Being Human

Rather mysteriously, no one can find anyone who has been blind from birth and has later been diagnosed with schizophrenia. I found this interesting snippet from a short article from Behavioral and Brain Sciences:

Five independent searches, varying considerably in scope, methods, and population, failed to identify even one well-defined co-occurrence of total blindness and schizophrenia (Abely & Carton 1967; Chevigny & Braverman 1950; Feierman 1982; Horrobin 1979; Riscalla 1980). We dedicated portions of 2000 and 2001 to e-mail and postal mail surveys of relevant professionals; e-mail and telephone discussions with officials of health, mental health, blindness, and schizophrenia organizations and research institutes; and extensive keyword probes of Medline, PsychINFO, and ScienceDirect databases. Some ambiguity was introduced by very low return rates for our surveys, but the consistent result of all these inquiries was that no instance of totally blind/schizophrenic co-occurrence was found.

The authors give a speculative hypothesis that this is because visual experience during development helps to shape brain pathways heavily reliant on the neurotransmitter glutamate and the NMDA receptor.

It is widely accepted that this system plays a role in the development of psychosis but the idea that it is shaped by visual experience to the point where schizophrenia is impossible is just an interesting idea at the present time.

That's not to say no-one with schizophrenia is blind (in fact, there are numerous tragic cases of self-blinding) but it is still the case that no-one has yet produced an example of someone who has been blind from birth who later has become psychotic.

If you do hear of anyone, get in touch, contact your nearest cognitive scientist, or if you are a researcher yourself, write up a case study, as it's an interesting anomaly in the medical literature.

Link to summary of paper on blindness and schizophrenia.

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I got a nice email from Joshua Fruhlinger about my post on Harper’s denial about having any content in their magazine. It seems that I’m a bit in the dark about how this word is being used in the tech industry these days, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. Here’s what Joshua wrote to me:

The ad is a somewhat cheeky response to a particular way that the word “content” has come to be used in the publication industry in the last decade or so. As the internet has become the main (or at least the most novel and talked about) publishing platform, the tech folks who are designing the new infrastructure tend to label and lump together as “content” the stuff that isn’t in their department – the actual text, video, audio, or what have you that various exciting new publishing platforms are designed to present.

I see, so the tech folks think of “content” as the stuff that’s not in their infrastructure. So far, so good. Joshua continues:

Some people whose job it is to create that content sort of see this terminology as a symptom that the shoe is on the wrong foot.

I can certainly understand that reaction. Joshua explains more:

Web sites can become well known and get venture funding because they’re designed or structured in some exciting way, and are sold around the design and structure, because the people who designed them and structured them are the ones selling them. The people in the traditional media would normally be thought of as the whole purpose and selling point of the exercise – and the writers or filmmakers or artists are just called “content providers,” and are something of an afterthought.

It’s something of a specialized debate, and it was probably a more keenly felt issue back during the first dot-com boom, when people were really trying to sell web sites just because they were web sites, without regard for what information they actually conveyed. But Harper’s is basically saying that, for them, the actual writing is at the forefront of their enterprise; they’re not focusing on improving the packaging of some “content” they’re buying from the lowest bidder.

If I understand this properly, Harper’s wants to tell us that what really matters is the original content that is in the magazine, not the way the magazine is packaged and not the content that they could (but don’t) buy from others. So why then, does the ad tell us that Harper’s has no content? Why not tell us that it contains only original content written by their good writers? But the really interesting part comes next in Joshua’s email:

You have to be a little involved in the industry to get the nuance, which is always a mistake for an ad. People who write ads assume their readers are going to be just like them.

Ah-hah. Now we may be getting to the problem. Insiders use language the way other insiders use it. It’s efficient and appropriate for medical specialists to use shorthand terms, abbreviations, and terminology among themselves. There’s nothing wrong with this as long as they don’t expect outsiders to understand them. The same goes for many lawyers, accountants, mechanics, engineers, and, I hate to admit it, linguists.

The ad writing team may have used the meaning of “content” in the way those in the design and packaging business use it – to mean the opposite of content packaging. But, like Joshua, I wonder if Harper’s thought it was using “content” to mean original writing rather than stuff purchased from outside sources. The problem with both senses is that most of us (I think) don’t even know about the specialized meaning of “content” held by the packaging industry and we can be equally confused if Harper’s really meant that they use only original material. Either way, by advertising that Harper’s has no content, many readers are likely to be mystified.

