March 27, 2008

Lost in translation:

ABC Radio National's The Philosopher's Zone recently broadcast a programme that tackled the philosophy of translating between languages - discussing whether particular ideas are just harder to express in certain languages, and whether it is possible ever to tie a word to a definite meaning.

As I've mentioned before, I'm fascinated by words which don't translate across languages, especially when they related to mental states or psychology.

One of my favourites is the Portuguese word saudade, which, as far as I can work out, refers to a type of wistful or sombre yearning for something that you've experienced in the past, with the underlying feeling that the wished for thing might never return and that the feeling is all that you have.

The programme looks at these issues beyond the case of single words, asking whether some sorts of thinking are a product of the language, which possibly allows for concepts to be dealt with in a different manner.

One of the most striking differences lies between analytic philosophy, largely produced by native English speakers that entails legal or scientific style reasoning as applied to concepts, and continental philosophy, which often deals with criticising the concepts of language itself and relies much more on rhetoric and analogy.

The most famous continental philosopher are French (Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze etc), so this provides a useful starting point for discussing whether the different approaches to philosophy are just the result of culture, or stem from the tools of language itself.

The second part of the programme deals with W.V. Quine's views on language, which suggest that there is no definite distinction between statements we assume are meaningful by definition (e.g. a bachelor is an unmarried man) and those which are only true with reference to the outside world (e.g. the sun is shining in London).

Interestingly, the programme avoids discussing Wittgenstein, who thought that all philosophical issues were really just difficulties brought about by language.

Anyway, a fascinating discussion of an important topic.

Link to The Philosopher's Zone on the philosophy of language.

—Vaughan.

February 20, 2008

Five auditory illusions:

In one of its rare fits of generosity, New Scientist has put a feature online that demonstrates five cool auditory illusions.

Possibly the freakiest, is psychologist Diana Deutsch's illusion called 'Phantom Words'. For me at least, I began by a hearing certain phrase, only to hear it transform over time into something else.

The 'temporal induction of speech' illusion is a wonderful example of how our brain fills in missing information better when there's sound rather than silence in the way.

All of them are well-worth checking out and accompany this week's special issue on the psychology and neuroscience of music, all of which is sadly behind a pay wall.

Link to NewSci 'five great auditory illusions'.
Link to music special issue table of contents.

—Vaughan.

January 16, 2008

Pirahã: the world's most controversial language:

It's probably true to say that Pirahã is the most controversial language in the world owing to Daniel Everett arguing that the language doesn't have recursion, as Chomsky's 'universal' language theory predicts, and doesn't have fixed words for numbers or colours.

New Scientist has just put a video online that is a superbrief introduction to Everett's theory, but best of all, we get to hear the language spoken.

Everett is also interviewed in this week's issue of the science magazine, but it's behind a pay wall, so I'd just read it in the newsagent.

However, if you want more detail over the controversy, it's been well covered in other places.

Edge had an article by Everett that put his case forward, NPR had a radio show on the debate, and The New Yorker has some wonderfully in-depth coverage of the issue.

Link to brief video of Everett at work.

—Vaughan.

October 22, 2007

Musicophilia goes live:

NPR public radio has recently broadcast two interviews with Oliver Sacks about the cases in his new book Musicophilia - which tackles the neurology of music.

The first interview is only eight minutes and the second, which you'll have to scroll down to the bottom of the page for, is a more in-depth half hour discussion.

The book itself appeared on the shelves last week and the book's website has just gone live which, as well as containing information about the new release, also has a series of videos of Sacks discussing everything from why we sometimes can't get tunes out of our heads, to music and amnesia.

Link to two NPR interviews with Sacks (scroll down for second).
Link to Musicophilia website with videos.

—Vaughan.

October 15, 2007

The roots of language may lie in our hands:

Science News reviews two books that propose a thought-provoking hypothesis about the evolution of language: that our ability to communicate verbally evolved from hand gestures.

The first book, Talking Hands is a study on a sign language developed by a Bedouin community only a short time ago that is used widely by both deaf and hearing members of the community.

As a relatively new phenomenon, it has allowed researchers to study a spontaneously created language as it develops.

