- your own middle name
- the street you grew up on
- your best friend in elementary school
- the name of your first pet
- your second-grade teacher's name
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Fighting Gullibility with Sarcasm, 6 days a week
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My novel In the Midst of Lions, the first of a trilogy, has a character named Anderson Quaice, who is a linguistics professor. He also has a strong pessimistic streak, something that proves justified in the course of the story. He develops a conlang called Kalila not only as an entertaining intellectual exercise, but because he fears that civilization is heading toward collapse, and he wants a way to communicate with his friends that will not be understood by (possibly hostile) outsiders.
Kalila provides a framework for the entire trilogy, which spans over fourteen centuries. I wanted the conlang to follow a similar trajectory as Latin did; by the second book, The Scattering Winds, Kalila has become the "Sacred Language," used in rituals and religion; by the third, The Chains of Orion, it has been relegated to a small role as a historical curiosity, something learned (and mourned!) only by academics, and which few speak fluently.
But of course, in order to incorporate it into the narrative, I had to invent the conlang. While I'm not a professor like Quaice, my master's degree is in historical linguistics, so I have a fairly solid background for comprehending (and thus creating) a language structure. I've mostly studied inflected languages, like Old Norse, Old English, Latin, and Greek -- ones where nouns, verbs, and adjectives change form depending on how they're being used in sentences -- so I decided to make Kalila inflected. (Interestingly, along the way English lost most of its noun inflections; in the sentences The dog bit the cat and The cat bit the dog you know who bit whom by word order, not because the words dog and cat change form, as they would in most inflected languages. English does retain a few inflections, holdovers from its Old English roots -- he/him/his, she/her/hers, they/them/theirs, and who/whom are examples of inflections we've hung onto.)
One of the interesting choices I had to make centers on phonetics. What repertoire of sounds did I want Kalila to have? I decided I was aiming for something vaguely Slavic-sounding, with a few sound combinations and placements you don't find in English (for example, the initial /zl/ combination in the word for "quick," zlavo.) I included only one sound that isn't found in English -- the unvoiced velar fricative (the final sound in the name Bach), which in accordance with the International Phonetic Alphabet I spelled with a letter "x" in the written form; lexa, pronounced /lekha/, means "hand."
Of course, in the end I used about one percent of all the syntax and morphology and lexicon and whatnot I'd invented in the actual story. But it was still a lot of fun to create.
The topic comes up because of a really cool study that recently came out in the journal Language and Speech, by a team led by linguist Christine Mooshammer of Humboldt University in Berlin. The researchers wanted to find out why some languages are perceived as sounding more pleasant-sounding than others -- but to avoid the bias that would come with actual spoken languages, they confined their analysis to conlangs such as Quenya, Sindarin, Dothraki, Klingon, Cardassian, Romulan, and Orkish.
The results, perhaps unsurprisingly, rated Quenya and Sindarin (the two main Elvish languages in Tolkien's world) as the most pleasant, and Dothraki (from Game of Thrones) and Klingon to sound the most unpleasant. Interestingly, Orkish -- at least when not being snarled by characters like Azog the Defiler -- was ranked somewhere in the middle.
Some of their conclusions:
This last one introduces the bias I mentioned earlier, something that Mooshammer admits is a limitation of the study. "One of our main findings was that Orkish doesn’t sound evil without the special effects, seeing the speakers and hearing the growls and hissing sounds in the movies," she said, in an interview with PsyPost. "Therefore, the average person should be aware of the effect of stereotypes that do influence the perception of a language. Do languages such as German sound orderly and unpleasant and Italian beautiful and erotic because of their sounds, or just based on one’s own attitude toward their speakers?"
I wonder how the test subjects would have ranked spoken Kalila? If the researchers want a sample, I'd be happy to provide it.
It's a fun study, which I encourage you to read in its entirety. It brings up the bigger question, though, of why we find anything aesthetically pleasing. I'm fascinated by why certain pieces of music are absolutely electrifying to me (one example is Stravinsky's Firebird) while others that are considered by many to be masterpieces do nothing for me at all (I've yet to hear a piece of music by Brahms that elicits more than "meh" from me). There's an emotional resonance there with some things and not others, but I'm at a loss to explain it.
