December 26, 2009

The obscure tools of language:

The Economist has an article based on rather a daft premise ('in search of the world’s hardest language') that nevertheless manages to cover numerous interesting ways in which diverse languages demand mental somersaults from the speaker or require that the speaker has to think about the world in specific ways.

Beyond Europe things grow more complicated. Take gender. Twain’s joke about German gender [“a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has”] shows that in most languages it often has little to do with physical sex. “Gender” is related to “genre”, and means merely a group of nouns lumped together for grammatical purposes.

Linguists talk instead of “noun classes”, which may have to do with shape or size, or whether the noun is animate, but often rules are hard to see. George Lakoff, a linguist, memorably described a noun class of Dyirbal (spoken in north-eastern Australia) as including “women, fire and dangerous things”. To the extent that genders are idiosyncratic, they are hard to learn. Bora, spoken in Peru, has more than 350 of them.

The article is clearly inspired by psychologist Lera Boroditsky's recent article for Edge on how language affects how we reason about the world, but it has a wider scope and is a fascinating look at the diversity of the spoken word.

Link to The Economist article 'Tongue Twisters'.

—Vaughan.

December 09, 2009

Can't get you out of my head:

Sometimes songs get 'stuck in our head'. In German, this experience is known as having an 'earworm' and a new study shortly to be published in the British Journal of Psychology surveyed the typical features of this common phenomenon.

What particularly struck me was that "the length of both the earworm and the earworm experience frequently exceed standard estimates of auditory memory capacity".

What is meant by auditory memory here is our ability to consciously remember a short piece of sound or to 'repeat something back to ourselves' - often called the 'phonological loop' in a popular model of working memory.

This tells us that 'earworms' are probably not something getting stuck in our very short-term memory but the reason why such tunes keeping buzzing around our conscious mind is still a mystery.

However, it's interesting seeing a study address what the experience typically consists of:

Earworms (‘stuck song syndrome’): Towards a natural history of intrusive thoughts

British Journal of Psychology,

C. Philip Beaman and Tim I. Williams

Two studies examine the experience of ‘earworms’, unwanted catchy tunes that repeat. Survey data show that the experience is widespread but earworms are not generally considered problematic, although those who consider music to be important to them report earworms as longer, and harder to control, than those who consider music as less important. The tunes which produce these experiences vary considerably between individuals but are always familiar to those who experience them. A diary study confirms these findings and also indicates that, although earworm recurrence is relatively uncommon and unlikely to persist for longer than 24 h, the length of both the earworm and the earworm experience frequently exceed standard estimates of auditory memory capacity. Active attempts to block or eliminate the earworm are less successful than passive acceptance, consistent with Wegner's theory of ironic mental control.

The reference to 'Wegner's theory of ironic mental control' is just the fact that when you deliberately try not to think of something (sometimes called thought suppression) you tend to think about it more often.

Link to study summary.

—Vaughan.

December 05, 2009

More on hallucinated voices in deaf people:

After a post we featured earlier this year on whether deaf people can hear hallucinated voices, I was sent an amazing study that attempted to distil the variety of 'hearing voices' experiences in deaf people.

It was published in the journal Cognitive Neuropsychiatry in 2007 (there's a full text copy available online as a pdf) and attempted to avoid some of the pitfalls of studying auditory hallucinations in people with absent or limited hearing.

Some of the earlier research on deaf people who hear voices has been criticised for assuming that when a deaf person describes a 'voice' it automatically means they are having a similar experience to hearing people.

For example, when a deaf person describes the experience as 'loud' they may just mean it is particularly intrusive, rather than that it has specific auditory properties.

This later study used a sorting method, were a number of statements about what the experience could be like (some illustrated) were presented to deaf participants and they are asked to select the ones that best describe their experiences.

The data was then analysed using factor analysis - a statistical procedure that, in this case, was used to group participants whose experiences were similar.

Five groups or 'factors' were found, and I've reproduced the descriptions below as they are a completely fascinating insight into how these experiences appear in their diverse and varied forms.

