The labyrinths of meaning

A recent study found that regardless how thoroughly AI-powered chatbots are trained with real, sensible text, they still have a hard time recognizing passages that are nonsense.

Given pairs of sentences, one of which makes semantic sense and the other of which clearly doesn't -- in the latter category, "Someone versed in circumference of high school I rambled" was one example -- a significant fraction of large language models struggled with telling the difference.

In case you needed another reason to be suspicious of what AI chatbots say to you.

As a linguist, though, I can confirm how hard it is to detect and analyze semantic or syntactic weirdness.  Noam Chomsky's famous example "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is syntactically well-formed, but has multiple problems with semantics -- something can't be both colorless and green, ideas don't sleep, you can't "sleep furiously," and so on.  How about the sentence, "My brother opened the window the maid the janitor Uncle Bill had hired had married had closed"?  This one is both syntactically well-formed and semantically meaningful, but there's definitely something... off about it.

The problem here is called "center embedding," which is when there are nested clauses, and the result is not so much wrong as it is confusing and difficult to parse.  It's the kind of thing I look for when I'm editing someone's manuscript -- one of those, "Well, I knew what I meant at the time" kind of moments.  (That this one actually does make sense can be demonstrated by breaking it up into two sentences -- "My brother opened the window the maid had closed.  She was the one who had married the janitor Uncle Bill had hired.")

Then there are "garden-path sentences" -- named for the expression "to lead (someone) down the garden path," to trick them or mislead them -- when you think you know where the sentence is going, then it takes a hard left turn, often based on a semantic ambiguity in one or more words.  Usually the shift leaves you with something that does make sense, but only if you re-evaluate where you thought the sentence was headed to start with.  There's the famous example, "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."  But I like even better "The old man the boat," because it only has five words, and still makes you pull up sharp.

The water gets even deeper than that, though.  Consider the strange sentence, "More people have been to Berlin than I have."

This sort of thing is called a comparative illusion, but I like the nickname "Escher sentences" better because it captures the sense of the problem.  You've seen the famous work by M. C. Escher, "Ascending and Descending," yes?

The issue both with Escher's staircase and the statement about Berlin is if you look at smaller pieces of it, everything looks fine; the problem only comes about when you put the whole thing together.  And like Escher's trudging monks, it's hard to pinpoint exactly where the problem occurs.

I remember a student of mine indignantly telling a classmate, "I'm way smarter than you're not."  And it's easy to laugh, but even the ordinarily brilliant and articulate Dan Rather slipped into this trap when he tweeted in 2020, "I think there are more candidates on stage who speak Spanish more fluently than our president speaks English."

It seems to make sense, and then suddenly you go, "... wait, what?"

An additional problem is that words frequently have multiple meanings and nuances -- which is the basis of wordplay, but would be really difficult to program into a large language model.  Take, for example, the anecdote about the redoubtable Dorothy Parker, who was cornered at a party by an insufferable bore.  "To sum up," the man said archly at the end of a long diatribe, "I simply can't bear fools."

"Odd," Parker shot back.  "Your mother obviously could."

A great many of Parker's best quips rely on a combination of semantic ambiguity and idiom.  Her review of a stage actress that "she runs the gamut of emotions from A to B" is one example, but to me, the best is her stinging jab at a writer -- "His work is both good and original.  But the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good."

Then there's the riposte from John Wilkes, a famously witty British Member of Parliament in the last half of the eighteenth century.  Another MP, John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, was infuriated by something Wilkes had said, and sputtered out, "I predict you will die either on the gallows or else of some loathsome disease!"  And Wilkes calmly responded, "Which it will be, my dear sir, depends entirely on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress."

All of this adds up to the fact that languages contain labyrinths of meaning and structure, and we have a long way to go before AI will master them.  (Given my opinion about the current use of AI -- which I've made abundantly clear in previous posts -- I'm inclined to think this is a good thing.)  It's hard enough for human native speakers to use and understand language well; capturing that capacity in software is, I think, going to be a long time coming.

It'll be interesting to see at what point a large language model can parse correctly something like "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo."  Which is both syntactically well-formed and semantically meaningful.  

Have fun piecing together what exactly it does mean.

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Coincidence and meaning

A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to an interview with author Sharon Hewitt Rawlette about her recent book, The Source and Significance of Coincidences, along with a note saying, "Would love to hear your thoughts about this."

