The universal language

Sometimes I have thoughts that blindside me.

The last time that happened was a couple of days ago, while I was working in my office and our puppy, Jethro, was snoozing on the floor.  Well, as sometimes happens to dogs, he started barking and twitching in his sleep, and followed it up with sinister-sounding growls -- all the more amusing because while awake, Jethro is about as threatening as your average plush toy.

So my thought, naturally, was to wonder what he was dreaming about.  Which got me thinking about my own dreams, and recalling some recent ones.  I remembered some images, but mostly what came to mind were narratives -- first I did this, then the slimy tentacled monster did that.

That's when the blindside happened.  Because Jethro, clearly dreaming, was doing all that without language.

How would thinking occur without language?  For almost all humans, our thought processes are intimately tied to words.  In fact, the experience of having a thought that isn't describable using words is so unusual that we have a word for it -- ineffable.

Mostly, though, our lives are completely, um, effable.  So much so that trying to imagine how a dog (or any other animal) experiences the world without language is, for me at least, nearly impossible.

What's interesting is how powerful this drive toward language is.  There have been studies of pairs of "feral children" who grew up together but with virtually no interaction with adults, and in several cases those children invented spoken languages with which to communicate -- each complete with its own syntax, morphology, and phonetic structure.

A fascinating study that came out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, detailing research by Manuel Bohn, Gregor Kachel, and Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, showed that you don't even need the extreme conditions of feral children to induce the invention of a new mode of symbolic communication.  The researchers set up Skype conversations between monolingual English-speaking children in the United States and monolingual German-speaking children in Germany, but simulated a computer malfunction where the sound didn't work.  They then instructed the children to communicate as best they could anyhow, and gave them some words/concepts to try to get across.

They started out with some easy ones.  "Eating" resulted in the child miming eating from a plate, unsurprisingly.  But they moved to harder ones -- like "white."  How do you communicate the absence of color?  One girl came up with an idea -- she was wearing a polka-dotted t-shirt, and pointed to a white dot, and got the idea across.

But here's the interesting part.  When the other child later in the game had to get the concept of "white" across to his partner, he didn't have access to anything white to point to.  He simply pointed to the same spot on his shirt that the girl had pointed to earlier -- and she got it immediately.

Language is defined as arbitrary symbolic communication.  Arbitrary because with the exception of a few cases like onomatopoeic words (bang, pow, ping, etc.) there is no logical connection between the sound of a word and its referent.  Well, here we have a beautiful case of the origin of an arbitrary symbol -- in this case, a gesture -- that gained meaning only because the recipient of the gesture understood the context.

I'd like to know if such a gesture-language could gain another characteristic of true language -- transmissibility.  "It would be very interesting to see how the newly invented communication systems change over time, for example when they are passed on to new 'generations' of users," said study lead author Manuel Bohn, in an interview with Science Daily.  "There is evidence that language becomes more systematic when passed on."

In time, might you end up with a language that was so heavily symbolic and culturally dependent that understanding it would be impossible for someone who didn't know the cultural context -- like the Tamarians' language in the brilliant, poignant, and justifiably famous Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Darmok"?

"Sokath, his eyes uncovered!"

It's through cultural context, after all, that languages start developing some of the peculiarities (also seemingly arbitrary) that led Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf to develop the hypothesis that now bears their names -- that the language we speak alters our brains and changes how we understand abstract concepts.  In K. David Harrison's brilliant book The Last Speakers, he tells us about a conversation with some members of a nomadic tribe in Siberia who always described positions of objects relative to the four cardinal directions -- so at the moment my coffee cup wouldn't be on my right, it would be south of me.  When Harrison tried to explain to his Siberian friends how we describe positions, at first he was greeted with outright bafflement.

Then, they all erupted in laughter.  How arrogant, they told him, that you see everything as relative to your own body position -- as if when you turn around, suddenly the entire universe changes shape to compensate for your movement!

[Image available under a license at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Human_Language_Families_Map.PNG]

Another interesting example of this was the subject of a 2017 study by linguists Emanuel Bylund and Panos Athanasopoulos, and focused not on our experience of space but of time.  And they found something downright fascinating.  Some languages (like English) are "future-in-front," meaning we think of the future as lying ahead of us and the past behind us, turning time into something very much like a spatial dimension.  Other languages retain the spatial aspect, but reverse the direction -- such as the Peruvian language of Aymara.  For them, the past is in front, because you can remember it, just as you can see what's in front of you.  The future is behind you -- therefore invisible.

Mandarin takes the spatial axis and turns it on its head -- the future is down, the past is up (so the literal translation of the Mandarin expression of "next week" is "down week").  Asked to order photographs of someone in childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age, they will place them vertically, with the youngest on top.  English and Swedish speakers tend to think of time as a line running from left (past) to right (future); Spanish and Greek speakers tended to picture time as a spatial volume, as if it were something filling a container (so emptier = past, fuller = future).

All of which underlines how fundamental to our thinking language is.  And further baffles me when I try to imagine how other animals think.  Because whatever Jethro was imagining in his dream, he was clearly understanding and interacting with it -- even if he didn't know to attach the word "squirrel" to the concept.

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Talking to the animals

Language is defined as "arbitrary symbolic communication."  The "symbolic" part is because the word (either spoken or written) for a concept is representative of the concept itself, and "arbitrary" because with the exception of onomatopoeic words like bang and swish there is no logical connection between the word and the concept itself.  (For example, the English word dog, the Japanese word inu, and the French word chien all have the same referent, but other than learned association there's nothing especially doggy about any of those words.)

It's been an argument of long standing whether any other animal species have true language. A 2006 paper in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America strongly suggests that whales have one of the most characteristic features of language -- syntax, the way words are put together to form meaningful sentences.  (What whale songs actually mean is still a matter of conjecture.)  A lot of animal sounds, such as bird songs and dogs barking, are dismissed as "non-linguistic vocalization" -- they are communication, but lack the "arbitrary symbolic" part of the definition of language.

Myself, I wonder. I can tell when I hear my dog barking or growling whether he:

• is playing;
• sees a vicious intruder, like the UPS man;
• sees an even more vicious intruder, like a chipmunk;
• sees or hears my wife driving up;
• is excited because he sees me or my wife get the ball and he knows he's going to get to play fetch, which is his most favorite thing ever;
• is bored; or
• wants to come inside because it's raining and he doesn't like getting his little toesies wet.  (He's just that tough.)

Each of those different-toned barks is completely distinct, and certainly they're arbitrary in that the connection between the tone and what it's communicating really has no logic to it.  (An exception is that the "excited bark" and "bored bark" are clearly different in volume and energy level, which you could argue isn't arbitrary.)