Factor A: Nonauditory voices with subvisual perception of voice-articulators in the mind’s eye

These experiences were mostly reported by profoundly deaf participants who were deaf at birth or before the development of language.

Voices were reported to be nonauditory, clear, and easy to understand. Participants were certain that they did not hear any sound when voices were present. They did not consider questions about pitch, volume, and loudness relevant to their experiences. Participants knew the identity and gender of the voice but did not deduce this information from the way it sounds. They reported seeing an image of the voice communicating with them in their mind’s eye when voice hallucinations were present. All participants had experienced seeing an image of the voice signing or lips moving in their mind. Imagery of fingerspelling was also seen but was less common. These images appeared to be subvisual in nature and distinct from true visual hallucinations. They were clearly understood as originating internally and several participants stated that the image could still be perceived with their eyes closed.

Factor B: Mixed perception and uncertainty about how voices are perceived.

These experiences were mainly reported by deaf people who had experience of hearing speech and used hearing aids.

The participants were uncertain about whether their voice hallucinations were auditory in nature. Comprehensibility and clarity are variable. The voice used speech/lip movements to convey its’ message and occasionally fingerspelling and gesture. The voice was perceived as sometimes being silently articulated and sometimes having sound. Participants were uncertain if the voice was mouthing with or without vocalisation. Despite this uncertainty, Participant 10 was able to make attributions about voice pitch, volume, and loudness. No primary visual hallucinations were reported, although Participant 10 described seeing a stationary image of her deceased husband when the voice was present. There was less certainty about whether a visual image was present when the hallucinations occurred but participants agreed that the hands/lips of the voice could be perceived but that they were unclear. Strange sensations were perceived in the body both when the voice was present and not present. These included the perception of air currents, electric currents, and vibrations.

Factor C: Poorly defined voices.

These experiences were largely reported by participants who were born deaf in developing countries and spent their early years without hearing aids or formal language, only acquiring sign language as their first language after moving to the UK after the critical period for language development

The voices were poorly defined, hard to understand and unclear, with no definitive statements about exact voice properties but rather a picture of what they were not. There were contradictory responses about whether the voices made sound or not. It was not clear whether participants were completely unable to make judgements about pitch and volume because the voices were not auditory in nature, or because they did not possess a sufficiently developed concept of sound-based descriptions. There was a great deal of uncertainty about voice genesis that may have led the participants to speculate that they might be ‘‘hearing’’ something when they were present. This factor is unique because participants did not perceive imagery of the voice articulators during hallucinations. The gender and identity of the voice were unknown and there was much more uncertainty about which language or modality the voice used to communicate. Participants were unable to articulate voice content but merely described a sense of being persecuted and criticised by an external other.

Factor D: Auditory voices.

These experiences were reported by deaf people who were born moderately or moderately severely deaf and used hearing aids.

Voices were auditory and participants report that they could always hear sounds when the voices were present. Participant 11 was able to make judgements about auditory properties including pitch and volume. Participant 7 was less able to provide qualitative description of acoustic aspects but she was convinced that she could hear the voices. Interestingly, the bilingual participant showed a mixed pattern of voice perception. She experienced predominantly auditory hallucinations but also reported silently articulated sign language hallucinations, with concurrent subvisual imagery of the articulators similar to those experienced by participants on Factor A.

Factor E: Voices and true visual, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile phenomena

These experiences were reported by two deaf participants who were both profoundly deaf.

This factor was distinguished by the presence of true visual, auditory, olfactory, and gustatory phenomena, which occurred separately to voice hallucinations. These included tinnitus, the perception of a black shadow darting through peripheral vision, strange smells emanating from the body, and a petrol taste in the mouth. Other phenomena occurred in conjunction with the voices such as vibrations and electric currents in the body, which occurred only when the voice was present. Participant 25 reported seeing a true visual hallucination of someone signing to her in real space as well as imagery of the voice in her mind’s eye.

