6,681 total words, for a rate of 3.58% — a rate 72% higher than Obama's rate. President Bush also used 'me' 26 times, 'my' 31 times, and 'myself' 4 times, for a total first-person singular pronoun count of 300 in 6,681 words, or a rate of  4.49% (59% higher than Obama).

For a third data point, I took William J. Clinton's first two solo press conferences as president (from 1/29/1993 and 3/23/1993), and found that he used 'I' 218 times, 'me' 34 times, 'my' 22 times, and 'myself' once, in 6,935 total words. That's a total of 275 first-person singular pronouns, and a rate of 3.14% for 'I' (51% higher than Obama), and 3.87% for first-person singular pronouns overall (50% higher than Obama).

As a result of this previous experience, I had a first-person-counting script all ready to go, and it took only a few seconds to check the new transcripts. This time around, Barack Obama's Olympic remarks included 26 first-person-singular words out of 1130, for a rate of 2.3%. This is slightly below his typical rate for presidential press conferences, and a bit more than half the rate of the George W. Bush pressers that I measured earlier (2.3/4.49 = 51%, to be precise).

[Give me some links for presidential remarks at events more comparable to these, and I'll check them out as well — I don't have time to look around this afternoon.]

It's true that Michelle's tally was higher — 45 first-person-singular words out of 781, for a rate of 5.76%.

This is almost as much as the 6.4% first-person-singulars registered by Nancy Reagan's statement on Edward Kennedy's death, or the 7.0% achieved by her remarks at the christening of the USS Ronald Reagan in 2001, or the 10.0% notched by her discussion of the assassination attempt on her husband. [Again, give me pointers to ceremonial remarks by former first ladies on occasions like the Geneva meeting, and I'll tally them as well.]

Mr. Will also complains 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."

Unfortunately, I don't have a program ready to hand for measuring cliche-density, much less cliche egregiosity, but I'll work on it. My prediction: in speeches prepared for ceremonial occasions like this one, the cliche density of presidential rhetoric has been fairly constant for decades if not centuries.

There are two interesting questions here, it seems to me. The first one is why George F. Will is so struck by rates of first-person usage, on the part of Barack and Michelle Obama, that are significantly lower than has been typical of recent presidents and first ladies on similar occasions. The second question is how many pundits and talking heads will follow his brainless lead this time around.  For some attempts to tally the score from the last go-round, you could check out these LL posts:

"Fact-checking George F. Will" (6/7/2009); "Obama's Imperial 'I': spreading the meme" (6/8/2009); "Inaugural pronouns" (6/8/2009); "Another pack member heard from" (6/9/2009); "I again" (7/13/2009); "'I' is a camera" (7/18/2009).

And if you're curious about what inferences, if any, can be drawn from someone's rate of first-person-singular usage, see Jamie Pennebaker's guest post "What is 'I' saying?",  8/9/2009.

[Now that I think of it, there's another significant question here as well. How in the world did our culture  award major-pundit status to someone whose writings are as empirically and spiritually empty as those of George F. Will?]

[Update — I clearly haven't been paying attention to the right pundits. The "Obama is a narcissist" meme has seen a surge among Republican beltway insiders in recent weeks:

Mona Charen, "Obama's Self-Worship", Real Clear Politics, 9/25/2009:

President Obama's speech to the United Nations has been called naive and even "post-American." It was something else, as well: the most extravagant excursion into self-worship we have yet seen in an American leader.

Michael Gerson, "All about Obama", 9/26/2009, Washington Post:

I can recall no other major American speech in which the narcissism of a leader has been quite so pronounced.

David Frum, "Obama's Narcissism", newmajority, 9/26/2009:

Michael Gerson's reading of President Obama's speech to the U.N. is both shrewd and damning.