Even dog lovers will admit, however, that the set of concepts expressed by barking or growling is fairly limited.  So if you want to call it language, it's pretty rudimentary.  The situation becomes blurrier, however, with animals with a rich vocal repertoire, like parrots and dolphins.  And our sense that we're the only ones with true language was dealt another blow by a study from the University of Zurich showing that primates called common marmosets not only speak regional dialects, when individuals are moved to a different region they learn -- and begin to use -- the dialect of the group they've joined.

"We could clearly show that the dialects of common marmosets are learned socially," said anthropologist Yvonne Zürcher, who co-authored the study.  "If their dialects were genetically determined, moving to a new place wouldn’t cause any change in calls.  The changes can’t be explained by differences in the environment, either."

Which seems to meet the characteristic of arbitrariness.

Again, I'm not trying to imply that marmosets have language in the same sense we do; whatever they're saying, it's unlikely that it has the richness and flexibility of human language.  But the black-and-white, "we have language and no one else does" attitude that has been prevalent for as long as the question has been considered may turn out to be as inaccurate as the "human vs. animal" distinction I often heard students voicing.  The truth is, vocal communication -- from the simplest (such as the hissing of a snake) to the most complex known (human language) -- is a continuum, just as are complexity, intelligence, emotional capacity, and anything else you might think separates us from the rest of Kingdom Animalia.

Which I think is pretty cool.

In any case, I better wrap this up, because Guinness is barking.  I know it's time to play ball.  He just told me so.

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The writing's on the wall

When you think about it, writing is pretty weird.

Honestly, language in general is odd enough.  Unlike (as far as we know for sure) any other species, we engage in arbitrary symbolic communication -- using sounds to represent words.  The arbitrary part means that which sounds represent what concepts is not because of any logical link; there's nothing any more doggy about the English word dog than there is about the French word chien or the German word Hund (or any of the other thousands of words for dog in various human languages).  With the exception of the few words that are onomatopoeic -- like bang, bonk, crash, and so on -- the word-to-concept link is random.

Written language adds a whole extra layer of randomness to it, because (again, with the exception of the handful of languages with truly pictographic scripts), the connection between the concept, the spoken word, and the written word are all arbitrary.  (I discussed the different kinds of scripts out there in more detail in a post a year ago, if you're curious.)

Which makes me wonder how such a complex and abstract notion ever caught on.  We have at least a fairly good model of how the alphabet used for the English language evolved, starting out as a pictographic script and becoming less concept-based and more sound-based as time went on:

The conventional wisdom about writing is that it began in Sumer something like six thousand years ago, beginning with fired clay bullae that allowed merchants to keep track of transactions by impression into soft clay tablets.  Each bulla had its own symbol; some were symbols for the type of goods, others for numbers.  Once the Sumerians made the jump of letting marks stand for concepts, it wasn't such a huge further step to make marks for other concepts, and ultimately, for syllables or individual sounds.

The reason all this comes up is that a recent paper in the Cambridge Archaeology Journal is claiming that marks associated with cave paintings in France and Spain that were long thought to be random are actual meaningful -- an assertion that would push back the earliest known writing another fourteen thousand years.

The authors assessed 862 strings of symbols dating back to the Upper Paleolithic in Europe -- most commonly dots, slashes, and symbols like a letter Y -- and came to the conclusion that they were not random, but were true written language, for the purpose of keeping track of the mating and birthing cycles of the prey animals depicted in the paintings.

The authors write;

[Here we] suggest how three of the most frequently occurring signs—the line <|>, the dot <•>, and the <Y>—functioned as units of communication.  We demonstrate that when found in close association with images of animals the line <|> and dot <•> constitute numbers denoting months, and form constituent parts of a local phenological/meteorological calendar beginning in spring and recording time from this point in lunar months.  We also demonstrate that the <Y> sign, one of the most frequently occurring signs in Palaeolithic non-figurative art, has the meaning <To Give Birth>.  The position of the <Y> within a sequence of marks denotes month of parturition, an ordinal representation of number in contrast to the cardinal representation used in tallies.  Our data indicate that the purpose of this system of associating animals with calendar information was to record and convey seasonal behavioural information about specific prey taxa in the geographical regions of concern.  We suggest a specific way in which the pairing of numbers with animal subjects constituted a complete unit of meaning—a notational system combined with its subject—that provides us with a specific insight into what one set of notational marks means.  It gives us our first specific reading of European Upper Palaeolithic communication, the first known writing in the history of Homo sapiens.

The claim is controversial, of course, and is sure to be challenged; moving the date of the earliest writing from six thousand to twenty thousand years ago isn't a small shift in our model.  But if it bears up, it's pretty extraordinary.  It further gives lie to our concept of Paleolithic humans as brutal, stupid "cave men," incapable of any kind of mental sophistication.  As I hope I made clear in my first paragraphs, any kind of written language requires subtlety and complexity of thought.  If the beauty of the cave paintings in places like Lascaux doesn't convince you of the intelligence and creativity of our distant forebears, surely this will.

So what I'm doing now -- speaking to my fellow humans via strings of visual symbols -- may have a much longer history than we ever thought.  It's awe-inspiring that we landed on this unique way to communicate; even more that we stumbled upon it so long ago.

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Talking to the animals

We just got back from a week-long trip to visit friends in Seattle, which meant boarding our two dogs with a local kennel.  We know and trust them -- we've used them for years -- and they love our dogs, quirks and all.  So we can leave them and be sure that they're in good hands.

Guinness, for the most part, has no problem with kenneling.  He knows he's going to get treats and play time, so for him it's kind of like sleep-away summer camp.  He jumps right into the car like it's going to be a great big adventure.

Cleo, on the other hand.

Our little Shiba Inu rescue was caged during much of her four years with an abusive breeder, and she has an absolute terror of being locked up.  She's relaxed considerably since we got her in December of 2021 -- especially once we installed a dog door so she can go in and out of our big fenced back yard whenever she wants -- but she still freaks out when the door closes behind her.  And she gets very, very wary when she knows we're going to pick her up and put her in the car (for example, on trips to the vet).  She's really snuggly and friendly if it's on her terms -- but if she knows she's going to be restrained, good freakin' luck.

Cleo in a calm moment

So we've tried everything we can think of to (1) lower the stress surrounding the situation, and (2) make it easier to get her when we absolutely have to.  Bribing her with food barely works; she's the least food-motivated dog I've ever met.  Calm talk has zero effect.  And my wife pointed out to me that my tightly-wound personality comes through in my voice, that if I say in as friendly and non-threatening a manner as I can, "Hey, Cleo, c'm'ere!  Want some cheese?" she not only isn't gonna respond to the bribe, she knows that I'm up to something.

I've tried whatever I can, but I don't seem to be able to help having it show when I'm anxious about something, like when we have to drop the dogs off at the kennel by 9 AM, and it's 8:45, and we're chasing Cleo all around the back yard.  At first, I was a little reluctant to believe that Cleo is really that sensitive to subtleties in my tone of voice, but after a few frustrating hour-long battles to come closer to her than ten feet, I have to admit Carol's got a point.