The book also touches on the evolution of language and notes that while primates typically have poor control over their vocal chords, they have a precise control over their hands allowing huge scope for symbolic representation.

The second book, The Gestural Origin of Language directly addresses the issue and argues that sign, not spoken languages, are the original mode of human communication.

Armstrong and Wilcox, building on their earlier work with Stokoe, get around this problem by redefining language itself. In their hands, as it were, language is considered an embodied system whereby bodily gestures become ritualized and conventionalized into an accepted communication system. Given that our ancestors were tree-dwelling primates, our hands are well adapted to create four-dimensional space-time representations of the four-dimensional world. This ability was especially amenable to exploitation once our hominin forebears became bipedal and gained additional freedom of hand movement. With conventionalization, gestures become simplified and may lose their iconic aspect, but they are readily maintained through cultural transmission.

In this view, speech itself is a gestural system, composed of movements of the lips, velum and larynx, and the blade, body and root of the tongue. This is consistent with the so-called "motor theory of speech perception" developed at the Haskins Laboratories (a private research institute in New Haven, Connecticut) during the 1960s, which holds that the perception of speech is not so much an acoustic phenomenon as the recovery, through sound, of speech gestures. The arbitrary nature of speech sounds is not a fundamental property of language but is rather the consequence of the medium through which the gestures are expressed. The authors aptly quote the linguist Charles Hockett: "When a representation of some four-dimensional hunk of life has to be compressed into the single dimension of speech, most iconicity is necessarily squeezed out." The concentration on speech may have created a myopic view of what language is really all about.

It's a challenging hypothesis that asks us to reconsider that spoken language, often quoted as the defining feature of humanity, may be a relatively recent form of communication.

On a purely aesthetic level, I find sign language beautiful and utterly mesmerising and after a quick search on YouTube it seems there is a healthy online signing community.

One of my favourites is a video of someone signing Dusty Springfield's Son of a Preacherman.

Link to Science News book review.

—Vaughan.

October 11, 2007

WTF? Pinker on swearing:

The New Republic has an article by Steven Pinker that investigates the psychology, neuroscience and cultural significance of swearing.

Swearing isn't just of interest to cognitive scientists for its day-to-day uses. We've known for many years that swearing holds a special place in the brain because of how neurological damage affects language abilities.

For most people, language is heavily reliant on the left hemisphere of the brain and extensive damage to this area can so severely impair speech that both expressing and understanding language becomes near impossible (a condition known as 'global aphasia').

However, patients with this sort of profound language impairment can often still swear like troopers.

Swearing seems to be much more associated with the right hemisphere, probably as the words are much more heavily emotional and so rely more on the various emotion networks in this side of the brain.

Pinker, of course, has a wide-ranging interest in language and discusses not only the neural basis for swearing, but the bizarre place it holds in our culture, as well as what it reveals about the structure of language itself.

When used judiciously, swearing can be hilarious, poignant, and uncannily descriptive. More than any other form of language, it recruits our expressive faculties to the fullest: the combinatorial power of syntax; the evocativeness of metaphor; the pleasure of alliteration, meter, and rhyme; and the emotional charge of our attitudes, both thinkable and unthinkable. It engages the full expanse of the brain: left and right, high and low, ancient and modern. Shakespeare, no stranger to earthy language himself, had Caliban speak for the entire human race when he said, "You taught me language, and my profit on't is, I know how to curse."

As an aside, once, whilst drinking with a psycholinguist (say that after a few pints) I was taught a useful way of quickly working out the stressed syllable in any English word - something which is apparently called the 'fuck test'.

Simply insert the word 'fucking' into the word, as if you were using the swear word for emphasis, and the syllable that follows the 'fucking' is the stressed syllable.

For example, absolutely -> abso-fucking-lutely. The stressed syllable is the third: i.e. absolutely. It works for every multi-syllable word I've found so far.

Which just goes to show that psycholinguists are some of the coolest melonfarmers in the whole of cognitive science.

Link to New Republic article 'What the F***?'.

—Vaughan.

September 06, 2007

Radio and the dormant brain:

A charming short article from the July 23, 1923 edition of Time magazine, about the supposedly receptive nature of the dormant brain.