Insider words can get you in trouble. Good ads see life from the perspective of their readers. Like Joshua, I still believe this ad didn’t do this.

In response to my (admittedly feeble) garden-path post a couple of days ago, Tim Leonard writes:

Ha!  That's not a garden-path sentence.  This is a garden path sentence:

"Police in Washington state captured a schizophrenic killer who had escaped during an outing from the mental hospital where he had been committed to a state fair."

Source: Dean Schabner, "Escaped Insane Killer Captured After Four-Day Manhunt", ABC News, 9/20/2009.

And for lagniappe, I don't think we've previously noted the "That's not a ___, this/that is a ___" phrasal template, which (I think) originated with this passage in the movie Crocodile Dundee:

I love this abstract of a scientific paper on 'Neurological Problems of Jazz Legends'. It's full of medical jargon but if you read it out loud it sounds like a beat poem. Try it with the same rhythm as Ginsberg's poem Howl.

Neurological problems of jazz legends

J Child Neurol. 2009 Aug;24(8):1037-42.

Pearl PL.

A variety of neurological problems have affected the lives of giants in the jazz genre.

Cole Porter courageously remained prolific after severe leg injuries secondary to an equestrian accident, until he succumbed to osteomyelitis, amputations, depression, and phantom limb pain.

George Gershwin resisted explanations for uncinate seizures and personality change and herniated from a right temporal lobe brain tumor, which was a benign cystic glioma.

Thelonious Monk had erratic moods, reflected in his pianism, and was ultimately mute and withdrawn, succumbing to cerebrovascular events.

Charlie Parker dealt with mood lability and drug dependence, the latter emanating from analgesics following an accident, and ultimately lived as hard as he played his famous bebop saxophone lines and arpeggios.

Charles Mingus hummed his last compositions into a tape recorder as he died with motor neuron disease.

Bud Powell had severe posttraumatic headaches after being struck by a police stick defending Thelonious Monk during a Harlem club raid.

If beat poetry aint your bag, try dropping it to the beat of Gang Starr's wonderful track Jazz Thing, which, among other things, taught me the recondite word 'recondite'.

Link to PubMed entry for 'Neurological Problems of Jazz Legends'.
Link to Gang Starr's Jazz Thing.

I've just discovered that the classic James Dean movie Rebel Without a Cause was inspired by a true life account of a psychiatrist's analysis of a young 'psychopath'.

According to this 1944 article from Time magazine, the book, called Rebel Without A Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath, was written by psychiatrist Mitchell Lindner and gave the public "one of the few play-by-play accounts of a psychoanalytic treatment ever published".

Lindner's subject is Harold, 21, serving a long term for a serious, unnamed crime. Harold, the son of a bull-tempered Polish laborer who speaks no English, has been in trouble with the police, mostly for pilfering, since the age of twelve. His most conspicuous psychopathic symptom was a constant blinking of his eyes.

Lindner began in orthodox analytic fashion by having the boy lie on a couch and encouraging him to talk freely. (Lindner got his transcript via a microphone concealed in the couch. Told about this at the end of the analysis, Harold himself urged the analyst to publish the record.) Without much hesitation, Harold gave the details of a hair-raising career of gun-toting, stealing, vandalism, fornication. Like all psychopaths, Harold was "a rebel without a cause, a revolutionary without a program," a grownup infant with no self-restraint and a craving for instant satisfactions.

If you're puzzled by the term 'hypnoanalysis' in the title, it was a form of Freudian psychoanalysis but where the patient was put into a hypnotic trance supposedly to encourage free association and facilitate access to the unconscious.

The idea was that it was a type of cranked up psychoanalysis that could give quicker results but, as the article notes, it was considered rather suspect by the forever orthodox Freudians.

An alternative juiced up version was 'narcoanalysis' that typically used barbiturate drugs for the same reason. This was the origin of the truth drug as it was wrongly thought that people hiding the truth might let it slip through if their unconscious was 'loosened' somewhat.

The connection between the book and the film seems to be fairly cursory though, as while the movie shares the title and is also about an antisocial young man, it's otherwise quite different.

Link to 1994 Time article on the book.

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The Boston Globe covers several recent studies that have been able to work out sensitive personal details from information made public on social networking sites, possibly including your sexual orientation.