And some research out of the University of Copenhagen that appeared last week in the journal BMC - Biology bears out her contention that domestic animals are way better at picking up on vocal tone than anyone thought.  It's an odd claim, when you think about it; why should domesticated animals -- even ones like dogs, who have been in association with humans for tens of thousands of years -- recognize human social signals?  Even between closely-related primate species, the same signal can mean entirely different things.  For example, smiling is a sign of friendliness amongst humans, but smiling to a chimp is basically baring the teeth, and is considered an indicator of aggression or fear.

But the research seems unequivocal.  And they weren't even working with dogs; they primarily worked with pigs and horses.  They even controlled for the possibility that animals might learn certain words and have associations (positive or negative) that come along with them, something that is certainly true of most dogs.  (Say "do you want to play fetch?" to Guinness and he immediately turns into the canine ping-pong ball.)  What the researchers did was to hire a trained actor and gave him various gibberish phrases, with the instruction to speak them in a variety of differing tones.  They then recorded the animals' reactions on a lot of benchmarks -- ear position, facial tension, pupil dilation, and so on.

The animals had no problem picking up on the actor's emotional tone.  "Our results show that these animals are affected by the emotions we charge our voices with when we speak to or are around them," said Elodie Briefer, who co-authored the study.  "They react more strongly -- generally faster -- when they are met with a negatively charged voice, compared to having a positively charged voice played to them first.  In certain situations, they even seem to mirror the emotion to which they are exposed."

So Carol, apparently, is spot-on about Cleo picking up the tension in my voice.  The open question is what I can do about it.  Even when I'm aware of it and trying to moderate it, it apparently comes through loud and clear.  At least this is the last time for a while that we're going to kennel them, she doesn't have any upcoming vet appointments, and maybe just time and trust-building will convince her that whatever happens, she's safe.

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Catcalling

For many years we owned two cats, Puck and Geronimo.

Imagine two soft, gentle, affectionate, fluffy kitties.  Puck and Geronimo were the exact opposite of what you just pictured.

What neither of our cats looked even remotely like.  [Image courtesy of the Creative Commons Nicolas Suzor from Brisbane, Australia, Cute grey kitten, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Puck and Geronimo were siblings, both long-bodied, tough, lean, and solid black.  Puck had some odd features, though.  She had one single white whisker accentuating a face that was already kinda... off.  Her eyes didn't quite line up, so you never could be 100% sure of where she was looking.  She had one broken fang, so her tongue frequently protruded from the side of her mouth.  Plus, her voice sounded like a creaky wheel.  She was actually quite a sweet, affectionate cat, but even dedicated cat lovers had to admit she looked like she had a screw loose.

Geronimo, on the other hand, hated everyone, with two exceptions: (1) my wife; and (2) our dog, Grendel.  When we adopted Grendel, we were assured by the shelter that he was great with cats.  But shelter staff -- no insult intended, they do amazing work -- can sometimes overplay animals' good qualities in the interest of getting them adopted, so when we brought him home, we introduced him to the cats on leash, with me hanging on to my end of it like grim death.  Puck, he ignored completely.  Then he came up and sniffed Geronimo, who sniffed him back (without hissing, which was Geronimo's primary way of communicating with the entire world).  So I tentatively relaxed my end of the lead...

... and Grendel lifted his big front paw and body-slammed Geronimo to the floor.

I leaped forward, yelling, "Noooooooo....!!!!"  But then Grendel started to lick Geronimo's face.  Geronimo, although still pinned to the ground, started purring.  And thus was born the only interspecies gay romance I've ever witnessed.  They were boyfriends for as long as we had them.

But other than those exceptions, Geronimo viewed the entire world with something between haughty disdain and utter loathing.  Sometimes I'd look up from what I was doing to find Geronimo staring at me, his yellow eyes narrowed to slits, and he was clearly thinking, "I am going to disembowel you in your sleep."

What brings all this up is a paper that appeared in Nature last week about some research done at Kyoto University.  A team led by animal behavioral psychologist Saho Takagi did a clever set of experiments to see if cats could not only learn their own names but the names of other cats, and their results suggest that the answer is yes.

They worked with two sets of cats -- household pets, and "café cats."  Apparently in Japan, it's common to have cats living in cafés, for the benefit of patrons who would like to pet cats while they have their coffee and pastries, or at least have cats glaring at them and making harsh judgments about their general appearance.  They had their test subjects "softly restrained" by volunteers, who I hope were wearing body armor at the time, and the cats were given vocal stimuli (the cats' own names, the names of other cats living in the same place, and neutral words falling into neither categories), along with photographs of different cats, sometimes the photograph of the cat being named, sometimes not.

They found that the cats tended to look more quickly and for a longer duration at photographs when the photograph was of the cat being named.  It was evident that the cats tested did indeed know the names of the cats that cohabited with them.  (Except for one test subject who "completed only the first trial before escaping from the room and climbing out of reach.")

I found these data mildly surprising, considering that our own cats gave no evidence of knowing either their own names or each other's.  Geronimo usually responded to being called as follows:

Us:  Geronimo!!!

Geronimo:  Fuck you.

Us:  Geronimo, come get your dinner!

Geronimo:  Fuck you.

Us:  C'mon, kitty kitty kitty!

Geronimo:  Fuck you.

Us: We have a plate of fresh salmon for you!

Geronimo:  Fuck you...  Salmon?  Well, okay, maybe this time.

So I don't know how we'd have been able to tell if he did know his name.

But all of this does point out something I've always thought, which is that a lot of animals are way smarter than we give them credit for.  I know one of our current dogs, Guinness, always gives us this incredibly intent look when we talk to him, as if he's trying his hardest to understand every word we're saying.  Our other dog, Cleo, spends a lot of time ignoring us, but she's a Shiba Inu, which in my opinion is a cat wearing a dog suit.

So okay, maybe that doesn't exactly support the contention that our pets are really smart.  But my point stands.

In any case, that's our cool piece of animal behavior research for today.  If you are the owner of two or more cats, see if you can figure out if they know each other's names.

If any of your cats have a temperament like Geronimo's, you might want to have fresh salmon handy.

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Can you hear me?

Most of you have probably heard of SETI -- the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.  SETI is an umbrella term that links dozens of different projects and approaches, but is most often connected to the SETI Institute, founded in 1984 specifically to address the question of whether extraterrestrial life exists, and if so, whether we could communicate with it.

Just detecting the evidence of an extraterrestrial intelligence (assuming there is any) is fraught with difficulties.  To begin with the most glaring problem, there are an estimated 250 billion stars in the Milky Way alone, which makes for a hell of a survey area.  And even if you start by looking only at the relatively nearby ones, there's still the question of what exactly you're looking for.  Radio wave signals are an obvious choice, and we have radio telescopes that do exactly that, but to start with, that's an awfully broad band of frequencies (between 300 and 3,000 kHz).  Even to pick it up would mean not only listening to the right region of space, but being tuned to the right frequency at the right time.

