Being Human

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.

Dierderich a 'fear-mongerer'
Signal
This is not clinical psychology but rather social psychology. Next, yes, Mr. Dean had books to sell, but on another topic entirely: the downfall of the ...

Armenian Education in America Revisited: Implications of an ...
Asbarez News
The Armenian colony in Fresno County, California: A study in social psychology. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Stanford University. ...

and more »

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.

This is beautiful work, showing that certain areas in the brain of mature Atlantic Salmon "light up" when the animal is asked to categorize the emotions expressed by a set of (human) faces:

More amazing still is the fact that the fish performed this task while dead. Specifically:

Note that SPM ("statistical parametric mapping"), the analysis software used, is pretty much the standard way of determining significance thresholds in fMRI studies.

The first author, Craig Bennett, has a blog at prefrontal.org, where you can find some further discussion, including the raw data from this experiment.

[Hat tip: Stefano Bartolo, also Neuroskeptic, who also cites a representative recent paper that fails to do the recommended multiple-comparison correction.]

Racial Narcissism
OpEdNews
... whereas recent developmental psychology literature suggests that racism is learned much earlier (conservatives flipped over the most recent Newsweek ...

Neuroskeptic covers a hilarious new study that involved brain scanning a dead salmon and finding activation in the brain as it 'looked' at photos of human faces.

The authors are not genuinely arguing that dead fish have brain activity but have run the experiment to show that some common statistical methods used in fMRI research will give false positives if they're not adequately controlled for.

The research, led by neuroscientist Craig Bennett, was presented as a poster at a recent conference and has the brilliant title of "Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: An argument for multiple comparisons correction" and is available online as a jpg.

I'd say that this research was justified on comedic grounds alone, but they were also making an important scientific point. The (fish-)bone of contention here is multiple comparisons correction. The "multiple comparisons problem" is simply the fact that if you do a lot of different statistical tests, some of them will, just by chance, give interesting results.

Most statistics used in psychology, and indeed brain imaging, are based on calculating a p value.

Usually, a p value of less than 0.05 is considered significant and this means that if there was genuinely no difference in the things you were comparing, you would get a false positive less than 5% of the time.

But your average fMRI brain scan analysis can involve 40,000 comparisons, so even if there's nothing going on, some bits of the brain are going to seem active just through falsely detecting noise and measurement error as real effect.

To help prevent this, you can correct for multiple comparisons by reducing the 5% cut-off to a smaller amount. Unfortunately, some of the standard methods of doing this can be so strict as to create false negatives, when genuine differences are dismissed as statistical noise.

There is no hard and fast rule about which methods to use, but our salmon neuroscientists have graphically illustrated how misleading results can occur if we naively assume that not correcting accounting 'multiple comparisons problem' will give us an accurate picture of brain function.

Kudos to the Neuroskeptic blog for picking up on this and for some excellent coverage of this study.

Link to Neuroskeptic on dead salmon study.
jpg of conference poster.

Meet your new best friends
Times Educational Supplement
... the long-term repercussions of increased parental pressure, says Eirini Flouri, lecturer in Developmental Psychology at the Institute of Education. ...

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

Neurophilosophy has an excellent piece on how eye movements can reveal the unconscious detection of changes in a 'change blindness' demo that the conscious mind is unaware of.

Illusion Sciences has an an excellent visual illusion that changes direction depending on where you look at it.

The sad case of a 9-year-old girl diagnosed with early onset dementia is covered by The Telegraph.

A new study covered by Science News finds that at least 60% of the population experiences depression, an anxiety disorder or substance dependence by the age of 32 and discusses whether this questions the validity of diagnoses or whether like physical illness, mental illness is actually very common.

The BPS Research Digest has an analysis of Derren Brown's recent lottery prediction stunt and lambasts him for misinforming people about psychology for the purpose of trickery.

The psychology of gay male sex preferences is discussed in an excellent article by Jesse Bering for Scientific American. At this point I normally compliment Bering for his magnificent column, but I shall refrain on this occasion.

In the same vein (oh stop it) Dr Petra look at a recent study that was widely reported as saying that larger penis size means more orgasms. Needless to say, the devil is in the detail.