Needless to say, sleeping radio operators were not adopted as the mainstay of the US Navy's communication system.

It is true, however, that during the hypnagogic state, the transition from wakefulness into sleep, the mind can make connections between seemingly unconnected perceptions, thoughts and ideas.

The accidental falling asleep, with the phones on his head, of a student in training for a job as radio operator in the U. S. Navy led to a discovery which will vastly shorten the process of manufacturing experts in wireless telegraphy. While the code and its translation were coming through the ether, the brain cells of the sleeping man, in a state of plastic receptivity, were absorbing the meaning of the dots and dashes and forming new associations. On waking, he was able to repeat accurately everything he had received in sleep. Psychologists say that such results are feasible because of the automatic, repetitive nature of the material conveyed to the dormant brain.

Navy officials immediately instituted tests of the method at Pensacola, Fla. Twelve students who were making unsatisfactory progress were tried out. After two nights, during which the code was sent to those students in sleep, ten had learned the lesson, and the other two had left the class before completion of the experiment. The instructors now report that " the experimental stage is past, and the method may now be termed a standard one."

Link to 1923 Time article 'Radio and Sleep'.

—Vaughan.

September 05, 2007

Sampling The Stuff of Thought :

3 Quarks Daily has an extended review of Steven Pinker's new book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature that highlights one of the many curiosities of the English language.

...what I'd like to try to do here is give you a flavor of the kinds of things the book is about by briefly explaining one of the many fascinating stories that Pinker tells about language and what it entails for "conceptual semantics"--the concepts and schemes that we use to think--indeed, the language of thought itself....

So now, if you heard someone say brush paint onto the fence you might guess that brush the fence with paint is also fine. So far so good. But now consider a different sentence: Hal poured water into the glass. It cannot be transformed in a similar manner: Hal poured the glass with water sounds immediately wrong to a normal speaker of English. Similarly, problems arise in the other direction with other verbs like fill: while the container-locative construction Bobby filled the glass with water is fine, the content-locative Bobby filled water into the glass is not grammatical English. Why?

As Pinker puts it, "How do children succeed in acquiring an infinite language when the rules they are tempted to postulate just get them into trouble by generating constructions that other speakers choke on? How do they figure out that certain verbs can't appear in perfectly good constructions?"

The review goes through Pinker's explanations for how we acquire the correct use of these aspects of language.

This example is one among many that raises the question of how children learn irregular parts of the language.

You might think that they just pick it up from hearing examples or from being corrected by parents, but it turns out that the examples too rarely occur for a complete demonstration of all these aspects and parents actually rarely correct every such mistake children make.

This situations are often where Pinker would argue for an innate 'language instinct' which can generate working language rules from limited experience.

You'll have to read the review or the book for a complete explanation of how this particular rule works out, but it seems, at least according to Pinker, that it's not just a matter of grammar - certain verbs imply certain physical possibilities and these meanings influence what seems grammatical.

And if you want to catch the author in person, Pinker is on tour at the moment, talking about his new book.

Link to review of The Stuff of Thought.
Link to Stuff of Thought lecture tour dates.

—Vaughan.

August 14, 2007

Battles over the beginnings of language:

The New York Times has a review of a new book on the evolution of language that is also a concise guide to the origin and controversies within the field.

The book is The First Word (ISBN 0670034908) by Christine Kenneally and, as the the NYT review makes clear, it tackles one of the most contentious topics in psychology.

In this field, physical evidence is scarce — language, except in its written form, leaves no trace — and scholarly clout depends on a capacity for ingenious inference and supposition. Christine Kenneally, a linguistics Ph.D. turned journalist, shrewdly begins "The First Word," her account of this new science, with candid portraits of several of its most influential figures. Appropriately, the first chapter is devoted to Noam Chomsky, whose ideas have dominated linguistics since the late 1950s, and who, as Kenneally reports, has been hailed as a genius on a par with Einstein and disparaged as the leader of a "cult" with "evil side effects."

Evolutionary psychology tends to generate mixed views among scientists as it has the (somewhat unjustified) reputation of being untestable.