I'm usually loath to give my opinion about a claim after reading a summary, book review, or interview without reading the book itself, but considering that I had issues with just about everything in the interview I can say with some confidence that it's unlikely the book would make me any less doubtful.  Rawlette's idea is that coincidences -- at least some of them -- "mean something."  Other than two events coinciding, which is the definition of coincidence.  Here's how she defines it:

For me, a coincidence is something that is not blatantly supernatural. It could be just chance. But there’s part of you that says, "This seems more meaningful than that."  And maybe just seems a little too improbable to be explained as chance.  It seems too meaningful to you, personally, given where you are in your life.  It’s something that makes you wonder, "Is there something more?"

Coincidences can certainly be startling, I'll admit that.  I was on my way to an appointment a while back and was listening to Sirius XM Radio's classical station "Symphony Hall," and one of my favorite pieces came on -- Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.  I was maybe two-thirds of the way through the first movement when I arrived, and I was short on time so regretfully had to turn the music off and get out of the car.

When I opened the door to the waiting room, there was music coming over the speakers.  Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata -- at almost precisely the same spot where I'd turned off the radio.

Immediately, I wondered if they were also listening to Sirius XM, but they weren't.  It was the usual selection of calming music you hear in doctors' offices everywhere.  It really had been... "just a coincidence."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Karry manessa", Coincidence with Smile, CC BY-SA 4.0]

But did it mean anything?  How would I know?  And if it did mean something... what?

Rawlette tells us what her criteria are:

I don’t think there’s a really cut and dry answer.  There are a variety of factors that I look at in my own life when I’m trying to figure out whether something is just a coincidence or something more.  One of those is how improbable it really is...  But I also think an important element is how you feel about it.  What is your intuition telling you?  How strongly do you feel about it?  And is it telling you something that really seems to help you emotionally?  Spiritually?  Is it providing you with guidance?

Here, we're moving onto some seriously shaky ground.

First of all, there's improbability.  How do you judge that?  I'd say that the probability of a random selection on a classical music station being the same as the selection playing in a doctor's office at the same time is pretty damn low, but that's just a hand-waving "seems that way to me" assessment.  Amongst the difficulties is that humans are kind of terrible at statistical reckoning.  For example, let's say you throw two coins twenty times each.  With the first coin, you get twenty heads in a row.  With the second coin, you get the following:

HTTHHHTHTHTTHHHTHTTH

Which one of those two occurrences is likelier?

It turns out that they have exactly the same probability: (1/2)^20.  A very, very small number.  The reason most people pick the second as likelier is that it looks random, and comes close to the 50/50 distribution of heads and tails that we all learned was what came out of random coin-flips back in the seventh grade.  The first, on the other hand, looks like a pattern, and it seems weird and improbable.

The second problem is that here -- as with Rawlette's coincidences -- we're only assessing their probability after the fact.  In our coin flip patterns above, after they happen the probability that they happened is 100%.  I'll agree with her insofar as to say that in the first case (twenty heads in a row), I'd want to keep flipping the coin to see what would come up next, and if I keep getting heads, to see if I could figure out what was going on.  The second, corresponding much more to what I expected, wouldn't impel me to investigate further.

But the fact remains that as bizarre as it sounds, if you throw a (fair) coin a huge number of times -- say, a billion times -- the chance of there being twenty heads in a row somewhere in the array of throws is nearly 100%.  (Any statisticians in the studio audience could calculate for us what the actual probability is; suffice it to say it's pretty good.)

Third, of course, is that we run smack into our old friend dart-thrower's bias -- our hard-wired tendency to notice what seem to us to be outliers.  We don't pay any attention to all the times we walk into the doctor's office (or anywhere else) and the music playing isn't what we were just listening to, because it's so damn common.  The times the music is the same stand out -- and thus, we tend both to overcount them and weigh them more heavily in our attention and our memories.

Rawlette also doesn't seem to have any sort of criteria for telling the difference between random coincidence, meaningful coincidence, and something that is a deliberately targeted "sign" or "message" directed at you personally, other than how you feel about it:

I think the most impactful coincidences in people’s lives tend to be most improbable.  It’s very hard to explain them away.  But, the counterpart to that is that those coincidences also seem to have a very strong emotional impact on us.  They’re not only very improbable—very strange—but they carry a very strong emotional weight.  And we can’t escape that they’re significant somehow, even if we’re not exactly sure what the message is.  And, often, they do turn out to be life-changing.

So you are estimating how likely something is, assessing whether it was likely after the fact, deciding what the event's significance is, and deciding what the message (if any) consisted of.  It's putting a lot of confidence in our own abilities to perceive and understand the world correctly.  And if there's one thing I've learned from years of teaching neuroscience, it's that our sensory/perceptive and cognitive systems are (as Neil deGrasse Tyson put it) "poor data-taking devices... full of ways of getting it wrong."  I don't trust my own brain most of the time.  It's got a poor, highly-distractible attention span, an unreliable memory, and gets clogged up with emotions all too easily.  It's why I went into science; I learned really early that my personal interpretations of the world were all too often wrong, and I needed a more rigorous, reliable algorithm for determining what I believed to be true.