So maybe I should end with a song by Enya, which is not only beautiful musically, but is sung in the conlang she invented, Loxian. Give this a listen and see where you'd rank it.
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I hold two strong opinions that sometimes come into conflict with one another.
The first is that everyone comes to understand the universe in their own way. Most of the time, we're all just muddling along trying to figure things out and simultaneously keep our heads above water, so who am I to criticize if you draw a different set of conclusions from this weird and chaotic place than I do? Honestly, as long as you don't push your beliefs on me or use them to discriminate against people who think differently than you do, I don't have any quarrel with you.
On the other hand, there's no requirement that I "respect your beliefs," in the sense that because you call them sacred or religious or whatnot, I'm somehow not allowed to criticize them (or point out that they make no sense). No beliefs -- and that includes mine -- are immune to critique.
So, respect people? Of course, always. But respect claims? Only if they make sense and follow some basic principles like honoring the rights of others. My support of "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" is tempered by, "... but if thou appearest to be a wingnut, thou shouldst not expect me not to point that out."
This is the thought that kept occurring to me as I perused a Wikipedia page I stumbled across, titled, "List of New Religious Movements." By "new" they mean "after 1800," and the point is made rather forcefully that it's an incomplete list -- and that "scholars have estimated that the number of new religious movements now number in the tens of thousands worldwide."
I find this kind of mind-boggling. I'm so uncertain about most of the Big-Question type beliefs that I'd never presume to say, "Hey, I know what's true! Here's what everyone else should believe!" Yeah, I come on pretty strong about things like "science works" and "we should respect hard evidence," but stuff like, "is there a Higher Power at work?" and "is there an afterlife?" and "is there any absolute truth?" -- I'm not going to claim my answers are any better than anyone else's.
But apparently there are a great many people who don't share that attitude. And a lot of answers they've come up with -- and feel strongly enough about that they try to convert others -- are, to put not too fine a point on it, really fucking bizarre. You have to wonder how many of the leaders of these groups were motivated by true belief, and how many by desire for power, wealth, fame, and adulation, but even so some of the "new religious movements" on this list are so strange that I find it astonishing they attracted any followers at all. Here's a sampler of some of the more peculiar ones:
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I am really distractible.
To say I have "squirrel brain" is a deep injustice to squirrels. At least squirrels have the focus to accomplish their purpose every day, which is to make sure our bird feeders are constantly empty. If I was a squirrel, I'd probably clamber my way up the post and past the inaccurately-named "squirrel baffle" and finally get to the feeder, and then just sit there with a puzzled look, thinking, "Why am I up here, again?"
My "Oh, look, something shiny" approach to life has at least a few upsides. I tend to make weird connections between things really fast, which long-time readers of Skeptophilia probably know all too well. If someone mentions something -- say, an upcoming visit to England -- in about 3.8 milliseconds my brain goes, England > Cornwall > Tintagel > King Arthur > Monty Python > the "bring out yer dead" scene > the Black Death > mass burials > a weird study I read a while back about how nettle plants need high calcium and phosphorus soils, so they're often found where skeletons have decomposed, and I'll say, cheerfully, "Did you know that nettles are edible? You can cook 'em like spinach," and it makes complete sense to me even though everyone else in the room is giving me a look like this:
Which, now that I come to think of it, is not really an upside after all.
A more significant downside, though, is that my inability to focus makes it really hard in noisy or chaotic environments. When I'm in a crowded restaurant or bar, I can pay attention for a while to what the people I'm with are saying, but there comes a moment -- and it usually does happen quite suddenly -- when my brain just goes, "Nope. Done," and the entire thing turns into a wall of white noise in which I'm unable to pick out a single word.
All of the above perhaps explains why I don't have much of a social life.