But there are other problems.  Suppose there is an intelligent civilization on a star 25 light years from us, and they're sending out a radio signal of some sort.  There are two possibilities, of which the first is that the signal comes from their own intraplanet communications, like the oft-discussed bubble of transmissions from our early radio and television, which is currently carrying snippets of I Love Lucy and Gilligan's Island that are sweeping past planets and stars seventy-odd light years away.  The second is that the signal is a deliberately-deployed beacon, an interstellar lighthouse specifically for communication with other civilizations.

Each of these presents its own problems.  In the first case, the bubble of radio transmissions gets fainter and fainter as it expands, according to the inverse-square law of intensity.  So as funny as it is to think of some extraterrestrials on the third planet of Vega judging humanity by The Beverly Hillbillies, my suspicion is that by the time it arrived the signal would be so faint that it would be nearly impossible to detect.  (And that's not even considering degradation of the signal from passing through interstellar dust and gas.)

The second sounds more promising, but it too has a difficulty.  If you're beaming a signal toward another star, you get an improvement in intensity because the logical way to do it is to collimate the beam as tightly as possible.  You're still subject to the inverse-square law, but a tightly-collimated beam has such a narrow cross-section and high intensity that it could retain its power for a great deal longer.  (Consider that even back in 1962, the Lunar Laser Ranging experiment successfully collimated a laser tightly enough that they were able to reflect it from the Moon, and detect the reflected pulse back here on Earth 2.6 seconds later.)  But the narrower your beam, the smaller the area of your potential target.  You would have to have a good reason to choose a particular star, or at least a region of space, or your signal would miss detection entirely.

So broad signal/low intensity, narrow signal/smaller sample size.  There doesn't seem to be any way around those equal-and-opposite problems.

There's also the difficulty of how exactly you could encode a message that would be understandable to a non-human intelligence.  Once the signal is received, how do you make sure the aliens can figure out what it's saying?  This question has most recently been tackled by a team led by Jonathan Jiang of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and this is in fact why the topic comes up.  Jiang has made a proposal to send out a message aimed toward the densest patch of stars in the night sky, in the direction of the galactic center in the constellation Sagittarius.  To be successful such message would have to contain enough information to (1) tell its recipients that it's not just an anomalous radio blip from a natural source, (2) give an indication of how to translate it, and (3) tell the extraterrestrials a little about where and who we are.

Jiang's proposal addresses all three.  It first contains an easily-deciphered binary code that links to our base-10 counting system, and lists off the first 24 prime numbers.  (Shades of the wonderful movie Contact, in which SETI researcher Ellie Arroway recognized that there is no naturally-occurring process that would produce blips in prime-number groups.)  Once that (hopefully) convinces the aliens that we're relatively intelligent, the message goes on to communicate our understanding of time (using a standard time interval -- the spin-flip transition of hydrogen -- that would hopefully be known to any technological species).  There would be information using this universal clock telling when the signal was sent, which would tell the recipient how far away we are.  Last, there would be a binary-encoded sketch of two humans, and some basic information about our biology and biochemistry, reminiscent of the gold plaques placed on Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 when they were launched in (respectively) 1972 and 1973.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

There's also the question, of course, of whether alerting the aliens to our presence (and giving them directions for how to get here, no less) would be a good thing.  Back in 2011, physicist Stephen Hawking warned us that first contact might not be quite as cheery as it was in Star Trek.  "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet," Hawking said.  "I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet.  Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach.  If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans...  They could be billions of years ahead of us technologically.  If so, they will be vastly more powerful and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria."

Which is both humbling and scary.  The positive side of all this is that even if the aliens do turn out to be hostile, they're still very far away.  Let's say that there is intelligent life on a planet orbiting Gliese 581 (the home of the first Earth-like planet ever discovered).  Gliese 581 is 20.4 light years away, so it's in our general neighborhood.  If we sent a signal to them saying hello, they'd get it 20.4 years from now, and we'd receive their response in (minimally) 40.8 years.  If instead of just sending a radio response back they were offended by our sending them biochemistry and pictures of naked people, and launched an attack fleet, it'd be even longer before they arrived here.  So even if they're hostile, we're safe for some time.

That's assuming that they haven't found some way to overcome the light-speed barrier and get here at superluminal velocities.  In that case, we might well be fucked.

But, like Hawking, I still think we should do it.  Finding out we're not alone in the cosmos would be the most stupendous discovery humans have ever made.  Jiang and his team don't have a proposed date for beaming out our "Can you hear me?" message, but there's no reason why it couldn't be done soon.  And if it does reach an extraterrestrial intelligence, we'll just have to cross our fingers and hope it's not the Daleks, Stenza, Sontarans, or the Crystalline Entity.

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Canine gap analysis

One of the reasons that it's (generally) much easier to learn to read a second language than it is to understand it in speech has to do not with the words, but with the spaces in between them.

Students learning to understand spoken conversation in another language have the common complaint that "they talk so fast."  They don't, really, or at least no faster than the speakers of your native language.  But unfamiliarity with the lexicon of the new language makes it hard to figure out where the gaps are between adjacent words.  Unless you concentrate (and sometimes even if you do), it sounds like one continuous stream of random phonemes.

As an aside, sometimes I have the same problem with English spoken with a different accent than the one I grew up with.  The character of Yaz in the last three seasons of Doctor Who is from Yorkshire, and her accent -- especially when she's agitated and speaking quickly -- sometimes leaves me thinking, "Okay, what did she just say?"  (That's why I usually watch with the subtitles on.)  This isn't unique to accents from the UK, of course; it's why a lot of non-southerners find southern accents difficult to parse.  Say to someone from Louisiana, "Jeetyet? and they'll clearly hear "Did you eat yet?"; and one of the most common greetings is "howzyamommandem?"

I'd never really considered how important the spaces between the words are until I ran into some research last week in Current Biology in a paper entitled, "Dogs Learn About Word Boundaries as Human Infants Do," that showed dogs -- perhaps unique amongst non-human animals -- are able to use some pretty complex mental calculations to figure out where the gaps are in "Do you want to play ball?"  Say that phrase out loud, especially in an excited tone, and you'll notice that in the actual sounds there are minuscule gaps, or none at all, so what they're listening for can't be little bits of silence.

By looking at brain wave activity in pre-verbal infants presented with actual speech, speech using unfamiliar/rare words, and gibberish, scientists found that the neural activity spiked when syllables are spoken that almost always (in the infant's experience) occur together.  An example is the phrase, "Do you want breakfast now?"  The syllables /brek/ and /fǝst/ aren't used much outside of the word "breakfast," so apparently the brain is doing some complex statistical calculations to identify that as a discrete word and not adjoined to the words coming before or afterward.