Now, I won't say I'm never prone to giving emotional weight to events after the fact.  As an example, I was quite close to my Aunt Pauline, my grandfather's youngest sister (youngest of twelve children!).  Pauline was a sweet person, childless and ten years a widow, when I was going to college at the University of Louisiana.  Every once in a while -- maybe every two or three months or so -- I'd stop by her house on the way home from school.  It wasn't far out of the way, and she was always thrilled to see me, and would bring out the coffee and a tray of cookies to share as we chatted.  One day, it occurred to me that it'd been a while since I'd seen her.  I don't know why she came to my mind; nothing I can think of reminded me.  I just suddenly thought, "I should stop by Aunt Pauline's and see how she's doing."

So I did.  She was cheerful as ever, and we had a lovely visit.

Two days later, she died of a heart attack at age 73.

I don't think I'd be human if the thought "how strange I was impelled to visit her!" didn't go through my mind.  But even back then, when I was twenty years old and much more prone to believe in unscientific explanations for things, it didn't quite sit right with me.  I visited with Aunt Pauline regularly anyhow; it certainly wasn't the first time I'd gotten in my car at the university and thought, "Hey, I should drop by."  I had lots of other older relatives who had died without my being at all inclined to visit immediately beforehand.  The "this is weird" reaction I had was understandable enough, but that by itself didn't mean there was anything supernatural going on.

I was really glad I'd gotten to see her, but I just didn't --and don't -- think I was urged to visit her by God, the Holy Spirit, the collective unconscious, or whatnot.  It was simply a fortuitous, but circumstantial, coincidence.

Rawlette then encourages us not to passively wait around for meaningful coincidences to occur to us, but to seek them out actively:

I think one of the most important things, when you experience a coincidence, is to keep an open mind about where it’s coming from and what it might mean.  Because it’s very easy to try to fit a coincidence into the way of thinking about the world that we already have—whatever our worldview is.  And coincidences generally come into our lives to expand that worldview.  They generally won’t fit neatly into the boxes that we have.  We might try to shove them in there, so we can stop thinking about it and make them less mysterious, but they generally are going to make us question some things that we thought we knew about the world.

What this puts me in mind of is the odd pastime of being a "Randonaut" -- using a random number generator to produce a set of geographical coordinates near you, going there, and looking for something strange -- about which I wrote a couple of years ago.  People report finding all sorts of bizarre things, some of them quite disturbing, while doing this.  I won't deny that it's kind of a fun concept, and no intrinsically weirder than my wife's near-obsession with geocaching, but it suffers from the same problems we considered earlier when you try to ascribe too much meaning to what you find.  If you're told to go to a random location and look around until you find something odd, with no criteria and no limitations, you're putting an awful lot of confidence in your own definition of "odd."  And, as I point out in the post, in my experience Weird Shit is Everywhere.  Wherever you are, if you look hard enough, you can find something mysterious, something that seems like a coincidence or a message or (at least) a surprise, but all that means is you had no real restrictions on what you were looking for, and that the world is an interesting place.

As an aside, this reminds me of my college friend's proof that all numbers are interesting:

• Assume that there are some numbers that are uninteresting.
• Let "x" be the first such number.
• Since being the first uninteresting number is itself interesting, this contradicts our initial assumption, and there are no uninteresting numbers.

Anyhow, all this rambling is not meant to destroy your sense that the universe we live in is mysterious and beautiful.  It is both, and much more.  I am just exceedingly cautious about ascribing meaning to events without a hell of a lot more to go on than my faulty intuition.  I'd much rather rely on the tried-and-true methods of science to determine what's out there, which for me uncovers plenty enough stunningly bizarre stuff to occupy my mind indefinitely.

But like I began with: I haven't read Rawlette's book, and if you have and I'm missing the point, please enlighten me in the comments section.  I don't want to commit the Straw Man fallacy, mischaracterizing her claim and then arguing against that mischaracterization.  But from her interview, all I can say is that I'm not really buying it.

On the other hand, if the next few times I go from my car to an office, exactly the same music is playing again and again, I'll happily reconsider my stance -- all arguments about the statistics of flipping twenty heads in a row notwithstanding.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is a bit of a departure from the usual science fare: podcaster and author Rose Eveleth's amazing Flash Forward: An Illustrated Guide to the Possibly (and Not-So-Possible) Tomorrows.