It typically involves discovering a psychological attribute or innate tendency and generating theories as to why we might have it, based on an evolutionary theory of why the presence of this feature might have improved survival or increased chances of sexual reproduction.

Of course, we can't go back in time to test the theory on early humans, but the theory might suggest the presence or link with other current attributes - something that can be tested experimentally.

However, it's probably true to say that hypothesis tend to be a little more unconstrained by the evidence than in other fields in psychology.

We now have a slightly odd state of affairs where most psychologists think that evolutionary psychology is a bit suspect, but are quite happy to throw in a few ad-hoc sentences about the possible evolutionary function of whatever they've discovered in their latest research paper.

Which, of course, makes the whole thing seem a bit suspect.

The NYT review charts how the debate on the evolution of language has moved from something which was originally considered either pointless or wacky, to a field which is now relatively mainstream.

Link to NYT review of 'The First Word'.

—Vaughan.

July 28, 2007

Like being struck by lightning: Musicophilia:

The July 23rd edition of The New Yorker has an article by Oliver Sacks on people who suddenly experience a passion and irresistible urge to listen to music after brain injury. The article itself is only available online as a brief summary, but there's a freely available podcast where Sacks discusses the topic in more detail.

The article has some fascinating examples of how people have, literally, been struck by the condition:

A neurologists's notebook about Tony Cicoria, who after being struck by lightning became obsessed by piano music. In 1994, when Tony Cicoria was forty-two, and a well-regarded orthopedic surgeon, he was struck by lightning. He had an out-of-body experience. "I saw my own body on the ground. I said to myself, 'Oh shit, I'm dead.' ...Then—slam! I was back." Soon after, he consulted a neurologist—he was feeling sluggish and having some difficulties with his memory. He had a thorough neurological exam, and nothing seemed amiss.

A couple of weeks later, Cicoria went back to work, and in another two weeks, his memory problems disappeared. Life had returned to normal, seemingly, when "suddenly over two or three days, there was this insatiable desire to listen to piano music." This was completely out of keeping with anything in his past. He started to teach himself to play piano. And then, he started to hear music in his head. In the third month after being struck, Cicoria was inspired, even possessed, by music, and scarcely had time for anything else.

The article and podcast are in lieu of a new book by Sacks, entitled Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain due out on October 17th.

Link to article summary.
Link to page with Oliver Sacks podcast (thanks Justin!)

—Vaughan.

June 18, 2007

Amazon tribe challenges the structure of language:

Chomsky famously argued that a core property of all language was recursion - the ability to include units of meaning inside other units. Anthropologist Daniel Everett argues in an article for Edge that the language of the Pirahã people is not like this, and might suggest that our understanding of the structure of language needs to be re-thought.

Language researchers like Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker are often called 'nativists', meaning they think our core language abilities are inherited and suggest that all the individual languages have the same underlying components.

Research based on this idea looks at the structure and neuroscience of language to try and work out the basic elements.

Chomsky and colleagues argued in a 2002 paper [pdf] that human language has only one core property - recursion, which Everett also describes in his article:

The essence of human language is, according to Chomsky, the ability of finite brains to produce what he considers to be infinite grammars. By this he means not only that there is no upper limit on what we can say, but that there is no upper limit on the number of sentences our language has, there's no upper limit on the size of any particular sentence. Chomsky has claimed that the fundamental tool that underlies all of this creativity of human language is recursion: the ability for one phrase to reoccur inside another phrase of the same type. If I say "John's brother's house", I have a noun, "house", which occurs in a noun phrase, "brother's house", and that noun phrase occurs in another noun phrase, "John's brother's house". This makes a lot of sense, and it's an interesting property of human language.

Finding a language which doesn't have the supposedly 'universal' property of recursion challenges the Chomsky theory and, potentially, the whole idea that a 'language instinct' is somehow genetically inherited.

Everett argues that the Pirahã language doesn't have recursion (or numbers and few colour names), presumably partly as a result of the particular habitat that the tribe lives in.

Everett's article is also fascinating as it describes his first encounter with the Pirahã as a Christian missionary, and his subsequent rejection of his missionary work and focus on linguistics.

It also describes the culture and mindset of the people and has some of Everett's personal reflections on his research and experiences.