What the current research finds is that dogs are doing precisely the same thing when they listen to human language.

The authors write:

To learn words, humans extract statistical regularities from speech.  Multiple species use statistical learning also to process speech, but the neural underpinnings of speech segmentation in non-humans remain largely unknown. Here, we investigated computational and neural markers of speech segmentation in dogs, a phylogenetically distant mammal that efficiently navigates humans’ social and linguistic environment.  Using electroencephalography (EEG), we compared event-related responses (ERPs) for artificial words previously presented in a continuous speech stream with different distributional statistics...  Using fMRI, we searched for brain regions sensitive to statistical regularities in speech.  Structured speech elicited lower activity in the basal ganglia, a region involved in sequence learning, and repetition enhancement in the auditory cortex.  Speech segmentation in dogs, similar to that of humans, involves complex computations, engaging both domain-general and modality-specific brain areas.

I know that when I talk to Guinness -- not using the short, clipped words or phrases recommended by dog trainers, but full complex sentences -- he has this incredibly intent, alert expression, and I get the sense that he's really trying to understand what I'm saying.  I've heard people say that outside of a few simple commands like "sit" or "stay," dogs respond only to tone of voice, not the actual words spoken.

Apparently that isn't true.

So I suppose when I say "whoozagoodboy?", he actually knows it's him.

"Keeping track of patterns is not unique to humans: many animals learn from such regularities in the surrounding world, which is called statistical learning," said Marianna Boros of Eötvös Loránd University, who co-authored the study, in an interview with Vinkmag.  "What makes speech special is its efficient processing requires complex computations.  To learn new words from continuous speech, it is not enough to count how often certain syllables occur together.  It is much more efficient to calculate the probability of those syllables occurring together.  This is exactly how humans, even eight-month-old infants, solve the seemingly difficult task of word segmentation: they calculate complex statistics about the probability of one syllable following the other.  Until now we did not know if any other mammal can also use such complex computations to extract words from speech.  We decided to test family dogs’ brain capacities for statistical learning from speech.  Dogs are the earliest domesticated animal species and probably the one we speak most often to.  Still, we know very little about the neural processes underlying their word learning capacities."

So remember this next time you talk to your dog.  He might well be understanding more than you realize.  He might not get much if you read to him from A Brief History of Time, but my guess is that common speech is less of a mystery to him than it might have seemed.

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My master's degree is in historical linguistics, with a focus on Scandinavia and Great Britain (and the interactions between them) -- so it was with great interest that I read Cat Jarman's book River Kings: A New History of Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Road.

Jarman, who is an archaeologist working for the University of Bristol and the Scandinavian Museum of Cultural History of the University of Oslo, is one of the world's experts on the Viking Age.  She does a great job of de-mythologizing these wide-traveling raiders, explorers, and merchants, taking them out of the caricature depictions of guys with blond braids and horned helmets into the reality of a complex, dynamic culture that impacted lands and people from Labrador to China.

River Kings is a brilliantly-written analysis of an often-misunderstood group -- beginning with the fact that "Viking" isn't an ethnic designation, but an occupation -- and tracing artifacts they left behind traveling between their homeland in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark to Iceland, the Hebrides, Normandy, the Silk Road, and Russia.  (In fact, the Rus -- the people who founded, and gave their name to, Russia -- were Scandinavian explorers who settled in what is now the Ukraine and western Russia, intermarrying with the Slavic population there and eventually forming a unique melded culture.)

If you are interested in the Vikings or in European history in general, you should put Jarman's book in your to-read list.  It goes a long way toward replacing the legendary status of these fierce, sea-going people with a historically-accurate reality that is just as fascinating.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Doggie determination

Our dog Guinness has brought home the truth of the quip that cats are teenagers, dogs are toddlers.

His engine has two settings: "full throttle" and "off."  We got him two and a half years ago as an eleven-month-old rescue, so he has settled down a little as compared to the irrepressible puppy exuberance he came with.  Which is a bit of a relief.  Handling seventy pounds' worth of irrepressible puppy exuberance can be a little exhausting.

He is never content unless he's interacting with either me or my wife.  "Will you please go entertain yourself for a while?" is a common phrase heard around Chez Bloomgarden-Bonnet.  And he doesn't just want to interact with us any old way; it has to be exactly the right way.  He loves to play fetch -- can do so for hours on end -- but not if we're standing on the patio.  No, throwing the ball into the lawn from the patio is not the proper way.  A true game of fetch must be played from a seated position, in one of the lawn chairs next to the pond.  I kid you not.  From the patio, he'll chase the ball once, pick it up, and then stare at us with an expression like, "What the hell am I supposed to do with this?"  Move a hundred yards in a westward direction to the lawn chairs by the pond, and he will happily retrieve over and over.  And over and over and over.

No, I don't get it, either.

Be that as it may, he is extraordinarily sensitive to our moods, tone of voice, and body language, and seems to watch us constantly for cues about what is going on.  We can talk about him without using any obvious clue-words like his name, or even dog or play or ball, and he immediately knows (to judge by the fact that his tail will start wagging, even if he appeared to be sound asleep).  When we talk to him directly, he stares at us with this eager expression, like he really wants to understand every word we're saying.  If it's a bit above his head, he gives us the Canine Head-Tilt of Puzzlement:

"I'm so disappointed in myself," he seems to be saying.  "I will try much harder to understand next time."

You might even say he shows dogged determination.  *rimshot*

He's also one of the most affectionate dogs I've ever known.  Like I said, his number one priority is interacting with us as much as possible.

The reason all this comes up is because of a study that appeared this week in the journal Current Biology that strongly suggests dogs come pre-wired to connect with humans -- i.e., this isn't learned behavior.  Dogs may refine these skills, and learn specific cues and behaviors, but the ability is innate.

Led by Hannah Salomons of Duke University, this study compared the behavior of puppies and wolf cubs, both groups of which had been given equal prior exposure to humans.  They found that the puppies automatically responded to people -- they were much more willing to come up to a person spontaneously, make eye contact, and look to the human for cues about what to do.  Wolves, on the other hand, started out afraid, and would huddle in the corner when a person came close, and even once habituated to people's presence would mostly ignore them rather than interact.  "They acted like I was a piece of furniture," Salomons said.

Most fascinating of all, puppies seem to come equipped with at least some level of a "theory of mind" -- knowledge that their own perspective isn't shared by everyone, and that the world would look different through the eyes of another.  One of the most rudimentary theory-of-mind tests is to point at a treat on the floor that is visually hidden from the dog -- i.e., you can see it, the dog can't.  Wolves don't respond to this at all; dogs usually pick up on it right away.  And it's a more sophisticated response than it seems at first.  To figure out what pointing means, the dog has to think, "If I was standing where (s)he is, sight-lining down the arm toward the floor, where would it be indicating?"

"Dogs are born with this innate ability to understand that we're communicating with them and we're trying to cooperate with them," Salomons said, in an interview with Science Daily.