However, as a study last week in Nature Human Behavior shows, coordinating all the inputs and outputs the brain has to manage is an exceedingly complex task, and one a lot of us find daunting. And, most encouragingly, that capacity for focus is not related to intelligence. "When people talk about the limitations of the mind, they often put it in terms of, 'humans just don't have the mental capacity' or 'humans lack computing power,'" said Harrison Ritz, of Brown University, who led the study, in an interview with Science Daily. "[Our] findings support a different perspective on why we're not focused all the time. It's not that our brains are too simple, but instead that our brains are really complicated, and it's the coordination that's hard."
The researchers ran volunteers through a battery of cognitive tests while hooked up to fMRI machines, to observe what parts of their brain were involved in mental coordination and filtering. In one of them, they had to estimate the percentage of purple dots in a swirling maelstrom of mixed purple and green dots -- a task that makes me anxious just thinking about it. The researchers found two parts of the brain, the intraparietal sulcus and the anterior cingulate cortex, that seemed to be involved in the task, but each was functioning in different ways.
"You can think about the intraparietal sulcus as having two knobs on a radio dial: one that adjusts focusing and one that adjusts filtering," Ritz said. "In our study, the anterior cingulate cortex tracks what's going on with the dots. When the anterior cingulate cortex recognizes that, for instance, motion is making the task more difficult, it directs the intraparietal sulcus to adjust the filtering knob in order to reduce the sensitivity to motion.****************************************
After my diatribe a couple of days ago about the misuse of the word dimension, I got into a discussion with a friend that can be summed up as, "Okay, then how are we supposed to picture spaces with more than three dimensions?"
Well, the simple answer is that we can't. Our brains are equipped to manage pictorial representations of three dimensions or fewer. We can try to get a handle on it via analogy -- a particularly masterful example is Edwin Abbott's Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, which considers a two-dimensional character named A. Square, who has as hard a time picturing a third dimension as we do a fourth. When a three-dimensional sphere passes through Flatland, A. Square perceives it as a series of successive two-dimensional slices -- a circle that appears out of nowhere, grows larger, then shrinks and finally vanishes. The implication is that if a four-dimensional object -- a hypersphere, perhaps -- were to pass through our three-dimensional world, we'd see something similar; a projection of successive "slices," a sphere popping into existence, expanding, then contracting and vanishing.
But the fact remains that these are ways of thinking about a concept that is, honestly, beyond our ken. It's the problem that plagues many of the deep models of physics -- something that can be described clearly and accurately by the math is nevertheless impossible to visualize. It's a bit like the situation with quantum mechanics; the math is astonishingly precise and makes spot-on predictions, but if you ask most physicists, "So what physical reality is the math describing?" the answer you'll get is a slightly embarrassed "we don't know." (If they don't say "Shut up and calculate.")
It's a serious sticking point with people like myself, who understand best when we can picture what's going on. It was when I hit that spot in my undergraduate studies -- when the professor said, basically, "The math is what's real, here, don't bother trying to visualize it because you can't" -- that I decided that a career in physics was not in the cards for me.
Despite that, I have continued to be intrigued with notions like quantum indeterminacy and higher-dimensional space, even though when I read about them I often have an expression on my face like the one my puppy has when I explain a complex concept that is beyond his comprehension, such as why he shouldn't eat the sofa. I'm currently reading a wonderful book about the topic of extra dimensions, by the brilliant theoretical physicist Lisa Randall, called Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions, which does an outstanding job of bringing the topic down to a level we eager-but-not-so-bright puppies can understand. (And if you want more, she has an appendix with mathematical notes elucidating the topic in a deeper and more precise fashion.)
One of the more fascinating topics she goes into is the concept of a brane -- a cross-section of a higher-dimensional space a bit like A. Square's expanding-and-contracting circles. The name comes from the word membrane, because (like a cell membrane) a two-dimensional brane can be a boundary on a three-dimensional space. The surface of the Earth's ocean, for example, can be seen as a two-dimensional brane (not only acting as a boundary, but oscillating up and down into the three-dimensional space on either side).