Marty Peretz, "Rio, 1 — Chicago, 0. The Politics of Narcissism and General McChrystal", TNR, 10/4/2009:

What I suspect is that the president is probably a clinical narcissist. This is not necessarily a bad condition if one maintains for oneself what the psychiatrists call an "optimal margin of illusion," that is, the margin of hope that allows you to work. But what if his narcissism blinds him to the issues and problems in the world and the inveterate foes of the nation that are not susceptible to his charms?

And so on.  So George Will was just adding his pebble to a pot of stone soup that was already on the boil.  I'm not sure whether this makes his column less stupid — because he's chiming in to support one of his cohort's talking points — or more stupid — because the idea, though apparently vacuous, is not even his.]

[Update #2 — in the comments, Sinfonian points us to his tally of FPS pronouns in three pages of George Will's essay "The Cubs and Conservatism": 29 in 853 words, or 3.4%.  Less than George W. Bush's press conference, but more than Obama's Copenhagen speech.]

That's what I called my own piece on William Safire, which runs today on "Fresh Air" and is online here. I cover some of the same ground that Ben does in his pitch-perfect Times magazine piece, mentioning his generosity to his critics and his willingness to acknowledge his mistakes. A very different tenor from his weekday columns — I think his Sunday readers got the best of him. I also pay tribute to his disinclination to engage in the rhetorical high jinks of other popular grammarians:

He was no snob. You can't imagine him comparing a poet who confused between and among with someone picking his nose at a party, the way John Simon once did. And he wasn't susceptible to the grammatical vapors that affect writers like Lynne Truss — the people who like to describe lapses of grammar as setting their teeth on edge, making their skin crawl, or leaving them gasping for breath, as if they'd spent all their lives up till now closeted with Elizabeth and Darcy in the morning room at Pemberley. 

Above all, there was his ability to convey his pleasure in ruminating on language: "It wasn't just that he loved words — who doesn't? But he really, really liked them."

Other things on Safire worth looking at include Jan Freeman's piece in the Boston Globe (if I had read this before I wrote mine I probably wouldn't have bothered) and Todd Gitlin's in the New Republic, as well as a Newsweek reminiscence by Aaron Britt, who served as Safire's assistant for a while. (The New Republic also posted part of a 1987 review of one of Safire's language books by Louis Menand.) For a more unforgiving take, see David Bromwich's "Wars Made Out Of Words." Feel free to add links to other pieces in the comments.

PsychCentral.com
Study: Posture Affects Personal Confidence
Ozarks First
The study involved 71 students at Ohio State University. Study details are published in the October issue of the "European Journal of Social Psychology."
Sit up straight for self-confidence, study showsReuters India
Body Posture Affects Confidence In Your Own Thoughts, Study FindsScience Daily (press release)
Want to boost your confidence? Sit straight!SamayLive

all 43 news articles »

The widely-watched PBS documentary The Civil War included this commentary by Shelby Foote:

Before the war, it was said "the United States are." Grammatically, it was spoken that way and thought of as a collection of independent states. And after the war, it was always "the United States is," as we say today without being self-conscious at all. And that sums up what the war accomplished. It made us an "is."

Innumerable history lectures have featured similar rhetoric, but as a biologist friend of mine once said about a popular but flamboyantly inventive documentary in his area of specialization, "this is, well, poetically true". In real life, that is, it's false. The civil war may have "made us an 'is'", but it doesn't seem to have brought about any abrupt change in the grammar of "the United States".

I write "doesn't seem to" because no one seems ever to have checked, at least not very thoroughly. So after a few years of intending to get to it, I've done a bit of poking around. And I've discovered two things. First, we need a change in how historical text archives are managed. (At least, I do.) And second, number-agreement — on whatever time scale it happened — is not at all, in my opinion, the most interesting historical change in the grammatical treatment of "the United States".