As we discussed earlier this week, huge amounts of information can be gleaned about your life through social network analysis simply from the patterns in your interactions.

In computer security and counter intelligence this is part of a technique called traffic analysis which has a long history in law enforcement. For example, before the days of the internet the UK police would use the Harlequin system to work out social networks from phone call patterns as these were much easier to obtain than court orders allowing phone taps.

Now, we put much of this information online ourselves but are unaware of how much the explicit personal information that we deliberately keep private is still available implicitly in the public data trail.

Sociologists have known this for years but the rapid spread of electronic communication has spurred the development of analysis tools as well as providing the real world data on which it can be applied.

Discussions of privacy often focus on how to best keep things secret, whether it is making sure online financial transactions are secure from intruders, or telling people to think twice before opening their lives too widely on blogs or online profiles. But this work shows that people may reveal information about themselves in another way, and without knowing they are making it public.

Who we are can be revealed by, and even defined by, who our friends are: if all your friends are over 45, you’re probably not a teenager; if they all belong to a particular religion, it’s a decent bet that you do, too. The ability to connect with other people who have something in common is part of the power of social networks, but also a possible pitfall. If our friends reveal who we are, that challenges a conception of privacy built on the notion that there are things we tell, and things we don’t.

Link to Globe article on social networks and personal info (via MeFi).

What may be the most widely-discussed statistical over-interpretation in history is coming around for the third time. The first gust front of commentary blew in with David Leonhardt in the NYT Business Section in September of 2007, echoed a few days later by Steven Leavitt in the Freakonomics blog. In May of 2009, Ross Douthat's NYT column recycled the same research for another round of thumb-sucking. And the same material has just been promoted again by Arianna Huffington ("The Sad, Shocking Truth About How Women Are Feeling", "What's Happening to Women's Happiness?", etc.), with an assist by Maureen Dowd ("Blue is the New Black", 9/19/2009).

Ms. Huffington tells us that

According to study after study, women are becoming more and more unhappy. This drop in happiness is found in women across the social and economic landscape. It doesn't matter what their marital status is, how much money they make, whether or not they have children, their ethnic background, or the country they live in. Women around the world are in a funk.

And it's not because of the multitude of crises we are facing. Women's happiness has been on a downward trend since the early 1970s, when the General Social Survey, a landmark study, began examining the social attitudes of women and men — who, by the way, have gotten progressively happier over the years.

MoDo chimes in:

According to the General Social Survey, which has tracked Americans’ mood since 1972, and five other major studies around the world, women are getting gloomier and men are getting happier.

Before the ’70s, there was a gender gap in America in which women felt greater well-being. Now there’s a gender gap in which men feel better about their lives.

People love this story. They love to speculate about the reasons for the trend — the favorites are variants of "too much feminism" and "not enough feminism" — and to tell us about their own happiness or lack thereof. Tens of thousands of readers, across the repeated reprises of this story in the mass media, have commented on various newspaper and weblog sites.  In a certain sense, this tidal wave of response validates the story, which clearly resonates with something in the spirit of the times.  But in fact, the empirical basis for all this fuss is so thin as to be practically non-existent.

I'll focus on the General Social Survey results, since I've looked into them in detail, but the rest of the worldwide background is similar.

One way to see what's happening is to look at this graph of General Social Survey results, from the preprint that kicked it all off in 2007:

Those who prefer tables may like to see it this way (taken from an earlier post on the subject):

If we sum up all the GSS responses across years, we get these proportions of answers to the question "Taken all together, how would you say things are these days — would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?"

Very happy Pretty happy Not too happy Male 31.2% 56.7% 12.1% Female 32.4% 55.1% 12.5%

In the responses for 1972, 1973, and 1974 (the earliest dates available), the overall proportions were:

Very happy Pretty happy Not too happy Male 31.9% 53.0% 15.1% Female 37.0% 49.4% 13.6%

In the responses for 2004, 2006, and 2008 (the most recent dates available), the proportions were:

Very happy Pretty happy Not too happy Male 29.8% 56.1% 14.0% Female 31.2% 54.9% 13.9%

The best way to describe this, I think, would be to say something like:

In the early 70s, women self-reported their happiness at levels somewhat higher than men did. Specifically, 5.1% more of the women reported themselves "Very happy", while 1.5% fewer reported themselves "Not too happy".