Of course, you're not limited to two-dimensional branes in three-dimensional space. A generalized name for branes in p dimensions is called a p-brane, which was one of my father's favorite insults (albeit spelled differently).
Where it becomes more interesting, and unfortunately far harder to picture, is when you consider the idea from some physicists -- Randall has been one of the lead researchers in this field -- that our own three-dimensional universe is a three-brane within a higher-dimensional space. There is a tantalizing suggestion that this model may explain some of physics's most persistent mysteries, such as why the gravitational force is so weak compared to the other three. If we are actually living in a three-dimensional slice, the gravitational force within our bit of space may leak across into the higher dimensions, weakening its intensity and perhaps influencing other branes within the space (which might give physicists a way of finding evidence for the conjecture).
There's even the suggestion that the Big Bang may have occurred because of collision between two three-branes in a multi-dimensional hyperspace -- a model called ekpyrotic cosmology.
But we're still up against the problem that it's impossible to answer the question, "But what does it actually look like?" The mathematics is crisp and clear; any picture we come up with is, by comparison, incomplete and inaccurate. Take, for example, a hypercube, a symmetrical four-dimensional structure that can be described mathematically but is impossible to visualize. All we can do is consider what projections of it -- shadows, so to speak -- look like in three dimensions. Here's a particularly mesmerizing projection of a rotating hypercube:
So we're kind of ending where we started. All of this is just a teaser, really -- a brief excursion into a subject that is just now being investigated by some of the most brilliant minds on the planet. If the mathematics of branes and higher dimensions and whatnot is beyond you -- it certain is me -- we're left with trying to get a faint glimmer of understanding via analogy. Which only gets you so far.
But at least it gives us something our branes -- um, brains -- can handle.
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In his remarkable TED Talk "Can We Create New Senses for Humans?," neuroscientist David Eagleman describes the concept of the umwelt -- the part of the available stimulus space sampled by a particular animal's senses. A simple example is the thin slice of the electromagnetic spectrum our eyes are sensitive to -- the familiar ROYGBIV of the rainbow. There's plenty of electromagnetic radiation outside of that slice; gamma rays, x-rays, ultraviolet light, infrared light, microwaves, and radio waves are all ordinary photons, just like visible light is. It's just that our eyes aren't sensitive to those frequencies, so they're outside of our umwelt.
The umwelt also has to do with the relative weighting of senses; how big a part of our sensory world a particular experience constitutes. Most humans have a sense of smell, but my dogs live in a far richer olfactory world than I do. But even how those inputs are utilized -- i.e., what kind of information they provide for making sense of the world -- can vary greatly. Bats and dolphins use hearing in much the same way as we use our eyes, creating "sonic landscapes" of the objects around them. What's kind of amazing, though -- and one of the main points of Eagleman's talk -- is that humans can train their brains to use other "peripherals" (as he calls them) to learn about the world, such as blind people who have learned to navigate the space around them by making clicking noises and listening for echoes from nearby obstacles.
It's always been fascinating to me to consider how the world would look to a night-flying echolocating bat. Do they "see" their world through their ears and auditory cortex?
The topic of how other animals perceive their worlds -- and how different it could be from what we experience -- comes up because of a paper this week in the journal Nature about how elephantnose fish (Gnathonemus petersii), which live in murky streams in west and central Africa where eyesight doesn't serve much purpose, develop their visual picture of the world (including locating prey) using electric fields. And not only do they gain information by creating and sensing electrical signals, they enhance those pictures using the signals created by nearby members of their species, making them one of the only known animals that relies on collective signal production and sensing.
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The sixth dimension consists of a straight line of possible worlds. Here, you get an opportunity to access all possible worlds that started with the same original conditions, like the Big Bang Theory. It is known as the "phase space" in a set of parallel universes where everything that could have happened in our pasts, but did not, occurred in some other universe. The sixth dimension exists in the same space and time as the one we occupy, an overlay of our universe or a 3-D space containing every possible world.Right! Exactly! What?
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