The executive summary of these two points: First, web-based search of digital text archives is well and good, but it's also critical for scholars to be able to run arbitrary computer programs over entire historical text corpora. In most cases, there's no provision for distribution of the texts that would make that possible; in some cases, the "business model" for the digitization process may actually prevent it.  Second, and more substantively, there's a striking increase during the 19th century in the propensity of the phrase "the United States" to occur in subject position, reflecting an increase in perceived agency and perhaps even in animacy (i.e. personification). In the early decades of the 19th century, "the United States" hardly ever occurs as a grammatical subject; today, about half of all textual occurrences are in subject position. Much more research will be needed to determine the time course of this change, but in newspaper text, it may have been associated with reporting and editorializing about military and diplomatic activities in the 1840s such as the struggle over Oregon and the Mexican-American War.

Let me start by tracing Shelby Foote's pontification to its historical roots. Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve wrote in Hellas and Hesperia; or, The vitality of Greek studies in America (1909) that

Not that I am ashamed of being a grammarian, and if I chose I might enlarge on the historical importance of grammar in general, and Greek grammar in particular. It was a point of grammatical concord which was at the bottom of the Civil War — "United States are," said one, "United States is," said another; and a whimsical scholar of my acquaintance used to maintain that the ignorance of Greek idiom that brought about the mistranslation "Men and brethren" (Acts ii, 29) is responsible for the humanitarian cry, "Am I not a man and a brother?" which made countless thousands mourn.

Gildersleeve, who fought for the Confederacy, is referring to a popular anti-slavery medallion by Josiah Wedgwood showing a kneeling slave in chains with the inscription "Am I not a man and a brother?". His little joke about United States number agreement was not apparently founded on any textual scholarship, but neither was it original — a similar thought can be found in G H Emerson, "The Making of a Nation", The Universalist Quarterly and General Review, January 1891:

For about a decade the states, under the technical name, "The United States of America," were a Confederacy; but when the Constitution was adopted the United States was. "They" gave place to "it." And as Mr. Fiske in his latest book, "Civil Government in the United States," has noted, the change from the plural to the singular was vital, though it has taken a War of Rebellion to make the difference unmistakable.

And Fiske in turn expressed the thought this way, in his 1891 work Civil Government in the United States Considered with some Reference to its Origins:

From 1776 to 1789 the United States were a confederation; after 1789 it was a federal nation. The passage from plural to singular was accomplished, although it took some people a good while to realize the fact.

All of these pre-Foote versions of the meme assume that the grammatical consequence of this political change was a gradual one, starting with the Constitutional Convention and proceeding through the 19th century. In this picture, the Civil War was one episode in a long argument over interpretation, starting earlier and continuing later; it was not the cause of any abrupt change in grammatical behavior.  Foote's contribution to this area of  meta-linguistic ideology was to invent (or at least popularize) the whole abrupt behavior-change story.

I've taken these citations from Ben Zimmer's discussions in alt.usage.english ("These United States", 10/5/2004), Language Log ("Life in these, uh, this United States", 11/24/2005) and in his Word Routes column at the Visual Thesaurus ("The United States Is… Or Are?", 7/3/2009). As Ben observes, there is at least one limited attempt at genuine textual scholarship on this point, in the form of a newspaper article by John W. Foster, "ARE OR IS?; Whether a Plural or a Singular Verb Goes With the Words United States", NYT, May 4, 1901:

The reason which has largely controlled the use of the plural verb with "United States" is one of euphony. It seems more natural and euphonistic to couple with this phrase "have" or "were," rather than "has" or "was." In public documents, such as the Presidents' messages, I find a number of examples where both the singular and plural forms are used in the same paper, and sometimes in the same sentence. For instance, Secretary Bayard: "The United States have no reason to believe that any discrimination against its citizens is intended." As the writer gets away from the phrase in the plural form, he escapes the euphonistic influence, and recurs to the the true significance of the words.