Cerebrum, Dana's excellent online neuroscience magazine, has an interesting piece on how arts training improves attention and cognition.

Some fantastic talks about the placebo effect from the Harvard Placebo Study Group are featured on The Situationist.

Cognitive Daily covers an intriguing study on change deafness.

Uncovered emails from GlaxoSmithKline suggests they were prepared to bury data if it suggested a link between antidepressant drug Paxil and birth defects. Bloomberg on the case.

Seed Magazine has an excellent short article about what visual illusions tell us about the psychology of perception. By one of the writers for Mind Hacks favourite Cognitive Daily.

There's an article on 'psychocutaneous disorders', psychiatric problems affecting the skin, in Psychiatric Times. Some fairly unpleasant photos. Not safe for work, or lunch for that matter.

Not Exactly Rocket Science has a typically excellent piece on how rowing as a group increases pain thresholds. I suspect this effect might be why meetings are so protracted and tortuous.

A study on employee satisfaction finds that promises can be broken but career progression is golden, according to New Scientist.

Neuroanthropology finds an interesting lecture by Antonio Damasio on art and emotion.

The development of brain surgery through the nose is covered by ABC News

Why you rooted for the underdog
The Malaysian Insider
... Nadav Goldschmied and David Richards studied the appeal of the underdog in a research paper published the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in ...

and more »

FanIQ (blog)
Is Jim Tressel Capable Of Becoming A New Coach? Or Will He Remain ...
FanIQ (blog)
We can then describe these three, six year stages in differing terms, using language from developmental psychology to help us understand the overall arch of ...

Neurosurgical Focus has an excellent article on the development of stereotactic neurosurgery where an external frame is usually screwed into the skull and fixes the head in place to allow surgeons to precisely locate brain areas in a standard 3D space.

In modern stereotactic surgery, the system is usually used with an electronic tracking system that maps the surgeon's instruments onto a previously acquired brain scan in real-time. The frame allows the brain scan and the actual brain to be precisely aligned.

This means the surgeon can, for example, place a depth electrode into a precise spot without having to physically see that area while still being confident that they're in the right place.

The system is also used in research labs to ensure that, for instance, the brain is stimulated in precisely the right spot with magnetic pulses, using a technology called transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS.

For example, if researchers wanted to see the effect of stimulating the auditory cortex they could run a listening experiment in an fMRI machine, see exactly where your auditory cortex is by mapping the activity on your brain scan, and then use a stereotactic system (e.g. this one) to guide the TMS machine to exactly this spot on your actual brain.

With all of its high-tech trappings, I never realised that the first human stereotactic system was created in 1918 with the system you can see in the picture.

The Neurosurgical Focus article looks at how the technology has developed from the original brass contraptions to the modern age of neurosurgery.

Link to Neurosurgical Focus on the history of stereotactic brain surgery.

Following up on this morning's "bored" post, I wrote a little script to query the NYT's index for the number of uses of "bored of" vs. "bored with" from 1981 to the present. Although the number are fairly small and thus somewhat unstable (in 1981 there were 72 instances of "bored with" and none of "bored of"; in 2008 there were 48 instances of "bored with" and 12 of "bored of"), the results lend further plausibility to the idea that there's a change in progress, with of gaining ground on with during the past decade:

[Update — Ray Girvan has supplied a table of numbers from  NewsBank (UK and Ireland newspaper online archive), which shows much the same pattern as the NYT, but with an apparently faster rate of change. (Or perhaps an earlier onset — the data is noisy enough that it's hard to tell…)

It's not clear whether this reflects a difference in regional varieties of English, with the UK and Ireland in the lead on this change, or a difference in local copyediting practices, with the NYT's copyeditors more conservative or more careful. I'm inclined to think that it's a genuine geographical difference — comparison with another U.S. paper, or a collection of papers, would help.]