Thanks to Mind Hacks reader Sanjay for sending me the study.

Link to PubMed entry for Cognitive Neuropsychiatry study.
pdf of full text of study.

—Vaughan.

November 08, 2009

Straight outta Bedlam:

I've just found an odd study on whether rap and heavy rock music encourages 'inappropriate behaviour' in psychiatric patients when compared to easy listening and country tunes.

It sounds like it could be something from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest but as I don't have access to the full text, I'm still not sure what the 'inappropriate behaviours' were (air guitar? MC Hammer trousers?)

A comparison of the effects of hard rock and easy listening on the frequency of observed inappropriate behaviors: control of environmental antecedents in a large public area.

Journal of Music Therapy. 1992 Spring;29(1):6-17.

Harris CS, Bradley RJ, Titus SK.

Observation of clients at a state mental health hospital by direct care staff indicated that they appeared to act in more inappropriate ways when "hard rock" or "rap" music was played in an open courtyard than when "easy listening" or "country" music was played. A study was conducted to compare the inappropriate behavior of clients when hard rock and rap music were played (21 days), followed by easy listening and country and western music (21 days). This comparison was followed by a reversal phase in which hard rock and rap music were again played (18 days). The behaviors of the clients were observed and recorded via a controlled methodology. The results demonstrated that more inappropriate behavior was observed under conditions in which hard rock and rap music were played than when easy listening and country western music were played. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Link to PubMed entry for music study.

—Vaughan.

August 13, 2009

The archaeology of language:

ABC Radio National's Ockham's Razor has a short but thoroughly fascinating programme on how human pre-history and cultural change can be uncovered through the study of languages. It's an eye-opening insight into how patterns in our language are relics of our past and how they can be a window into the interplay of societies.

The presenter is linguist Claire Bowern who does most of her research in the field. Bowern particularly studies the languages of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia and how they've interacted with each other and with English.

She gives the example of various 'loan words', such as koala or kangaroo, used in English but adopted from native speakers.

Loan words like this show us that there were enough contacts between Aboriginal people and settlers for the settlers to learn the names of local animals in those languages, rather than making up their own names. However, the loans are mostly confined to plants, animals and environment terms, and this tells us something about the depth and type of contact between the two groups. The European settlers did not adopt Aboriginal kinship terminology, for example, or other cultural terms.

We might compare this to the English wholesale adoption of French legal terms like judge, jury and trial, following the Norman Conquest. Many of the loans of Aboriginal words in English come from the Sydney region; it's therefore reasonable to assume that this was the place that European settlers first came into contact with animals like koalas and dingos.

It really is like archaeology for language as she often has to uncover quirks of languages that are spoken only in remote places and then builds of picture from feint traces left by past generations.

Link to Ockham's Razor on 'Language and prehistory'.

—Vaughan.

June 16, 2009

Don't stand so close to me:

There's a neat study in Perception finding that listening to music through headphones warps our comfort zone of interpersonal space.

The researchers asked participants to walk up to another person from various angles until they reached the edge of their comfort zone.

Without them knowing the researchers measured the distance, and this was compared between times when participants were listening to music through headphones, were wearing silent headphones or were without headphones.

When listening to music, participants maintained a greater interpersonal distance and this was particularly true when their back faced another person. In other words, people needed more distance behind them to feel comfortable.

This is likely because we use hearing to track objects, particularly behind us, and when we can no longer rely on a sense to give us this information we tend to err on the side of caution.

The researchers drop a tantalising hint that the type of music may also have an effect.

While in this study, all participants listened to unfamiliar music, they mentioned that "we have pilot data suggesting that people change their interpersonal space area when listening to music they like compared with music they dislike or no music at all".

Turn down the Barry White buddy, you're crowding my space.

Link to page with full text of paper.
Link to PubMed entry.

—Vaughan.

June 11, 2009

Language as a looking glass:

Edge has a fantastic essay on how the language we speak can affect how we experience and think about the world.