We not only cooperate with them, we also provide a valuable opportunity for them to get dressed up fancy now and again.

It seems like this in-touchness dogs are born with has come from millennia of domestication, where their use as companions meant that generation after generation people were selecting the most responsive, interactive dogs, meaning their capacity for bonding to humans increased over time.  Contrast that to cats -- and I mean no disparagement of our feline friends -- but they are often characterized as more aloof and self-reliant than dogs.  No surprise, really; having cats as companion animals is a relatively recent innovation, while there is good evidence that dogs have been companions back at least thirty thousand years.

"This study really solidifies the evidence that the social genius of dogs is a product of domestication," said Brian Hare, professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke, senior author of the study.  "It's this ability that makes dogs such great service animals.  It is something they are really born prepared to do."

Now, y'all'll have to excuse me.  Guinness wants something.  I'm not sure if it's food, petting, or an early round of fetch-the-ball.  Maybe some of each.  Don't worry, I'll figure it out.

Which, incidentally, brings up the awkward question of who domesticated whom.

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I've loved Neil de Grasse Tyson's brilliant podcast StarTalk for some time.  Tyson's ability to take complex and abstruse theories from astrophysics and make them accessible to the layperson is legendary, as is his animation and sense of humor.

If you've enjoyed it as well, this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is a must-read.  In Cosmic Queries: StarTalk's Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going, Tyson teams up with science writer James Trefil to consider some of the deepest questions there are -- how life on Earth originated, whether it's likely there's life on other planets, whether any life that's out there might be expected to be intelligent, and what the study of physics tells us about the nature of matter, time, and energy.

Just released three months ago, Cosmic Queries will give you the absolute cutting edge of science -- where the questions stand right now.  In a fast-moving scientific world, where books that are five years old are often out-of-date, this fascinating analysis will catch you up to where the scientists stand today, and give you a vision into where we might be headed.  If you're a science aficionado, you need to read this book.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The network of nonsense

I've long been fascinated with communication network theory -- the model that maps out the rules behind the spread of information (and its ugly cousin, disinformation).  Back in my day (you'll have to imagine me saying this in a creaky old-geezer voice) both moved a lot more slowly; communities devoted to conspiracies, for example, had to rely on such clunky modes of transmission as newsletters, magazines, and word-of-mouth.

Now?  The internet, and especially social media, have become rapid-transit networks for bullshit.  The phenomenon of a certain idea, video, meme, or link "going viral" has meant that virtually overnight, it can go from being essentially unknown to basically everyone who is online seeing it.  There was nothing even close to comparable forty years ago.

Communications network theory looks at connectedness between different communities and individuals, the role of nodes (people or groups who are multiply-connected to many other people and groups), and "tastemakers" -- individuals whose promotion of something virtually guarantees it gaining widespread notice.  The mathematics of this model is, unfortunately, over my head, but the concepts are fascinating.  Consider the paper that came out this week in the journal Social Media and Society, "From 'Nasa Lies' to 'Reptilian Eyes': Mapping Communication About 10 Conspiracy Theories, Their Communities, and Main Propagators on Twitter," by Daniela Mahl, Jing Zeng, and Mike Schäfer of the University of Zürich.

In this study, they looked at the communities that have grown up around ten different conspiracy theories:

1. Agenda 21, which claims that the United Nations has a plan to strip nations of their sovereignty and launch a one-world government
2. The anti-vaccination movement
3. The Flat Earthers
4. Chemtrails -- the idea we're being dosed with psychotropic chemicals via jet exhaust contrails
5. Climate change deniers
6. Directed energy weapons -- high-intensity beams are being used to kill people and start natural disasters like major forest fires
7. The Illuminati
8. Pizzagate -- the claim that the Democrats are running some kind of nationwide human trafficking/pedophilia ring
9. The Reptilians -- many major world leaders are reptilian aliens in disguise, and you can sometimes catch a glimpse of their real appearance in video clips
10. "9/11 was an inside job"

They also looked at connections to two non-conspiracy communities -- pro-vaccination and anti-flat-Earth.

The researchers analyzed thousands of different accounts and tens of thousands of tweets to see what kind of overlap there was between these twelve online communities, as based on hashtag use, retweets, and so on.

What they found was that the communities studied formed eight tightly-networked clusters.  Here's a diagram of their results:

There are a couple of interesting features of this.

First, that six of the communities are so entangled that they form two multiply-connected clusters, the chemtrail/Illuminati/Reptilians cluster, and the Pizzagate/9/11/climate change denial clusters.  Both make sense considering who is pushing each of them -- the first by such conspiracy loons as David Icke, and the second by far-right media like Fox, OAN, and Newsmax.

Note, however, that even if three of the other conspiracy theories -- the anti-vaxxers, Agenda 21, and directed energy weapons -- are distinct enough that they form their own nodes, they still have strong connections to all the others.  The only one that stands out as essentially independent of all the others is the Flat Earthers.

Evidently the Flerfs are so batshit crazy that even the other crazies don't want to have anything to do with them.

This demonstrates something that I've long believed; that acceptance of one loony idea makes you more likely to fall for others.  Once you've jettisoned evidence-based science as your touchstone for deciding what is the truth, you'll believe damn near anything.

The other thing that jumps out at me is that the pro-vaccine and anti-flat-Earth groups have virtually no connections to any of the others.  They are effectively closed off from the groups they're trying to counter.  What this means is discouraging; that the people working to fight the network of nonsense by creating accounts dedicated to promoting the truth are sitting in an echo chamber, and their well-meant and fervent messages are not reaching the people whose minds need to be changed.

It's something that I've observed before; that it's all very well for people on Twitter and Facebook to post well-reasoned arguments about why Tucker Carlson, Tomi Lahren, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert are full of shit, but they're never going to be read by anyone who doesn't already agree.

It's why Fox News is so insidious.  Years ago, they and their spokespeople, commentators like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, started off by convincing their listeners that everyone else was lying.  Once you've decided that the only way to get the truth is to rely on one single source, you're at the mercy of the integrity and accuracy of that source.  In the case of Fox, you are vulnerable to being manipulated by a group of people whose representation of the news is so skewed it has run afoul of Great Britain's Office of Communications multiple times on the basis of inaccuracy, partiality, and inflammatory content.  (And in fact, last year Fox began an international streaming service in the UK, largely motivated by the fact that online content is outside the jurisdiction of the Office of Communications.)

Mahl et al. write:

Both anti-conspiracy theory communities, Anti-Flat Earth and Pro-Vaccination, are centered around scientists and medical practitioners.  Their use of pro-conspiracy theory hashtags likely is an attempt to directly engage and confront users who disseminate conspiracy theories.  Studies from social psychology have shown that cross-group communication can be an effective way to resolve misunderstandings, rumors, and misinformation.  By deliberately using pro-conspiracy hashtags, anti-conspiracy theory accounts inject their ideas into the conspiracists’ conversations.  However, our study suggests that this visibility does not translate into cross-group communication, that is, retweeting each other’s messages.  This, in turn, indicates that debunking efforts hardly traverse the two clusters.