[…]

The result of a somewhat cursory examination of the treatment of "United States" by our public men and official bodies may be found curious, if not decisive of the proper or permissive use of the verb and pronoun in connection with that phrase. It is found that in the earlier days of the Republic the prevailing practice was the use of the plural, but even then many of our pulbic men at times employed the singular. Among statesmen who have used the the singular form may be cited Hamilton, Webster, Silas Wright, Benton, Schurz, Edmunds, Depew. Of our Secretaries of State Jefferson, Marcy, Sweard, Fish, Evarts, Baline, Frelinghuysen, Bayard, Gresham, and Olney. Among diplomats Motley, C. F. Adams, E.J. Phelps, and Reid. Of living professors of international law and lawyers Woolsey of Yale, Moore of Columbia, Huffcut of Cornell, and James C. Carter of New York. In the earlier message of the Presidents the use of the singular verb is seldom found, Jackson's being the only one noted; but in later years Lincoln, Grant, Cleveland, Harrison, and McKinley. Messages of the last three are found in which the singular verb alone is used throughout the message in connection with "'United States."

The decision of the Supreme Court in the earlier years rarely show the use of the singular, but several cases have been found, and in later years its use has been growing much more frequent.

The result of my examination is that, while the earlier practice in referring to the "United States" usually followed the formula of the Constitution, our public men of the highest authority gave their countenance, by occasional use, to the singular verb and pronoun: that since the civil war the tendency has been toward such use; and that to-day among public and professional men it has become the prevailing practice.

For today, I'll close with a few counts and examples from the Pennsylvania Civil War Newspapers archive at Penn State, "A collection of newspapers from the civil war era dated from February 23,1831 to February 14,1877."

I checked the first 50 articles containing the phrase "the United States" in the year 1836, published between January 1 and April 25. These involved roughly 150 tokens of the phrase (I didn't try to count them, but there are typically several in an article where there is one). Of all of these, there was only one in subject position (with plural verb agreement), in a story about the Texas War of Independence:

Volunteers arrive daily; and our marine is in a state to blockade the Mexican ports. The result of the delay in the actual strife with the central government will be a radical separation; and if we may credit rumors, the United States propel to this; we shall see hereafter.

There is one other where "the United States" refers to the frigate rather than to the nation:

The United States, we believe, was built in Philadelphia. [refers to the ship "which has recently undergone a thorough repair at New York"]

The other examples are all attributives (the United States Mint, the United States Senate, the United States Infirmary, the United States Bank, the United States ports), or heads of prepositional phrases (the government of the United States, the president of the United States, the Bank of the United States, trade with the United States, the northern coasts of the United States), or verbal objects, or etc.

Searching similarly in the year 1846, I looked at the first 50 articles containing the phrase "the United States", published between January 1 and June 27. These contained 18 cases where the phrase occurs in subject position. (And singular agreement is almost as common and plural agreement.) FWIW, here the examples are:

It is contended, on the part of Great Britain, that the United States acquired and hold the Spanish title subject to the terms and conditions of the Nootka Sound convention

In the mean time, the United States were proceeding with the discoveries which served to complete and confirm the Spanish American title to the whole of the disputed territory.

Will the United States allow 20,000 of these bitter and irreconcilable foes [the Mormons] to take possession of any portion of the Pacific coast that is now or may hereafter by purchase become ours?

In the discussion on the address in the Chamber of deputies, the United States and Texas have likewise come in for a good deal of observation. […] He observed that it was appeared to him, from the remarks in the President's message, that the U. States were dissatisfied in the Texas affair, …

The United States in annexing Texas had assumed the responsibility that devolved upon Texas antecedent to that event.

The unprejudiced of all parties, we doubt not, will freely admit that the United States have a clear right to the territory on which Gen. Taylor is stationed with his troops, and if so, the charge of the Gazetter, that the President has invaded Mexico, is utterly untrue.

Certain it is, that if Texas had not that right, then the United States had not;

He attempted to show that President Polk had trampled upon the constitution of his country — that Gen. Taylor, by his orders, had invaded Mexico — that his army was posted upon soil which did not belong to Texas, and over which neither the Republic or the United States had even exercised civil jurisdiction.