The piece is by psychologist Lera Boroditsky whose work has shown that the not only are there differences across people with different mother tongues, but that asking people to use different words can affect their perceptions.

Boroditsky's article is full of fascinating snippets about how language structure enforces a different mental set on the speaker.

For example, she notes that in Russian you need to change verbs to indicate whether the action was completed or not (when someone read a book, did they finish the book or just manage part of it). In Turkish verbs indicate whether you saw the thing yourself or whether you're describing what someone else has told you.

But one of the most vivid examples is from the language of a small Aboriginal community in Australia:

Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space.

This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit." One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly...

The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English).

Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them — in fact, forces them — to do this is their language. Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities.

This research is interesting because it relates to the much maligned Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that claims that language shapes how we experience the world.

When I was a student this theory wheeled out in psycholinguistics classes to show how naive we used to be. I'm no expert on psycholinguistics, but I suspect that this was due to the dominance of Noam Chomsky's idea that all languages are based on an underlying universal grammar, implying that, fundamentally, we all think about things in broadly similar ways. Jerry Fodor's language of thought hypothesis might also have been a culprit.

What ever the cause, the effect of language on perception and understanding was neglected for many years and only recently have some of these interesting effects come to light through the work of people like Boroditsky.

Link to 'How does language shape the way we think?'

—Vaughan.

June 10, 2009

A night at the opera:

The International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry has a brief case report of a man who began hallucinating whole operas that would start every evening shortly after sunset.

A 74-year-old retired mathematician had to undergo emergency surgery due to an ischemic perforation of the colon. Three days after the operation, he began to suffer from near complete insomnia and mentioned only briefly that ‘this monkey music’ kept him awake. His condition deteriorated and 5 days later he admitted, that he heard complete operas at night from the very first to the last chord, ‘and you know how long these operas are’.

He could not offer any explanation as to where these sounds came from, could not distance himself from his elaborate musical perceptions, had no means of interrupting them, and feared the first notes of another overture (which reliably rang out soon after sunset).

On examination during daytime he appeared tired and irritable, rather uncooperative with poor concentration, but without overt evidence of a severe confusional state. His medical history was inconspicuous, but it became obvious that he was a dedicated opera-lover with a profound musical expertise, which he had acquired over decades of studying scores and librettos in every detail.

Link to PubMed entry for case report (via @sarcastic_f).

—Vaughan.

November 03, 2008

Sine-wave speech:

Tom and Matt wrote about the remarkable phenomenon of 'sine-wave speech' in the Mind Hacks book (Hack #49) but I was just reminded of it recently (thanks Alex!) and I am always struck about what a great effect it is.

If you're not familiar with it, I recommend psychologist Matt Davis' webpage that explains the effect and has some fantastic examples.

Essentially, what initially sounds like random whistling sounds comes together as coherent speech when you know what you're listening out for.

It's a striking effect and is a wonderful demonstration of how prior knowledge and expectations can affect perception.

Link to Matt Davis' sine-wave speech page.

—Vaughan.

October 18, 2008

Looking for the mind in a haystack of words:

The New York Times has an article on the simple but effective idea that a statistical analysis of word frequency in written text can be a guide to the psychological state of the author. It's a technique that's been pioneered by psychologist James Pennebaker who has conducted a considerable amount of intriguing research to back up his technique.

In fact, he's completed a huge number of studies looking at word frequency in everything from bereavement to suicidal and non-suicidal poets.

However, some of his most impressive work has focused on the benefits of getting distressed or ill people to write, finding that it benefits recovery from trauma, but perhaps more surprisingly seems also to boost immune system function in HIV patients.

The evidence and theory behind the work was described in a great 2003 review article which notes that the importance lies not so much in the subject or action words, but in the 'bitty' parts of speech, such as the use of pronouns (I, you, we and so on).

These seem to relate to the focus of the thoughts and Pennebaker was asked by the FBI to apply the technique to the communications of Al Queda:

Take Dr. Pennebaker’s recent study of Al Qaeda communications — videotapes, interviews, letters. At the request of the F.B.I., he tallied the number of words in various categories — pronouns, articles and adjectives, among others.