There's also a video about the topic and its possible effect on our understanding of language on the same page, and a recent NPR radio show investigated the Pirahã controversy in more detail.

UPDATE: Many thanks to Austin for sending in a link to an enjoyable article from The New Yorker that is a fantastic guide to the language and its impact on science.

UPDATE 2: There are some fantastic comments, corrections and additional links in the comments that are definitely worth reading. Thanks to everyone who's contributed!

Link to 'Recursion and Thought: Why the Pirahã don't have numbers'.
Link to NPR radio show.

—Vaughan.

March 04, 2007

Language is a skin:

Language is a skin. I rub my language against the other. It is if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

From p73 of A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (ISBN 0099437422) by Roland Barthes. In the book, Barthes analyses the components of love and the relationship of lovers.

—Vaughan.

February 06, 2007

From waves to the brain:

Retrospectacle has a great beginner's guide to hearing for anyone interested in how sound waves get converted into neural impulses for the brain.

The article describes the wonderful mechanics of the ear. It's quite striking how much the physical make-up of the ear filters and 'processes' the sound waves before they even reach the sensory cells that connect with the nervous system.

All the hair cells sit on top of a firm but flexible membrane called the basilar membrane. As the stapes bangs against the oval window, a wave is transmitted through the basilar membrane. The distance this wave travels (and subsequently, the hair cells that are stimulated) are dictated by the frequency of the sound wave. The basilar membrane becomes stiffer at the top of the cochlea, which allows different parts of the cochlea to correspond to specific frequencies. High frequency sound-specifity corresponds to the base of the cochlea while the top (or "apex") of the cochlea transduces low frequency sounds. The area on the cochlea where the most hair cells are stimulated during a given sound wave is considered the resonance point, and loudness can be perceived by the number and duration of hair cell stimulation at that point.

The article is both informative and wonderfully illustrated for those wanting to get a grip on one of our most interesting senses.

Link to Retrospectacle on 'Basic Concepts: Hearing'.

—Vaughan.

January 15, 2007

Ninety minutes blindfolded enhances your hearing:

The BPS Research Digest reports on a new study that shows that 90 minutes of being blindfolded significantly improves our ability to locate sounds.

Next the participants spent 90 minutes sitting quietly with the blindfold on. Crucially, when they repeated the [sound location] task after this, their accuracy was improved as they no longer underestimated the location of the sounds as much... In fact their performance had become more typical of a blind person performing this kind of task.

There's more on the study over at the BPSRD including a link to the original paper.

Link to BPSRD article.

—Vaughan.

December 22, 2006

Without music:

Amusia is like colour blindness for music. Affected people can't grasp the subtleties and structure of music despite having having intact hearing. The problems seems to be with the relevant auditory brain systems.

BBC Radio 4 science programme Frontiers recently had an edition on this curious condition that explores the neuroscience of why this occurs and talks to people with the music perception difficulties.

They also link to a musical listening test so you can test your own abilities.

Link to Frontiers page on amusia.
realaudio of programme.
Link to good BBC article on amusia.

—Vaughan.

May 25, 2006

Japanese War Tuba Hack:

Via badscience.net, the Japanese War Tuba Hack! (Or maybe we'll call it "improve sound localisation by increasing interaural distance" or something).

Similarly the way your visual system calculates depth from the different images that your two eyes get, you use the difference in when sounds arrive at your ears to calculate their location. Bigger distance between the ears means bigger differences in arrival times, means more sensitivity in detecting sound location. How do you increase the distance between the ears? Ear horns! Don't they look great?

More here and here

—tom.

April 02, 2006

Hypocoristic:

hypocoristic A pet name, such as Willie or honey. Ingenious and bizarre coinages may be encountered, as seen in the love messages published in some British national newspapers on St Valentine's Day.

From p152 of the Penguin Dictionary of Language (ISBN 0140514163).

There's more on hypocoristics here and here.

—Vaughan.

December 30, 2005

The Distorted Tune Test:

Ever wondered if you are tone-deaf? The Distorted Tune Test page can help. You listen to 25 simple tunes and judge whether they are played correctly or not (it takes about five or six minutes). Based on your responses, you'll be told how well you can judge pitch. If the results suggest you are tone-deaf then you are eligable to take part in a US National Institute of Health study into the conditions, so that's some compensation.