This newspaper has always maintained that neither England nor the United States is entitled to Oregon, and it seizes this occasion to recommend the French government to insist on the whole territory being declared neutral.

…it is now entirely proper to remind our readers that the United States has for a long series of years in terms mild and conciliatory, been endeavoring to obtain from Mexico a fair and just rumuneration for the "injuries and wrongs"; sustained by our citizens.

Against Mexico the United States had a black catalogue of robbery, insult and perfidy, anterior to the Texan controversy.

As we said before, we have those in our midst who declare that the United States is in the wrong.

Is he really willing to vote for resolutions recommending a vigorous prosecution of the war, and in the same breath to declare that it is an unjust war, and that the United States is in the wrong?

From what I can collect, I am of opinion that if the United States, at present, were to attempt to conquer Mexico, or even to annex any considerable portion of its territory, they would cause great dissatisfaction in France; …

This calculation is based somewhat upon the idea that the United States will order an expedition from the Missouri river upon the northern provinces.

The United States of America will never recede in the face of Monarchy; they must greet a kindred Republic across the Rio Grande, or advance and entrench themselves upon the ragged steeps and defiles of the Sierra Madre.

In other words, while the treaty of peace and commerce between Mexico and the United States is in full force, the United States, presuming on her strength and prosperity, and on our supposed imbecility and cowardice, attempts to make you the blind instrumnets of her unholy and mad ambition, and force you to appear as the hateful robbers of our dear homes, and the unprovoked violators of our dearest feelings as men and patriots.

Two swallows don't make much of a summer, but that's all for now.

I've done a bit more research, which I'll cover in a later post, along with an account of the ideas about animacy, agency and subjecthood pioneered by Michael Silverstein ( "Hierarchy of Features and Ergativity", in R.M.W. Dixon (ed.), Grammatical Categories in Australian Languages, 1976), and widely discussed since by linguists (e.g. Judith Aissen, "Markedness and Subject Choice in Optimality Theory", Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 1999) and psycholinguists (e.g. F. Ferreira, "Choice of Passive Voice is Affected by Verb Type and Animacy", Journal of Memory and Language, 1994; Willem Mak et al. "Animacy in processing relative clauses: The hikers that rocks crush", Journal of Memory and Language, 2006).

If I could get hold of the underlying texts, then rather than painfully reading all this stuff by hand, I could classify examples automatically on a large scale, and make more serious progress much more rapidly on a picture of this phrase's changes in number agreement and subjecthood — and their relationship — over time and space. That's just what I hope to do, if the archivists are kind.

Body posture affects how we think about ourselves
India Business Blog (blog)
In the study, published in the October 2009 issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology, researchers found that people who were told to sit up ...

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.

Day care provides research, work prospects for students
The Flat Hat
Ingram said her reason for pursuing the WCCC job was because she is potentially interested in working in child and developmental psychology. ...

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.

Brooklyn Rail
Too Much Moore
Brooklyn Rail
Both are educational films that take stock of the free-market system's impact on our collective, social psychology. Both are full of goofy and somewhat ...

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Psychology Today (blog)
Change Your Posture
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A recent study in the European Journal of Social Psychology (Brion, Petty, & Wagner 2009) looked at how posture influences self-confidence. ...

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Kansas City Call
... University of Missouri (Columbia), the Master of Arts degree in Social Psychology, and in 1986, received a PhD degree in Community Psychology at UMKC. ...

Body Posture Affects Confidence In Your Own Thoughts, Study Finds
Science Daily (press release)
The research appears in the October 2009 issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology. The study included 71 students at Ohio State. ...

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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.

Beautiful women addle men's brains
Detroit Free Press
This is serious research published in the May Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and it all started because the lead researcher, Johan Karremans, ...

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