Eveleth looks at what might happen if twelve things that are currently in the realm of science fiction became real -- a pill becoming available that obviates the need for sleep, for example, or the development of a robot that can make art.  She then extrapolates from those, to look at how they might change our world, to consider ramifications (good and bad) from our suddenly having access to science or technology we currently only dream about.

Eveleth's book is highly entertaining not only from its content, but because it's in graphic novel format -- a number of extremely talented artists, including Matt Lubchansky, Sophie Goldstein, Ben Passmore, and Julia Gförer, illustrate her twelve new worlds, literally drawing what we might be facing in the future.  Her conclusions, and their illustrations of them, are brilliant, funny, shocking, and most of all, memorable.

I love her visions even if I'm not sure I'd want to live in some of them.  The book certainly brings home the old adage of "Be careful what you wish for, you may get it."  But as long as they're in the realm of speculative fiction, they're great fun... especially in the hands of Eveleth and her wonderful illustrators.

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

The creative relationship

When I was in freshman lit -- a lot of years ago -- we were assigned to read and analyze Robert Frost's classic poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."

Mostly what I remember about the discussion that ensued was the professor telling us that when an interviewer asked Frost himself what the poem meant, Frost replied that it wasn't intended to be allegorical, or symbolic of anything; it was simply a recounting of a scene, a weary traveler pausing for a moment to appreciate the beauty of a snowy woodland.

"Of course," the professor went on, cheerfully confident, "we know that a poet of Frost's stature wouldn't produce anything that simplistic -- so let's see what symbolism we can find in his poem!"

I recall being kind of appalled, mostly at the professor's hubris in thinking that his own opinions about meaning overrode what the poet himself intended.  Since then, though, I've begun to wonder.  I still think the professor was a bit of a cocky bastard, don't get me wrong; but I've come to realize that creativity implies a relationship -- it's not as simple as writer (or artist or composer) creating, and reader (or observer or listener) consuming.

This topic comes up because a couple of days ago, a friend of mine sent me a link to a video by Aldous Harding, a brilliant singer/songwriter from New Zealand, performing her song "The Barrel."

The song is weird, mesmerizing, strangely beautiful, and the video is somewhere in that gray area at the intersection of "evocative" and "fever dream."  The lyrics are downright bizarre in places:

The wave of love is a transient hut
The water's the shell and we are the nut
But I saw a hand arch out of the barrel

Look at all the peaches
How do you celebrate
I can't appearance out of nowhere

What does it mean?  Harding herself wants to leave that, at least in part, up to the listener.  In an interview with NPR, she said, “I realized that the video was a well-intended opinion of mine to just keep it loose.  I feel we’re expected to be able to explain ourselves...  But I don’t necessarily have that in me the way you might think."

It's wryly funny, especially in light of the long-ago pronouncements of my freshman lit professor, that a lot of people are weighing in on the song and interpreting it in a variety of mutually-exclusive ways.  One writer said that it's about female empowerment and escaping from abusive relationships.  Another suggests that it describes how "the scariest thing is looking in the mirror and not recognising what you see staring back at you."  A review in The Guardian lists other interpretations that have been suggested:

Depending on whose interpretation you plumped for, the video was either a homage to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s surreal 1973 film The Holy Mountain, a nod to the national dress of Wales (where [Harding's album] Designer was partly recorded and where Harding currently resides), analogous to the faintly disturbing vision of pregnancy found in Sylvia Plath’s 1960 poem "Metaphors," inspired by postmodernist poet Susan Howe’s book Singularities, which surveys the 17th-century First Nation wars in New England, [or] somehow related to menstruation.

Watch it... and see what you think.

Like my lit professor, what gets me about a lot of these interpretations is how certain they sound.  My own reaction was that the lyrics fall into the realm of "nearly making sense," and that part of why they're fascinating -- and why I've watched the video several times -- is that there's a real art to using language that way, neither being too overt about what you mean nor devolving into complete nonsense.

Creativity, I think, implies a relationship between producer and consumer, and because of that, the producer can't always control where it goes.  Readers, listeners, and observers bring to that activity their own backgrounds, opinions, and knowledge, and that is going to shape what they pull out of the creative experience.  And, of course, this is why sometimes that relationship simply fails to form.  I love the music of Stravinsky, while it leaves my wife completely cold -- she thinks it's pointless cacophony.  A lot of people are moved to tears by Mozart, but I find much of his music inspires me to say nothing more than "it's nice, I guess."