I wish I had an answer to all this.  It's one thing if a group of misinformed people read arguments countering their beliefs and reject them; it's another thing entirely if the misinformed people are so isolated from the truth that they never even see it.  Twitter and Facebook have given at least a nod toward deplatforming the worst offenders -- one study found that the flow of political misinformation on Twitter dropped by 75% after Donald Trump's account was suspended -- but it's not dealing with the problem as a whole, because there even if you delete the platforms of the people responsible for the wellspring of bullshit, there will always be others waiting in the wings to step in and take over.

However discouraging this is, it does mean that the skeptics and science types can't give up.  Okay, we're not as multiply-connected as the wackos are; so we have to be louder, more insistent, more persistent.  Saying "oh, well, nothing we can do about it" and throwing in the towel will have only one effect; making sure the disinformation platforms reach more people and poison more conduits of discourse.

And I, for one, am not ready to sit back and accept that as inevitable.

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I have often been amazed and appalled at how the same evidence, the same occurrences, or the same situation can lead two equally-intelligent people to entirely different conclusions.  How often have you heard about people committing similar crimes and getting wildly different sentences, or identical symptoms in two different patients resulting in completely different diagnoses or treatments?

In Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, authors Daniel Kahneman (whose wonderful book Thinking, Fast and Slow was a previous Skeptophilia book-of-the-week), Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein analyze the cause of this "noise" in human decision-making, and -- more importantly -- discuss how we can avoid its pitfalls.  Anything we can to to detect and expunge biases is a step in the right direction; even if the majority of us aren't judges or doctors, most of us are voters, and our decisions can make an enormous difference.  Those choices are critical, and it's incumbent upon us all to make them in the most clear-headed, evidence-based fashion we can manage.

Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein have written a book that should be required reading for anyone entering a voting booth -- and should also be a part of every high school curriculum in the world.  Read it.  It'll open your eyes to the obstacles we have to logical clarity, and show you the path to avoiding them.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Couplespeak

Like a lot of couples, my wife and I have a great many inside jokes and turns of phrase that amuse us no end but must puzzle the hell out of everyone else.

Part of the reason, of course, is that we've been together for over twenty years, and during that time shared experience has given us a rich reservoir to draw from.  Sometimes, it's a combination of two or more memories that gives words their relevance, and those are even harder to explain should anyone ask.  For example, I ended a series of texts with my wife a couple of weeks ago, "Thank you, Bloopie," and she started laughing so hard she was afraid her coworkers would come in and demand to know what was so funny, which would have required her to explain that it was a combination of bits from Seinfeld and an obscure British spoof of middle school educational videos called Look Around You, and there was no way the explanation would have elicited anything more than puzzled head tilts and questions about why that was even funny.

Another example is why we always laugh when we hear Bill Withers's song "Ain't No Sunshine," the lyrics of which are anything but funny.  This one is at least explainable; when we were in Spain about fifteen years ago we rented a room for the night in a B&B, and the guy in the next room spent what seemed like hours practicing the trombone.  Amongst his Greatest Hits was -- I kid you not -- "Ain't No Sunshine."

He seemed to particularly enjoy the "WOMP WOMP WOMP" part at the end of each line.

The whole subject comes up because of a paper a couple of weeks ago in the Journal of Communication, which gave the results of a longitudinal study of communication between couples as they moved deeper -- and subsequently, sometimes out of -- relationships.  Instead of verbal communication, which would have required the participants to recall accurately what they'd said, the researchers used text messages, and found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that as relationships progress, the language of the texts becomes more and more similar.

The research, done by Miriam Brinberg (Pennsylvania State University) and Nilam Ram (Stanford University), looked at three parts of electronic communication: syntactic alignment (sentence structure, use of the different parts of speech, use of punctuation), semantic alignment (word meaning, including similarity of word choice where there's more than one way of expressing the same concept), and overall alignment (including features like the use of shortcuts like "omwh" for "on my way home").  They found that at the beginning of a romantic relationship, all three of them converge fairly quickly, and the process of becoming more similar continues -- albeit at a slower pace -- thereafter.

One interesting potential direction for further research is whether both partners shifted their speech, or if one of them moved more than the other.  "There's some research in this area that looks at power dynamics," study co-author Brinberg said, in an interview with The Academic Times.  "For example, in a job interview, the interviewee might make their language more similar to the interviewer to indicate they are more similar to them, or employees may alter their language to match that of their supervisor.  As with those examples, one might wonder if, in romantic relationship formation, there is one person who is changing their language to match the other."

In my own case, it doesn't seem like one of us altered our language use further than the other; more that we both gradually picked up phrases that then had a shared meaning.  The one exception I can think of is that there's been an unequal trade in words from our respective ethnic backgrounds.  My wife, who is Jewish, has a great many words and phrases from Yiddish that are incredibly expressive, explaining why I now use words like bupkis and verklempt and schvitz and schmutz.  Carol has picked up fewer French words from me, although I know that she's used words like macacries (Cajun French for "knick-knacks") even though there's a perfectly good Yiddish word for the same concept (tchotckies).  Other than that, I think most of the French words she's learned from me have to do with cooking, which I suppose makes sense.

But it's a fascinating phenomenon.  Language is much more than flat denotative meaning; there are wide shades and gradations of connotation that can be extremely subtle, one reason why it's so hard to learn a second (or third or fourth) language fluently.  I still remember my Intro to Linguistics professor explaining the difference between denotation and connotation using the example of "Have a nice day" versus "I hope you manage to enjoy your next twenty-four hours."

If there are cultural nuances that would be difficult to explain to a non-native speaker, consider that within those there are additional personal nuances that might be incomprehensible outside of the small number of people in the in-group who "get it," making the interpretation of informal speech a lot more complex than you might have guessed.

So that's our excursion into the subtleties of linguistics for today.  Now, I gotta go get ready for work, and I need to take a shower and wash off the schvitz and schmutz.  Can't show up looking all verklempt.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun: Arik Kershenbaum's The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens and Ourselves.  Kershenbaum tackles a question that has fascinated me for quite some time; is evolution constrained?  By which I mean, are the patterns you see in most animals on Earth -- aerobic cellular respiration, bilateral symmetry, a central information processing system/brain, sensory organs sensitive to light, sound, and chemicals, and sexual reproduction -- such strong evolutionary drivers that they are likely to be found in alien organisms?

Kershenbaum, who is a zoologist at the University of Cambridge, looks at how our environment (and the changes thereof over geological history) shaped our physiology, and which of those features would likely appear in species on different alien worlds.  In this fantastically entertaining book, he considers what we know about animals on Earth -- including some extremely odd ones -- and uses that to speculate about what we might find when we finally do make contact (or, at the very least, detect signs of life on an exoplanet using our earthbound telescopes).