—tom.

November 15, 2005

Keeping tabs on the english language:

Language Log is a site that keeps track of language science, and the changes in the subtleties of language use.

It's updated daily, and discusses everything from curious new uses of words to archaelogical findings that shed light on the early development of language.

One of my favourite long-running themes is spotting what Language Log have called 'snowclones'.

A snowclone is a popular sentence structure which is recycled and adapted from the original quote by replacing key words.

For example, "On the internet, no-one can hear you scream" is a snowclone of the original movie tag-line "In space, no-one can hear you scream." Of course, it could be endlessly recycled by replacing 'space' with whatever comes to mind.

I am guessing the name 'snowclone' is an allusion to the American 'snowcone' frozen deserts desserts, which consist of plain crushed ice to which flavour is added.

I, for one, welcome our new snowclone overlords.

Link to Language Log
Link to snowclone definition.

—Vaughan.

October 14, 2005

Deafhearing:

In blindsight you lose the conscious experience of vision due to loss of the visual cortex, but you retain the ability to respond to visual information (due to intact subcortical visual processing). You don't think you can see, you have no experience of 'seeing', but you can make rudimentary visually guided behaviours. I've been told that the experience is a lot like being able to make guesses which feel completely uninformed but are startlingly accurate.

Parallel to visual processing, auditory processing is also done subcortically and cortically (replace 'visual cortex' with 'auditory cortex', replace 'superiour colliculus' with 'inferior colliculus'). I'm sure the correspondence isn't exact, but how's this for a prediction: deafhearing - following loss of auditory cortex the conscious experience of sound would be lost, but the ability to make responses based on noises would be retained due to intact subcortical auditory processing.

I haven't trawled the annals of neuropsychology to see if this condition has ever been documented - and I’m not going to just yet since I prefer to sit here and speculate! - but I think it is strong possibility.

(interesting tangent: the link above, and here, draws out the parallel between blindsight and normal 'intuition' where we are required to make choices before all the (sensory) evidence is in)

—tom.

October 11, 2005

"Eyeballs sound like creaking doors":

ABC Radio's Health Report has a programme about Superior Canal Dehiscence Syndrome, a condition that leads to supersensitive hearing. So sensitive, in fact, that whispers can sounds like thunder, and sufferers can hear their own bloodflow and eyeball movements.

The condition is thought to occur due to a crack in the bony casing that surrounds the inner ear.

Normally, sound is channeled from the outside world, through the ear canal to the inner ear. Here lies the cochlea, the organ that translates sound waves to nerve impulses for the brain.

This arrangement efficiently picks up and filters external sound. When the bony casing to the inner ear is damaged, however, the filtering is thought to stop working as efficiently, so sounds 'leak in' from other places - including from the inside of the body.

People with this condition have very sensitive hearing, sometimes leading to pain and discomfort. Occasionally, their strange experiences are mistaken for mental illness, where unusual perceptions can sometimes occur.

A person interviewed for the programme describes her experience as where:

Eyeballs sound like creaking doors, eyelids opening and closing have a scratchy sound, bones and joints creak.

mp3 or realaudio of programme audio.
Link to programme transcript.

—Vaughan.

September 02, 2005

Thumbs down to baby signing:

Last Tuesday’s Independent carried a feature by Lucy Cavendish, mother of one-year-old Jerry, on ‘baby signing’: the idea that teaching and communicating with your (hearing) pre-linguistic child via sign language speeds their language development, enhances their IQ and allows them to communicate with you before they can talk. The UK launch of leading baby-signer Joseph Garcia’s new book also spawned a similar feature in the Guardian, in July, by Lucy Atkins, who also happens to have a baby. The baby signing idea has apparently taken the US by storm, and now, in time-houroured fashion, has come over here to Britain where we've got over 100 baby signing classes of our own.

From reading the movement’s UK website, I gather the idea is that babies have some latent linguistic ability before their vocal chords have developed, which they can tap into using sign.