30-odd years later, in the mid 00s, women's self-reported happiness was closer to men's, though it was still slightly higher. 1.4% more of the women reported themselves "Very happy", while 0.1% fewer reported themselves "Not too happy".

To Arianna Huffington, this means that "women are becoming more and more unhappy", while "men … have gotten progressively happier over the years". To Maureen Dowd, this means that "Before the ’70s, there was a gender gap in America in which women felt greater well-being. Now there’s a gender gap in which men feel better about their lives."  Ross Douthat described these numbers with the generalization "In postfeminist America, men are happier than women."

All of these statements are either false or seriously misleading.  Maybe, if you look at the data through a sophisticated statistical model, you can support a conclusion about the relative signs of the long-term-trends for males and females.  But any way you slice and dice it, there's not much there there.

I've cited the earlier stages in this discussion as motivation for a moratorium on using generic plurals to describe small statistical differences.  The contributions of Arianna Huffington and Maureen Dowd are, if anything, even better arguments for this (hopeless) cause.

Past LL happiness-gap posts:

"The 'Happiness Gap' and the rhetoric of statistics" (9/26/2007)
"Gender-role resentment and Rorschach-blot news reports" (9/27/2007)
"Why are economists so misleading?" (10/1/2007)
"The gender happiness gap: statistical, practical and rhetorical significance", 10/4/2007
"The happiness gap returns" (7/26/2008)
"The happiness gap is back" (5/26/2009)
"Women's happiness and pundits' accuracy" (5/27/2009)

Also maybe relevant, if you're not completely sick of the whole topic:

"Myth is truth (p < .05)" (12/23/2007)

If you want to do your own modeling, a csv file of the GSS happiness answers is here (some background on the data is here).

[I also note a certain lack of journalistic courtesy — Douthat didn't mention that Leonhardt and Leavitt had covered the same material a year and a half earlier, and Huffington doesn't mention Douthat, Leavitt or Leonhardt.  I know that journalists don't need footnotes, but if a pundit reprises a story that's previously been featured by other pundits, doesn't journalistic etiquette suggest a tip of the hat to the earlier authors? Dowd does cite Huffington, which seems like the normal practice.]

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That's not a-the-indefinite-article, it's a-the-immediate-future-marker, as in Kanye West's infamous "I'm a let you finish" interruption at the MTV awards. Steven Poole at Unspeak has a poll, where you can register your preference for how to spell it. (So far, "I'ma" has a plurality of 45%, with "I'm'a" next at 20%.)

Steven links to the discussion that Ella and I had about this back in 2005.

Garden-path photo caption of the day:

Reading this, I spent a few seconds trying to figure out how fans could catch a walk, off a home run or in any other circumstance.

I knew the phrase "walk-off home run", meaning a home run that puts the home team ahead in the bottom of the final inning of a baseball game, and thus permits them (and everybody else) to walk off the field without any further game-play. But by the time my on-line sentence processing system got to "off", it was too late.

A hyphen in "walk-off" would have helped.

Commenters on this blog and others, and many of my correspondents, have been asking: "Where is Pullum?"

I am on a train in England, using unspeakably slow wireless Internet. And I have a copy of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol cradled in my palms.

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Yesterday's 9 Chickweed Lane:

And today's strip:

Read the whole sequence (to date): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

I especially like this exchange:

Juliette: Your only actual qualification is one of manifest insanity.
Thorax: "Broad experience" would be the term then.

I'm not usually on the Dan Brown desk here at Language Log Plaza — that's Geoff Pullum's domain — but this one came to me (from Bruce Webster). By Tom Chivers on the Telegraph's site:

The Lost Symbol, the latest novel by The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown, has gone on sale. We pick 20 of the clumsiest phrases from it and from his earlier works.

Chivers quotes Geoff P. on Brown's writing. And there's space for comments and for nominations of further regrettable quotes from the Brownian oeuvre.

Oliver Sacks has done a wonderful TED talk on hallucinations that has just been released online. He particularly focuses on the hallucinations of Charles Bonnet syndrome where damage or decay of the retina can cause strikingly complex hallucinations of people and animals that seems to be a natural part of the visual scene.

Interestingly, the people affected by the condition are usually well aware that they are hallucinating and remain lucid throughout.

The talk is wonderful and Sacks is engaging as ever, but some of his neuroscience explanation seems a little dodgy.