Additional evidence for a change in progress comes from an examination of apparent-time effects in the LDC's collection of conversational telephone speech:

"bored of" (count) "bored with" (count) Young speakers (20-39) 9 16 Middle-aged speakers (40-59) 12 70 Old speakers (60-69) 0 5

In this case, males seem to be leading the change (though I haven't verified that the effect is not due to a difference in age distribution in the fairly small subset of speakers who used either of these sequences — maybe younger men and older women are more likely to express boredom…):

"bored of" (count) "bored with" (count) males 14 36 females 8 55

It might be interesting to take a look at some other sources with reliable dating.

[Update — as evidence that the (perception of) change is a both-sides-of-the-Atlantic thing, here's a paragraph from a long "kids these days" groaner in the (London) Times, "A levels: what is behind the falling standards?", July 10, 1976:

And Literature Online turns up 257 instances of "bored with", compared to only 6 instances of "bored of", three of which are bogus — Henry Howard Brownell's 1866 poem Lines, Kimposed A Bored of a Californy Male-Steemer. By a Parsinger., a mention elsewhere of "the most bored of women", and a 1991 poem containing this passage:

25   You'll fear some stroke has left me dumb,
26   bucolic, inward-looking, glum;
27      irrelevant, to boot.
28   It seems some others think this too;
29   each morning brings some short review,
30      bored, of my selected
31   verses, calls them 'quiet', 'true',
32   a man who woos a rural muse
33      and suitably dejected.

But one of the 3 genuine hits for "bored of" is Ezra Pound ranting about politics, from Redondillas, or something of that sort:

36   I demonstrate the breadth of my vision.
37   I am bored of this talk of the tariff,
38   I too have heard of T. Roosevelt.
39   I have met with the "Common Man,"
40   I admit that he usually bores me,
41   He is usually stupid or smug.
42   I praise God for a few royal fellows
43   like Plarr and Fred Vance and Whiteside,
44   I grant them fullest indulgence
45   each one for his own special queerness.

The date of composition is not clear, but the first cited copyright is 1926. (Pound also used "bored with" 7 times in other poems.)

The other two genuine "bored of" hits are a 1991 poem and 1994 novel.

This evidence, though thin, is consistent with a long-standing low rate of usage, whether by analogy to e.g. "tired of" or by reversion to the unmarked preposition "of", followed by recent vernacular change that started to leak into the written language in the 1990s. ]

I was surprised when the mail brought me my October issue of Harper's, where on page 43 was Harper's full-page ad, defining the word, "content," in what seemed to me to be an unusual and counterproductive way.

The ad says:

WARNING! Harper's Magazine is 100% Content Free! Everybody gives you "content." But you'll never find that in Harper's Magazine. Instead, you'll get literature. Investigative reporting. Criticism. Photojournalism. Provocative adventures. Daring commentary. And truth-telling as only Harper's Magazine can tell it. Subscribe today and join the thoughtful, skeptical, witty people just like you who pay for culture, not content.

After telling readers how to subscribe, the ad then says:

HARPER'S  Proudly "content free" for more than 150 years!

All these years I've been using and understanding "content" to mean substance, the matter being dealt with, information and details about topics that matter. You know, like Language Log. And I've been reading Harper's because I thought it contained the very things it now denies. But being a thoughtful, skeptical, and sometimes witty person, maybe I'll need to rethink my subscription. Or buy a better dictionary. Or something.

What will ad-writers think of next?

The New York Times has a huge article on the forthcoming publication of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung's 'Red Book', the notebook he kept during the six years of his 'creative illness' in which he was clearly psychotic but found inspiration for some of his most influential ideas.

Jung is one of the most interesting people in the history of psychology. He was both an experimentalist and an analyst in the Freudian tradition, before rejecting Freud (causing him to feint at one point!) and branching out into his own system of analytical psychology.

His works are often concerned with interests that even at the time were considered a little outlandish, such as the far reaches of world religions, UFOs and myths, but he explained almost all of them in terms of psychological phenomena.

He was the first to create a comprehensive classification of personality and his work still forms the basis of the Myers-Briggs personality inventory. He has been accused of being a Nazi, and, although untrue, it is clear that he was ambiguous about the Third Reich when a firm rejection was needed.

And most interesting, perhaps, was what he called his 'confrontation with the unconscious', shortly after his split from Freud, when he spent six years, largely isolated at home, having visions, hearing voices, fighting what he interpreted as his own internal forces.