In the spirit of the Guardian’s Bad Science column I did some database searches on Joseph Garcia and he doesn’t seem to have published any research on baby signing, at least not since 1985.

However, the baby signing website says there’s masses of research and cites a load of articles in support of its claims. Most of the peer-reviewed research that’s directly relevant (for example see free PDF here) seems to have been conducted by California based psychologists Drs Linda Acredolo and Susan Goodwyn. Have they got a vested interest? Well, they’ve published over 10 popular books on the subject between them!

In 2003 the Royal College of Speech and Language therapists issued a statement that read “it is not necessary for parents to learn formal signing such as British Sign Language for children with no identified risk of speech and language development… The College is concerned that the use of signing does not replace/take priority over the need for parents to talk to their children".

—christian.

July 28, 2005

iPods increase likelihood of musical hallucinations?:

Psychiatrist Victor Aziz has suggested that some iPod users are experiencing musical hallucinations owing to the constant repetition of favourite songs.

Dr Aziz was recently featured in a New York Times article discussing musical hallucinations. This story was touted as 'brain becomes an iPod' because musical hallucinations can take the form of complete songs or melodies.

In an interesting twist, however, Aziz suggests the use of personal music players may lead to musical hallucinations in some people.

This is not as far fetched as it sounds. A recent brain scanning study used a technique where songs were silenced for short intervals when played, and showed that the auditory cortex remained active when people continued 'hearing' the silenced tune.

The constant repetition of the same music may produce a similar effect, perhaps leading to the hallucinations.

In July's issue of the International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry Aziz and colleague Nick Warner reviewed 30 cases of musical hallucinations in older people and found the hallucinations could be very specific and distinct:

The hymn 'Abide with me' was clearly the most frequent music heard. In 2/3 of cases religious music predominated, with Christmas music also common. In most cases the music took the form of solo voice (male or female) with instrumental backing. Two people could identify the singer (George Formby and Luciano Pavarotti).

Link to story 'IPod hallucinations face acid test'.
Link to story 'iPods could make you hallucinate' from the London Evening Standard.
Link to New York times article 'Neuron Network Goes Awry, and Brain Becomes an IPod'.

—Vaughan.

April 07, 2005

Poetry requires more brain power than prose:

A collaboration between the English department of St Andrews University and psychologists from Dundee has discovered that reading poetry involves deeper thought than prose.

Psychologist Martin Fischer led a team that used an infra-red eyetracking device to measure how often the eyes moved across the page and within sentences, when people were reading poetry or prose.

The poems were in their original format, and the prose was created by taking the poems and removing the line breaks and formatting, while leaving the words intact. This was so any differences could not be attributed to the words themselves.

Among the poems were Shelley's Ozymandias and parts of Lord Byron's Beppo.

The team found that the poems took more time to read, involved far more recapping of words and sentences, and less jumping forward, suggesting poetry had to be analysed and considered more deeply than prose to be understood.

The team plan to use brain imaging to discover which areas of the brain are involved in understanding different these different forms of text.

Link to write-up of research from Scotland on Sunday.

—Vaughan.

March 01, 2005

Sharks, scary music and the temporal lobes:

The film starts. It's a calm day at sea and there's nothing for miles around except for a lone fisherman, relaxing and hoping for a catch. Deep below the water, something stirs. Urgent music starts, your adrenaline starts pumping and you know something terrible is about to occur. Your heart is racing, and according to recent research, so are your temporal lobes.

Neuropsychologist Nathalie Gosselin and her colleagues have been studying the brain's response to scary music, and has recently published an intriguing study on a series of patients who have had parts of their temporal lobes and amygdala surgically removed, to treat otherwise untreatable epilepsy.

Gosselin's team played the patients various pieces of music and found that although they could recognise peaceful, happy and sad music, their perception of scary music was impaired.

This wasn't a problem with sensory monitoring of the music, as the patients performed normally when asked to detect subtle timing errors which had been implanted into some of the pieces.

It has been known for a while that the amygdala (which are located in the inner temporal lobes) are involved in the perception of emotion in other people's faces, and this study shows that these areas may be essential in understanding fearful emotions in music, and perhaps other abstract aspects of the world.

Link to study summary.

—Vaughan.