He found, for example, that Osama bin Laden’s use of first-person pronouns (I, me, my, mine) remained fairly constant over several years. By contrast, his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, used such words more and more often.

“This dramatic increase suggests greater insecurity, feelings of threat, and perhaps a shift in his relationship with bin Laden,” Dr. Pennebaker wrote in his report [pdf], which was published in The Content Analysis Reader (Sage Publications, July 2008).

Interestingly, the FBI have their own in-house text analysis technique but I'm damned if I can remember the name or find it on the net. Answers on an encrypted telegram please...

Link to NYT piece 'He Counts Your Words (Even Those Pronouns)'.
Link to review article 'Psychological aspects of natural language'.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

August 12, 2008

George Lakoff and the linguistics wars:

George Lakoff is famous for being one of the founding fathers of cognitive linguistics, for battling Noam Chomsky, and for arguing that using the right metaphors is the key to winning a political debate.

He's profiled in an article for the Chronical Review which serves as a fantastic introduction to the man, his work and his controversial foray into politics.

Lakoff is particularly interesting because he advised the US Democratic party on the use of language and in 'framing' debates - meaning they are described with metaphors that automatically conjure up positive ideas and concepts that are favourable to the policy under discussion.

Whether you share Lakoff's politics or not, the story of how he became prized by the party and then embroiled in a backlash over whether this was just gloss and glitter rather than anything of political substance is interesting.

The roots of the cognitive revolution in the social sciences are numerous and wide-ranging, but Lakoff traces his own story to Berkeley in 1975, when he attended a series of lectures that prompted him to embrace a theory of the mind that is fully embodied. Lakoff came to believe that reason is shaped by the sensory-motor system of the brain and the body. That idea ran counter to the longstanding belief — Lakoff traces it back 2,500 years to Plato — that reason is disembodied and that one can make a meaningful distinction between mind and body.

One of the most influential lectures Lakoff heard that summer was delivered by Charles J. Fillmore, now an emeritus professor of linguistics at the university, who was developing the idea of "frame semantics" — the theory that words automatically bring to mind bundles of ideas, narratives, emotions, and images. He called those related concepts "frames," and he posited that they are strengthened when certain words and phrases are repeated. That suggested that language arises from neural circuitry linking many distinct areas of the brain. In other words, language can't be studied independently of the brain and body. Lakoff concluded that linguistics must take into account cognitive science.

The field of cognitive linguistics was born, and Lakoff became one of its most prominent champions. But it wasn't until the mid-1990s that he began thinking through some of the political implications of framing. Startled by the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in 1994, Lakoff set about looking for conceptual coherence in what he saw as the seemingly arbitrary positions that defined modern conservatism. What thread connected a pro-life stance with opposition to many social programs, or a hostility toward taxes with support of the death penalty? Lakoff concluded that conservatives and liberals are divided by distinct worldviews based on the metaphor of the nation as a family.

The fact that throughout Lakoff was trying to apply the cognitive science of language to a practical problem makes for an interesting tension between science, speculation and ambition.

Link to article 'Who Framed George Lakoff?'.

—Vaughan.

July 17, 2008

Audio rising high illusion:

I've just found this fantastic auditory illusion after browsing through Tom's blog. It's a YouTube video but the visuals are just text, all you need to do is listen and replay.

It's like the audio equivalent of a moving spiral. It always seems to be moving up but you realise after a while it can't possibly be going anywhere. It's remarkably compelling though.

I'm afraid I don't know much about how it works, but I suspect it's a form of Shepard tone.

The Shepard tone link above is a Wikipedia page, and if you scroll down through the page there's a nice example of a continuous tone which seems to have the same effect.

The article also mentions that the effect has been used in the Muse song 'Ruled by Secrecy'.

Link to rising tone illusion (via Idiolect).
Link to Wikipedia page on the Shepard tone.

—Vaughan.