It's a wonderfully fun read, and if you're fascinated with the idea that we might not be alone in the universe but still think of aliens as the Star Trek-style humans with body paint, rubber noses, and funny accents, this book is for you.  You'll never look at the night sky the same way again.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Listen to the hands

I've been interested for a long while in the interplay between our senses -- how all of our sensory organs work together to create our perceptual world.  A simple example -- at least to describe, if not to explain completely -- is proprioception, which is our sense of the position of our bodies.  If you ask your typical biology-teacher-type to explain how we sense what direction is up and what direction is down, (s)he will probably tell you that it's the semicircular canals of the inner ear, that act a bit like a carpenter's level to sense the pull of gravity.  This is the organ that gets fouled up when you spin around and become dizzy, and it's skew signals from the semicircular canals that seem to be at fault in people who get motion sickness.

The truth, of course, is more complicated.  You achieve proprioception not just using your inner ears but at least two other ways -- the tactile sense (i.e. the pressure under the soles of your feet if you're standing, and against your butt if you're sitting), and your visual sense (you can see your surroundings and the position of your body relative to them).  Honestly, you need all three, or your sense of balance gets pretty precarious.  If you doubt this, try a simple experiment -- stand on one leg, close your eyes, and then tip your head backward, thus confounding all of your proprioceptive senses except the feeling of pressure under your foot.  If you can keep your balance more than a few seconds, you're doing well.  (It is strongly suggested that if you try this, you either have a spotter or else surround yourself with pillows.)

This isn't just true of proprioception.  Even more surprising is the McGurk Effect, a bizarre result of the interaction between sight and hearing in determining what someone is saying.  If a person with decent vision and hearing watches a friend speaking and is trying to determine what they're saying, you would think that if the eyes and ears disagree, the ears would win.

But no.  In the McGurk Effect, if you are watching someone say a syllable like "va" but you see them at the same time moving their mouth as if they were saying "ba," you hear "ba."  The eyes overrule the ears.  It's absolutely convincing even if you know what's going on.  (In the video I linked in the previous paragraph, I tried listening to the guy saying "va" and mouthing "ba" over and over, but closed my eyes on every other syllable, I heard "ba va ba va ba va."  Try it.)

A paper last week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B gives us another curious example of this.  It has to do with "talking with your hands" -- something I do incessantly.  In fact, one of my classes once challenged me to deliver my lecture while sitting on my hands.  I lasted about two minutes before saying, in some dismay, "I can't do this."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Luisfi, 071228 human hands, CC BY-SA 3.0]

In "Beat Gestures Influence Which Speech Sounds You Hear," by Hans Rutger Bosker and David Peeters of the Max Planck Institute for Biolinguistics, we read about how you perceive the stress difference in words that have the same sounds but a different stress pattern -- such as "disCOUNT" (the verb) and "DIScount" (the noun), or "preSENT" (verb) and "PREsent" (noun).  With no visual cues, the test subjects were good at discerning what was said; unsurprising, as in English (and many other languages) stress is an important clue to meaning.

But when a video was added showing the speaker using a "beat gesture" -- the kind of strong, up-and-down motion of the arms many speakers use for emphasis -- it created something the researchers call a "manual McGurk Effect."  The speaker may have said "obJECT," but if (s)he used a beat gesture on the first syllable, the listener heard "OBject."

"Listeners listen not only with their ears, but also with their eyes," said study co-author Hans Bosker, in an interview in Science Direct. "These findings are the first to show that beat gestures influence which speech sounds you hear...  Our findings also have the potential to enrich human-computer interaction and improve multimodal speech recognition systems.  It seems clear that such systems should take into account more than just speech."

Communication is subtle and complex, which is one of the reasons why it's so hard to learn a second language fluently.  Words with the same literal definition (denotation) can carry an entirely different emotional or subtextual message (connotation), something it takes a long while for a new speaker to pick up.  (To illustrate this point, my Intro to Linguistics professor said, "Consider how your words would be taken if you told someone 'Have a nice day,' as opposed to 'I hope you manage to enjoy your next 24 hours.'")

But as the Bosker and Peeters paper shows, it's more than just the sounds and how they're interpreted.  Facial movements and gestures of the hands and arms all combine to give us information about not only the emotional content of what's said, but its actual denotative meaning.  This might lie behind why it's so common for people to misinterpret written sentences, as in emails and texts.  If the speaker was standing in front of us, we'd see (s)he was joking, or not; cheerful or angry; speaking literally or being sarcastic.  We need more information than the words alone to understand them properly -- adding another layer to the already complicated affair of perceiving and interpreting our world accurately.

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Science fiction enthusiasts will undoubtedly know the classic 1973 novel by Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama.  In this book, Earth astronomers pick up a rapidly approaching object entering the Solar System, and quickly figure out that it's not a natural object but an alien spacecraft.  They put together a team to fly out to meet it as it zooms past -- and it turns out to be like nothing they've ever experienced.

Clarke was a master at creating alien, but completely consistent and believable, worlds, and here he also creates a mystery -- because just as if we really were to find an alien spacecraft, and had only a limited amount of time to study it as it crosses our path, we'd be left with as many questions as answers.  Rendezvous with Rama reads like a documentary -- in the middle of it, you could easily believe that Clarke was recounting a real rendezvous, not telling a story he'd made up.

In an interesting example of life imitating art, in 2017 astronomers at an observatory in Hawaii discovered an object heading our way fast enough that it has to have originated outside of our Solar System.  Called 'Oumuamua -- Hawaiian for "scout" -- it had an uncanny, if probably only superficial, resemblance to Clarke's Rama.  It is long and cylindrical, left no gas or dust plume (as a comet would), and appeared to be solid rather than a collection of rubble.  The weirdest thing to me was that backtracking its trajectory, it seems to have originated near the star Vega in the constellation Lyra -- the home of the superintelligent race that sent us a message in the fantastic movie Contact.

The strangeness of the object led some to speculate that it was the product of an extraterrestrial intelligence -- although in fairness, a team in 2019 gave their considered opinion that it wasn't, mostly because there was no sign of any kind of internal energy source or radio transmission coming from it.  A noted dissenter, though, is Harvard University Avi Loeb, who has laid out his case for 'Oumuamua's alien technological origin in his new book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.

His credentials are certainly unimpeachable, but his book is sure to create more controversy surrounding this odd visitor to the Solar System.  I won't say he convinced me -- I still tend to side with the 2019 team's conclusions, if for no other reason Carl Sagan's "Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence" rule-of-thumb -- but he makes a fascinating case for the defense.  If you are interested in astronomy, and especially in the question of whether we're alone in the universe, check out Loeb's book -- and let me know what you think.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds go to support Skeptophilia!]