It's part of why I have zero patience for genre snobs and self-appointed tastemakers.  If some piece of creative work inspires you, or evokes emotions in you, it's done its job, and no one has the slightest right to tell you that you're wrong for feeling that way.  Honestly, I'm delighted if Mozart grabs you by the heart and swings you around; that's what music is supposed to do.  Just because I'm more likely to have that experience listening to Firebird than Eine Kleine Nachtmusik doesn't mean I'm right and you're wrong; all it means is that human creativity is complex, intricate, and endlessly intriguing.

So don't take it all that seriously if someone tells you what a poem, lyric, or piece of art or music means, even if that person is a college professor.  Enjoy what you enjoy, and bring your own creativity to the relationship.  It may be that Robert Frost didn't mean "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" to be anything more than a depiction of a scene; but that doesn't mean you can't bring more to the reading, and pull more out of the reading, yourself.

And isn't that what makes the creative experience magical?

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The advancement of technology has opened up ethical questions we've never had to face before, and one of the most difficult is how to handle our sudden ability to edit the genome.

CRISPR-Cas9 is a system for doing what amounts to cut-and-paste editing of DNA, and since its discovery by Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, the technique has been refined and given pinpoint precision.  (Charpentier and Doudna won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year for their role in developing CRISPR.)

Of course, it generates a host of questions that can be summed up by Ian Malcolm's quote in Jurassic Park, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."  If it became possible, should CRISPR be used to treat devastating diseases like cystic fibrosis and sickle-cell anemia?  Most people, I think, would say yes.  But what about disorders that are mere inconveniences -- like nearsightedness?  What about cosmetic traits like hair and eye color?

What about intelligence, behavior, personality?

None of that has been accomplished yet, but it bears keeping in mind that ten years ago, the whole CRISPR gene-editing protocol would have seemed like fringe-y science fiction.  We need to figure this stuff out now -- before it becomes reality.

This is the subject of bioethicist Henry Greely's new book, CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans.  It considers the thorny questions surrounding not just what we can do, or what we might one day be able to do, but what we should do.

And given how fast science fiction has become reality, it's a book everyone should read... soon.

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

The code switchers

When I was a graduate student in the School of Oceanography at the University of Washington -- an endeavor that lasted one semester, at which point I realized that I had neither the focus nor the brainpower to succeed as a research scientist -- I found an interesting commonality amongst the graduate students I hung out with.

This group of perhaps eight or nine twenty-somethings were without question the most vulgar, profane group I have ever been part of.  Regular readers of Skeptophilia, not to mention my friends and family, will know that my own vocabulary isn't exactly what anyone would call "prim and proper;" but while I am not averse to seasoning my speech with the occasional swear word, these people basically dumped in the entire spice cabinet.

The words "fuck" and "fuckin'" were like a staccato percussive beat to just about every sentence uttered.  You didn't say, "I gotta go to class," you said, "I fuckin' gotta go to class."  It was so bad most of us didn't even hear it any more, it was just "how we talked."  (And, I might add, it had the result of making those words completely lose their punch, and thus their effectiveness as emotionally-packed language.)  I have no idea why this particular group was so prone to obscene speech -- as you might expect, they were smart, scientifically-minded people with commensurately large vocabularies to choose from -- but once that became the norm, it was what one did to fit in.

What's most interesting is that when, at the end of that semester, I switched to the School of Education and started the track toward becoming a high school science teacher (a much more felicitous choice, as it turned out), I almost instantly adjusted my vocabulary to reflect the far more squeaky-clean speech of the Future Teachers of America.  I didn't have to think much about it; it wasn't like I had to obsessively watch my mouth until I learned how to control it.  The change was quick and required very little conscious thought to maintain.

This phenomenon is called code switching.  In its broadest definition, code switching occurs when a bilingual person flips between his/her two languages depending on the language of the listeners.  But context-dependent code switching occurs whenever we jump from one group we belong to into a different one, or from a group of strangers to a group of friends.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons JasonSWrench, Transactional comm model, CC BY 3.0]

Code switching occurs in written language, too.  I write here at Skeptophilia, I write fiction, I have written science curriculum, I write emails to family, friends, coworkers, and total strangers (like the guy at the software company helpdesk and the woman at the bank who oversees our mortgage).  In each of those, my vocabulary, sentence structure, and degree of formality are different, not only in the words I choose, but in how exactly they're used.  Some of the differences are obvious; my wife gets emails ending with "xoxoxoxoxo;" my friends, usually with "cheers, g," and people I've contacted over business matters, "thank you so much, sincerely, Gordon."  (I'm a bit absent-minded at the best of times, and I live in fear of the day I send the guy at the helpdesk an email ending with the hugs-and-kisses signoff.)