June 12, 2008

Serious threats distinguished by style over substance:

Last September's Journal of Forensic Sciences had an intriguing study comparing email and handwritten threats to members of the United States Congress.

While threats by letter were more thoughtfully composed, they need to taken more seriously as they were more often followed by a threatening physical approach and more frequently written by people with a significant criminal history.

A comparison of email versus letter threat contacts toward members of the United States Congress.

J Forensic Sci. 2007 Sep;52(5):1142-7

Schoeneman-Morris KA, Scalora MJ, Chang GH, Zimmerman WJ, Garner Y.

To better understand inappropriate correspondence sent to public officials, 301 letter cases and 99 email cases were randomly selected from the United States Capitol Police investigative case files and compared. Results indicate that letter writers were significantly more likely than emailers to exhibit indicators of serious mental illness (SMI), engage in target dispersion, use multiple methods of contact, and make a problematic approach toward their target. Emailers were significantly more likely than letter writers to focus on government concerns, use obscene language, and display disorganization in their writing. Also, letter writers tended to be significantly older, have more criminal history, and write longer communications. A multivariate model found that disorganization, SMI symptoms, problematic physical approach, and target dispersion significantly differentiated between the correspondence groups. The group differences illuminated by this study reveal that letter writers are engaging in behavior that is higher risk for problematic approach than are emailers.

Link to PubMed entry for study.

—Vaughan.

June 11, 2008

Language specific madness:

I've just found this fascinating study on language and psychosis that found that multilingual psychotic patients can present with either different or less psychotic symptoms depending on the language they use.

It's a 2001 study from The British Journal of Medical Psychology that collected existing case studies from the medical literature and reports on several new examples.

There have been previous accounts of bilingual or 'polyglot' patients who only hear voices in one of their languages, but this seems to be the first study to assess psychotic symptoms using a standardised measure.

This is from the introduction, which outlines some of the curious effects:

Zulueta’s (1984) review article on the implications of bilingualism in the study and treatment of psychiatric disorders showed that certain psychotic fluent bilinguals, who had learnt their second language during or after puberty, could present with different psychotic phenomena depending on which language they used. Most of these patients tended to present as more disturbed in their primary ‘mother tongue’ and as less disturbed in their second language (Castillo, 1970; Hemphill, 1971).

Some patients were thought disordered in one language and less so or not at all in their other language; some complained of having delusions in one language and not in their other language, and some experienced auditory hallucinations in one language and not in another. Moreover, some patients who were fluent bilinguals lost their linguistic competence in their second language during their psychotic illness (Heinemann & Assion, 1996; Hughes, 1981).

The case of Mr Z illustrates the marked change in phenomenology that can be observed in such patients. He was a 30-year-old patient diagnosed as hypomanic with a history of bipolar illnesses. His mother tongue was English, and he had learnt Spanish after puberty. When he spoke in English, he was markedly thought-disordered and complained of hallucinations. On one occasion, whilst being interviewed by his psychiatrist, he addressed her spontaneously in Spanish, knowing that she was a Spanish speaker.

To his surprise, and hers, he discovered that when he spoke in Spanish, he no longer appeared to be thought-disordered. He commented on this difference by observing, in Spanish, that when he spoke in this language, he felt he was ‘sane’, but when he spoke in English, he went ‘mad’ (Zulueta, 1984). This bilingual dialogue took place within the space of half an hour. It would seem that in this case and in others with similar differences in psychotic phenomena across languages, the second language may, in some cases, exert a protective function in terms of psychotic symptoms.

Link to PubMed entry with summary.

—Vaughan.

June 03, 2008

Multiple sarcasm:

If you're going to be sarcastic, make sure you do it with the full force of knowledge behind you, because there's nothing that'll make you look more ridiculous than being sarcastic and wrong.

Unfortunately, an otherwise interesting article from The New York Times manages to tick both boxes. The fact that the article is on the neuroscience of sarcasm makes it all the more ironic, but we all know that irony is an entirely different ball game.