He discusses the well-known role of an area in the temporal lobes called the fusiform gyrus in face recognition and relates disturbance in this area to face hallucinations:

There's an area in the anterior part of [the fusiform gyrus] where teeth and eyes are represented and that part of the gyrus is activated when people get the deformed hallucinations [of people with big teeth and eyes].

There is another part of the brain that is especially activated when one sees cartoons. It is activated when one recognises cartoons, when one draws cartoons and when one hallucinates them...

There are other parts of the brain that are involved in the recognition and hallucination of buildings and landscapes.

Actually, all of this seems quite dodgy. I couldn't find any evidence that part of the fusiform gyrus is specialised for teeth and eyes.

I found one study which linked the viewing of moving mouths or pair of eyes to activation on the superior temporal gyrus, but this is the other side of the temporal lobe. Also, he seems to be suggesting that specific face parts are mapped to specific areas of the fusiform gyrus, again, which I could find no evidence for.

I suspect the bit about specific parts of the brain for buildings, landscapes and cartoons comes from a misunderstanding of neuropsychology experiments as these sorts of pictures are also often used in experiments on face recognition.

One of the big debates in face perception research is whether the fusiform gyrus is dedicated to face recognition or whether it is specialised for any sort of expertise needed for fine grained visual distinction - for example, recognising car types, or birds and so on.

Hence, experiments often will test people on face recognition, but then also on building or drawings so the researchers can find out whether the problem is specific to faces or just a general visual recognition problem. For example, this exact procedure was used in this 2005 study on four people with prosopagnosia, a selective impairment in face recognition.

Apart from maybe a few minor hallucinations from Sacks himself, the talk is excellent and comes highly recommended.

Link to Oliver Sacks TED talk on hallucinations.

Recently, we've been talking, here and here, about the choice of preposition to go with the adjective bored: the older with (or by) or the innovative (and now spreading) of. Commenters added some other choices of of where another preposition might have been expected: with the adjectives concerned, embarrassed, and fed up; and with verbs in appreciate of and succumb of. There are several possible routes to these usages — analogy with P choice for semantically similar words (bored of on analogy with tired of), blending (bored of = bored with x tired of), and reversion to of as the default P in English — but the cases are at least superficially similar (though they are probably not related at a deeper level; people with one of these usages can't be expected to have any, or all, of the others).

And then a commenter (on the first of these postings) moved to a very different case; dw asked about off of, adding, "It drives me nuts". The only thing that this case — of what some handbooks term "intrusive" of in combination with certain prepositions — has to do with things like bored of is that the word of is involved. Still, people like dw, and a great many usage critics as well, are inclined to "bundle" disparate phenomena under a single heading for no reason beyond the involvement of a particular word. As I said recently, people are inclined to "blame it on a word".

I'll say a bit about "intrusive" of in a moment, but first another case of P choice in which of is one of the possibilities: in time expressions like a quarter to/till/before/of 2, discussed on Language Log a couple of years ago. (Here, of is a distinctly American option.) But I don't see that there's any relationship between this case and P choice with adjectives and verbs.

On to "intrusive" of. Here, many commenters bundle P + of (in alongside/inside/off/out/outside of) together the of that appears in one variant of exceptional degree modification (the much-reviled too big of a dog as an alternative to too big a dog), but the two phenomena have nothing to do with one another beyond that of.

There's extensive discussion of the five P + of cases above in this course handout of mine. For these, there’s a separate story for each one (though some handbooks recommend against P + of in general): plain out is extremely restricted; outside of is not colloquial (except in one sense); off of is somewhat on the conversational side; etc. Off of is the combination that gets the heaviest criticism, though I don't think that on the evidence of actual use, it can be classified as non-standard — on the colloquial side, but not non-standard.

My 2007 posting on prepositions in time expressions went on to unearth some genuinely non-standard occurrences of P + of (underneath of and others) and to examine a relatively extreme case of bundling, in Rudolf Flesch's entry for of in The ABC of Style. Flesch sternly pronounces that "of is a weed that should be pulled out of all sentences where it doesn't belong" and gives a series of examples, of three very different sorts (though Flesch doesn't label them): repeated partitives ("Of all the objections, not one (of them) was cogent"; of with superlatives ("one of the most hazardous (of) medical episodes"); and of in WH-clause complements of abstract nouns ("the issue (of) whether such behavior is permissible"). Details in the 2007 posting.