But it turns out that these differences are apparent in other, more subtle ways.  A study out of the University of Exeter that appeared in the journal Behavior Research Methods this week describes a protocol for detecting code switching that had an accuracy of 70% -- even when they didn't look at words that would be obvious giveaways.

The researchers used an automated linguistic analysis program to look at writing done by the same people in two different contexts.  The participants in the study were chosen because they were active in two different sorts of social media groups, some having to do with parenting and others gender equity, and the software was given passages they'd written in both venues -- with tipoff words like "childcare" and "feminism" removed.  It turned out the program was still able to discern which social media group the passage had been directed toward, simply by looking at structural features like use of pronouns and meaning-based characteristics like the number of emotionally-laden words used per paragraph.

"It is the first method that lets us study how people access different group identities outside the laboratory on a large scale, in a quantified way," said study lead author Miriam Koschate-Reis, in an interview with Science Daily.  "For example, it gives us the opportunity to understand how people acquire new identities, such as becoming a first-time parent, and whether difficulties 'getting into' this identity may be linked to postnatal depression and anxiety.  Our method could help to inform policies and interventions in this area, and in many others."

Koschate-Reis and her team are next going to look into whether this kind of code switching is facilitated by location -- if, for example, an informal-to-formal switch might be easier in an academic location like a library than it is in a relaxed setting like a café.

In other words, if it might be better not to work on your dissertation in Starbucks.

All of which is fascinating, and once again points out the complexity of human communication -- and why it's so hard to get an artificial neural network to mimic written conversation convincingly.  Most of us code switch automatically, without even being aware of it, as we navigate daily through the many groups to which we belong.  Most AI speech I've seen, even if responses are contextually correct and use the right vocabulary with the right structure, have a inflexible stilted quality that is lacking in the generally more sensitive, free-flowing communication that happens between real people.  But perhaps that's another application that the Koschate-Reis et al. research might have; if a linguistic analysis software can learn to detect code switching, that's the first step toward an AI actually learning how to apply it.

One step closer to passing the Turing Test.

In any case, I'd better run along and get my fuckin' day started.  I hope y'all have a good one.  Hugs & kisses. 💘

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 Many of us were riveted to the screen last week watching the successful landing of the Mars Rover Perseverance, and it brought to mind the potential for sending a human team to investigate the Red Planet.  The obstacles to overcome are huge; the four-odd-year voyage there and back, requiring a means for producing food, and purifying air and water, that has to be damn near failsafe.

Consider what befell the unfortunate astronaut Mark Watney in the book and movie The Martian, and you'll get an idea of what the crew could face.

Physicist and writer Kate Greene was among a group of people who agreed to participate in a simulation of the experience, not of getting to Mars but of being there.  In a geodesic dome on the slopes of Mauna Loa in Hawaii, Greene and her crewmates stayed for four months in isolation -- dealing with all the problems Martian visitors would run into, not only the aforementioned problems with food, water, and air, but the isolation.  (Let's just say that over that time she got to know the other people in the simulation really well.)

In Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars: Space, Exploration, and Life on Earth, Greene recounts her experience in the simulation, and tells us what the first manned mission to Mars might really be like.  It makes for wonderful reading -- especially for people like me, who are just fine staying here in comfort on Earth, but are really curious about the experience of living on another world.

If you're an astronomy buff, or just like a great book about someone's real and extraordinary experiences, pick up a copy of Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars.  You won't regret it.

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

Patterns and meaning

I remember a couple of years ago noticing something odd.  While eating breakfast on work days, I'd finish, and always give a quick glance up at the digital clock that sits on the counter.  Three times in a row, the clock said 6:19.

I know there's a perfectly rational explanation; I'm a total creature of habit, and I did the same series of actions in the same order every single work morning, so the fact that I finished breakfast three days in a row at exactly the same time only points up the fact that I need to relax a little.  But once I noticed the (seeming) pattern, I kept checking each morning.  And there were other days when I finished at exactly 6:19.  After a few weeks of this, it was becoming a bit of an obsession.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mk2010, LED digital wall clock (Seiko), CC BY-SA 3.0]

So being a rationalist, as well as needing a hobby, I started to keep track.  And very quickly a few things became obvious:

• I almost always finished breakfast (and checked the clock) between 6:16 and 6:22.
• 6:19 is the exact middle of that range, so it would be understandable if that time occurred more often.
• Even considering #2, 6:19 turned out to be no more likely than other times.  The distribution was, within that six minute range, fairly random.