Despite what the opening paragraph of the article tells you, neuropsychologist Katherine Rankin's study did not find that sarcasm "resides" in the right parahippocampal gyrus - a part of the temporal lobe that lies just below the hippocampus.

Her study, which was presented to a recent neurology conference, tested a series of 78 patients with various forms of dementia and 13 healthy older adults, with the TASIT - a test that measures the ability to discriminate between sarcastic and sincere statements.

The research team then used MRI scans to take structural images of each of the participants' brains and looked to see whether atrophy (brain area shrinkage caused by cell death) was linked to poorer sarcasm detection.

As they mention in their presentation abstract: "Poorer sarcasm recognition correlated with right temporal lobe atrophy (anterior fusiform and parahippocampal gyrii, superior temporal sulcus), and atrophy to the right superior frontal gyrus and striatal structures (right caudate and left globus pallidus)".

For those not familiar with the geography of the brain, this is a fairly distributed area, affecting the frontal lobe, temporal lobe and basal ganglia, largely on the right side.

Contrary to what the article tells you, it's very unlikely that Dr Rankin was surprised by the fact that the brain areas linked to sarcasm were on the right, rather than the left dominant hemisphere for language.

In fact, not only has right hemisphere damage been known to impair the recognition of emotion in speech for almost 30 years, but in her own abstract Rankin mentions that the finding is consistent with existing research on voice prosody, facial emotion recognition and perspective taking.

Finally, to say that sarcasm "resides" in one particular place in the brain from a study like this is just daft. It's like concluding fun "resides" in a particular area of the city because you've noticed that the population enjoyed themselves less after the cinema burnt down.

Dr Rankin's study has not yet been published, so the full details aren't available. However, from the abstract it looks like an excellent study on the cognitive neuroscience of sarcasm which will make a great contribution to the growing literature (including another study presented at the same conference).

I just wouldn't go by the NYT piece to pick up on the details, although it does have a good demonstration clip from the TASIT.

Link to NYT on sarcasm.
Link to abstract of scientific study.

—Vaughan.

May 21, 2008

Linguistic feathers ruffled by high tech new school:

This week's Nature has a feature article on how a new breed of computational linguists are attempting to understand the evolution of language by using high powered computer models. The traditionalists are not impressed, and accuse the new school of reducing language to numbers and oversimplifying to the point of meaninglessness.

It's an old debate in the human sciences, and relates to whether aspects of human experience can be meaningfully quantified.

Some psychologists, for example, completely reject any scientific approach to thought and behaviour because they say it strips human experience of exactly what it means to be human - the lived subjective experience of life.

German intellectuals were struggling with similar issues in the 1890s but a related debate arises in consciousness studies in the form of the hard problem.

It wonders how we can explain the fact that our conscious experience - which we understand subjectively, can arise from the biological function of the brain - which we understand empirically and objectively.

While not all problems are quite so intractable, many issues in human science bump up against the maxim "not everything that can be measured is meaningful, and not everything that is meaningful can be measured".

Whether a particular method gets the balance right is a constant source of arguments.

The Nature article notes that traditional linguists tend to use their interpretation of word meaning combined with historical records to track how language has developed over time, while newer methods code rough assumptions into numerical models and then compute likely patterns.

It is putting it mildly to say that many historical linguists find the evolutionary biologists working on language histories to be bungling interlopers who have no idea how to handle linguistic data. It is also an understatement to say that some of these interlopers feel that their critics are hidebound traditionalists working on a hopelessly unverifiable system of hunches, received wisdom and personal taste. And that's just the mood between the historical linguists and the newcomers. Lots of the newcomers don't like each other either. “Why get excited about it when it is still so preliminary?” says Johanna Nichols, a historical linguist at the University of California, Berkeley. “We are not impressed by a computational or mathematical paper per se. We have to see that it blends well with what is known by historical linguistics and really adds to our knowledge. Then we will be excited.”

Link to Nature article 'The language barrier'.

—Vaughan.

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.