February 16, 2005

Abstract structure need not be based on language:

Grammar-impaired patients with problems in parsing sentences can parse sums. This weighs against the argument that language underpins our capacity for abstract thought: these individuals have problems with telling "dog bites man" from "man bites dog" but no similar problems with 112-45 vs 45-112.

Aphasia and other language problems stemming from brain damage can indeed lead to calculation problems, but this study suggests that they are not necessarily intertwined. As the authors put it, the performance of their subjects is "incompatible with a claim that mathematical expressions are translated into a language format to gain access to syntactic mechanisms specialized for language."

The same issue is also discussed in a recent Trends in Cognitive Science article by Rochel Gelman and Brian Butterworth. They survey the claims made about the need for counting words to do counting, and arithmetic facts to be stored verbally, and find them wanting. The imaging data does not give a decisive picture, as is often the case, but it is certainly true that numerosity appears to depend in large part on areas in the parietal lobe (top-back of the head) which are some way from language areas.

Another claim is that numerical concepts can only develop if language is there to support it, like a virtual scaffolding. This is one aspect of the strong Whorfian claim - that language shapes thought. Number words are acquired in much the same way that we learn to distinguish 'dog' from 'dogs', and then form a shorthand that is expanded into our full abilities. However when you examine tribes with limited number vocabularies (no greater than the value 3 with consistency) you find that they can succeed in tasks that involve values as great as eighty , presented non-verbally. Research into one tribe, the Munduruku, had a deal-closing finding: adults and children from the tribe performed comparably on the tasks, whether they were monolingual or bilingual with Portuguese - a language with the full range of number words. The groups even performed comparably with a French control groups. If number vocabulary is supposed to be crucial for numerosity, one would expect it to, well, actually help in number tasks.

Finally, it seems the idea of 'recursive infinity' - that is, you can keep adding one indefinitely to get larger and larger numbers - comes naturally to us, even when it does not figure in our established systems. A New Guinean group who used body-parts as a fixed counting system quickly adapted the system to a generative counting rule (ie being able to count higher and higher, up 'levels' of magnitude) when times changed and money became introduced to the system. It implies that these key concepts come naturally to us, rather than being imposed as linguistic concepts.

The study I led with, underaken by Rosemary Varley and colleagues, isn't the first to suggest that language deficits need not cause maths deficits - the TiCS survey outlines such work from way back in the 1920s. And dyscalculia is now well-recognised as its own dissociable disorder. The strength of the study is how it systematically matches the demands of the math and language tasks to make a compelling case that the difference in performance must be due to different underlying mechanisms. And it comes, as part of the burgeoning Renaissance in our understanding of numerosity, to query whether language need be the syne qua non of our species, and continue to feed the language-thought debate.

The BBC have an account of the Varley et al paper. Link
Abstract Link
TiCS survey abstract Link

Henschen, S.E. (1920) Klinische und Anatomische Beitrage zu
Pathologie des Gehirns, Nordiska Bokhandeln

Saxe, G.B. (1981) The changing form of numerical reasoning among
the Oksapmin. Indigenous Mathematics Working Paper. No 14,
UNESCO Education

Pica, P. et al. (2004) Exact and approximate arithmetic in an
Amazonian indigene group. Science 306, 499–503

—Alex.

December 14, 2004

Finding Geschwind's territory:

A new connection has been found between two of most important language areas in the brain. Broca's area and Wernicke's area have been linked to speech production and language comprehension respectively. They were some of the first discoveries that linked particular brain areas to specific mental abilities and are known to be joined by a bundle of neural fibres called the arcuate fasciculus.

Reseachers from London have now discovered that another parallel pathway connects the two areas, although it does not develop until about 5-7 years of age, suggesting that even quite major connections in the brain do not develop until well into childhood.

The pathway runs through an area they have named Geschwind's territory after Norman Geshwind, the famous American neurologist who theorised that such a connection might exist.

Understanding the connectivity of the language areas is the brain is essential to the understanding and treatment of language problems after brain damage. These sorts of impairments are a common result of serious stroke or traumatic brain injury.

Link to story on newscientist.com.
Link to abstract from the Annals of Neurology.

—Vaughan.