So I had fallen for dart-thrower's bias, the perfectly natural human tendency to notice the unusual, and to give it more weight in our attention and memory.  The point is, once you start noticing this stuff, you're more likely to notice it again, and to overestimate the number of times such coincidences occur.

The whole thing comes up because of a link sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia called, "Angel Numbers Guide: Why You Keep Seeing Angel Number Sequences."  I'm not going to recommend your going to the site, because it's pretty obviously clickbait, but I thought the content was interesting from the standpoint of our determination that the patterns we notice mean something.

The site is an attempt to convince us that when we see certain numbers over and over, it's an angel attempting to give us a message.  If you notice the number 1212, for example, this is an angel encouraging us to "release our fears and apprehensions, and get on with pursuing our passions and purpose... [asking you to] stay on a positive path and to use your natural skills, talents, and abilities to their utmost for the benefit of yourself and others."

Which is good advice without all of the woo-woo trappings.

Some numbers apparently appeal not only to our desire for meaningful patterns, but for being special.  If you see 999 everywhere, "you are amongst an elite few... 999 is sometimes confrontative, and literally means, 'Get to work on your priorities.  Now.  No more procrastinating, no more excuses or worries.  Get to work now."

Since a lot of the "angel numbers" involve repeated digits, I had to check to see what 666 means.  I was hoping it would say something like, "If you see 666, you are about to be dragged screaming into the maw of hell."

But no. 666 apparently is "a sign from the angels that it's time to wake up to your higher spiritual truth."  Which is not only boring, but sounds like it could come from a talk by Deepak Chopra.

So the whole thing turns out to be interesting mostly from the standpoint of our desperation to impose some sense on the chaos of life.  Because face it; a lot of what does happen is simply random noise, a conclusion that is a bit of a downer.  I suspect that many religions give solace precisely because they ascribe meaning to everything; the Bible, after all, says that even a sparrow doesn't fall from the sky without the hand of God being involved.

Me, I think it's more likely that a lot of stuff (including birds dying) happens for no particularly identifiable or relevant reason.  Science can explain at least some of the proximal causes, but as far as ultimate causes?  I think we're thrown back on the not very satisfying non-explanation of the universe simply being a chaotic place.  I understand the appeal of it all having meaning and purpose, but it seems to me that most of what occurs is no more interesting than my finishing breakfast at 6:19.

*************************************

I've always had a fascination with how our brains work, part of which comes from the fact that we've only begun to understand it.  My dear friend and mentor, Dr. Rita Calvo, professor emeritus of human genetics at Cornell University, put it this way.  "If I were going into biology now, I'd study neuroscience.  We're at the point in neuroscience now that we were in genetics in 1900 -- we know it works, we can see some of how it works, but we know very little in detail and almost nothing about the underlying mechanisms involved.  The twentieth century was the century of the gene; the twenty-first will be the century of the brain."

We've made some progress in recent years toward comprehending the inner workings of the organ that allows us to comprehend anything at all.  And if, like me, you are captivated by the idea, you have to read this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation: neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett's brilliant Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.

In laypersons' terms, Barrett explains what we currently know about how we think, feel, remember, learn, and experience the world.  It's a wonderful, surprising, and sometimes funny exploration of our own inner workings, and is sure to interest anyone who would like to know more about the mysterious, wonderful blob between our ears.

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

The signature of the creator

The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Chase" is justly revered by Trekkies, and also by people who simply like a good story.  The gist -- giving as little in the way of spoilers as I can manage, if you've not seen it -- is that there's a message implanted in our DNA and the DNA of alien species across the galaxy.  No one species has the entire thing, so to find out what it means requires getting tissue samples from all over the place, extracting the piece of the message, then somehow putting the entire thing together to decipher what it says.

A secret code dispersed through time and space, so to speak.

While the quasi-scientific explanation behind the whole thing was a little dubious for those of us who know something about genetics and evolution, it was a hell of a good idea for a story.  A mysterious, super-powerful someone left its thumbprint on life everywhere in the universe, and there the message has sat, waiting for us to become smart enough and technologically advanced enough to find it.

"The Chase" brings up a theological question I've debated before with religious-minded friends; how, starting from outside of the framework of belief, you could tell there was a God by what you see around you.  I often hear "natural beauty" and "love and selflessness" brought up, but (unfortunately) there seems to be enough ugliness, hatred, and selfishness to more than compensate for the good stuff.  Put simply, how would a universe with a divine presence look different from one without?  I've never been able to come up with a good answer to that.  To me, the God/no God versions of the universe look pretty much alike.