Jung came out of this period with some of his most distinctive ideas all of which he noted in his 'Red Book' which has been kept behind closed doors by the Jung family for years.

The book has gained an almost mythical status and The New York Times article is as much about the long saga of getting into print, almost 90 years after it was written, as it is about Jung himself.

It also gives an interesting insight into the culture of Jungian analysts themselves, who have been a breed apart ever since their subversion of the Freudian mainstream after Jung went his own way.

A fascinating piece of psychological history.

Link to NYT on 'The Holy Grail of the Unconscious'.

Sarah Currier asked:

Last night I was reading a beautifully written, prize-nominated novel, but was thrown out of my immersion in it by what I thought was an anachronistic bit of language. I do have a particular fingernails-down-the-blackboard reaction to "bored of" and I am convinced it is fairly recent as common usage. I am 43, grew up in New Zealand, but now live in Scotland.

This passage is set in 1960 and is between the narrator and his then elderly mother:

"She is too sincere for you," she said after a short pause.
"Sincere?"
"You will become bored of her, just as I became bored of your father".

The woman using "bored of" is also an Austrian Jew who escaped to England during WWII. So English is her second language.

I just found that really jarring, especially in such a beautifully written literary novel. My partner thinks I am mad.

I just found a small posting of yours from 2004 where you seem to be saying that "bored of" is in fact ungrammatical. What is your take on how recent it is, and when it started becoming so common that you read it in serious newspapers and in other public commentary a lot (in the UK at least)? Do you agree that the passage quoted is anachronistic?

BTW the book is Samantha Harvey's 'The Wilderness' which was nominated for the Orange Prize 2009. The passage quoted is p.12 of the British Cape paperback edition.

The LL post in question is "Bored of", 3/25/2004; also marginally relevant are two later posts, "Am I boring, or are you?", 10/20/2004, and "Etymology porn", 10/21/2004.

I do believe that the widespread use of "bored of" (rather than "bored with") is a fairly recent development, though I haven't done the research needed to prove it. In addition to Michael Rundell's observation, quoted in the earlier post, that the spread of "bored of" seems to have happened after the early-1990s collection period of the British National Corpus, I'm also encouraged in this view by the fact that OED has no examples of "bored of" among its citations, except a single example where bored is the past participle of the historically-unrelated verb bore meaning "To pierce, perforate, make a hole in or through":

a1877 KNIGHT Dict. Mech. I. 682/2 Deep-well pump, a pump specifically adapted for oil and brine wells which are bored of small diameters and to great depths.

In comparison, there are 24 citations for "bored with" in the ennui sense, e.g.

1837 Fraser's Mag. 16 640 They are sufficiently bored with the solemn noodledoms of pretension.

(A careful survey of the time course of "bored of" relative to "bored with" would be a fun Breakfast Experiment™ in cultural dynamics, using online newspaper archives and similar well-dated sources — unfortunately I don't have a spare hour this morning.)

But even if its spread is recent, it's not hard to find evidence that the "bored of" trait has been hanging around for a long time in the linguistic gene pool.

In the first place, it's a likely mutation, through childish overgeneralization of of as the default preposition for expressing adjectival arguments. Thus in Patricia Wentworth's novel The Devil's Wind, set in British India and published in 1912 (and this is not just the opinion of Google Books' metadata, which got this date right — I checked the title page), 5-year-old Miss Margaret Elizabeth Monson comes to pay a call on grown-up Helen Wilmot:

And there have probably been individual or regional pockets where adults exhibit this trait at least to some extent. Thus I found a letter from Sir Walter Scott to a Miss Edgeworth,  dated 1824,which includes this passage:

So I think that Samantha Harvey can be declared innocent of anachronism — it's highly plausible that a fluent but non-native speaker of English might have over-generalized of in this case.

On the other hand, I can see that the passage is confusing for a reader who's aware of (and irked by) the modern vernacular trend towards "bored of", since her reaction suggests anachronism rather than foreignism.  Perhaps Ms. Harvey was unaware of the vernacular trend when she wrote the passage in question.

[Update: More here.]