Which is a large part of why I'm an atheist.  I'm perfectly okay with revising that if evidence comes my way, but at the moment, I'm not seeing any particular cause for belief in any of the various deities humans have worshipped along the way.

What brings all this up is a paper released last week in arXiv called, "Searching for a Message in the Angular Power Spectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background."  The CMB is a relatively uniformly-spread (or isotropic, as the scientists put it) radiation that is the remnant of the Big Bang.  In the 13.8-odd billion years since the universe started, the searing radiation of creation has become stretched along with the space that carries it until it has an average wavelength of two millimeters, putting it in the microwave region of the spectrum, and that radiation comes at us from everywhere in the sky.

What the author, Michael Hippke of the Sonnenberg Observatory in Germany, proposed was something that is reminiscent of the central idea of "The Chase."  If there was a creator -- be it a god, or a super-intelligent alien race, or whatever -- the obvious place to put a message is in the CMB.  The minor fluctuations ("anisotropies") in the CMB would be detectable by a technological society pretty much from any vantage point in the visible universe, and so hiding a pattern in the apparent chaos would be as much as having a signature from the creator.

So Hippke digitized the most detailed map we have of the CMB, and then estimated what part of the signal would have been lost or degraded in 13.8 billion years due to quantum noise and interference with the much closer and more powerful radiation sources in our own galaxy.  After some intense statistical analysis, Hippke determined that there should be at least a one-thousand-bit remnant of sense somewhere in there, so he set about to find it.

Nothing.

"I find no meaningful message in the actual bit-stream," Hippke wrote.  "We may conclude that there is no obvious message on the CMB sky.  Yet it remains unclear whether there is (was) a Creator, whether we live in a simulation, or whether the message is printed correctly in the previous section, but we fail to understand it."

Despite how I started this post, I have to admit to being a little disappointed.  It was a clever approach, and no one would be more excited than me if he'd actually found something.  I don't honestly like the idea that we live in a chaotic, meaningless universe -- or, more accurately (and optimistically) that the only meaning is the one we create within it.  But if there's one thing I've learned in my sixty years on Earth, it's that reality is under no particular obligation to order itself in such a way that it makes me comfortable.  

But still, if there had been a message there, how cool would that be?  Even if, as the Cardassian commander Gul Ocett said in "The Chase," "it might just be a recipe for biscuits."

*************************************

I've always had a fascination with how our brains work, part of which comes from the fact that we've only begun to understand it.  My dear friend and mentor, Dr. Rita Calvo, professor emeritus of human genetics at Cornell University, put it this way.  "If I were going into biology now, I'd study neuroscience.  We're at the point in neuroscience now that we were in genetics in 1900 -- we know it works, we can see some of how it works, but we know very little in detail and almost nothing about the underlying mechanisms involved.  The twentieth century was the century of the gene; the twenty-first will be the century of the brain."

We've made some progress in recent years toward comprehending the inner workings of the organ that allows us to comprehend anything at all.  And if, like me, you are captivated by the idea, you have to read this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation: neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett's brilliant Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.

In laypersons' terms, Barrett explains what we currently know about how we think, feel, remember, learn, and experience the world.  It's a wonderful, surprising, and sometimes funny exploration of our own inner workings, and is sure to interest anyone who would like to know more about the mysterious, wonderful blob between our ears.

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

Talking to birds

A friend of mine, knowing my interest in linguistics and birdwatching, sent me a link to a fairly mindblowing post on the blog Corvid Research a couple of days ago.  But first, a little background.

Bird communication is generally not considered to be language.  The usual definition of language is "arbitrary symbolic communication that has a characteristic and meaningful structure."  The "arbitrary" bit is sometimes misunderstood; it doesn't mean any sounds can mean anything within a language (something that's obviously not true).  In this context, it means that the sound-to-meaning correspondence is arbitrary, in that the word "dog" is no inherently doggier than the French word chien or the Japanese word inu.  With the exception of a few onomatopoeic words, like "bang" and "swish" and "splat," the sound of the word itself has no particular connection to the concept it represents.

So bird song fails the definition of language on a number of counts.  When the Carolina wrens that nest in our back yard start their outsized calls of "TEAKETTLE TEAKETTLE TEAKETTLE" at four in the morning, those vocalizations don't mean anything more than "I'm a male bird in a territory and you need to leave" or, to any available females, "Hey, baby, how about it?"  They're not capable of representational language, in the sense of using a different set of sounds to represent discrete concepts.

The situation blurs considerably when you look at parrots, many of which can learn to mimic human speech convincingly.  An African gray parrot named Alex learned, with the help of cognitive behavior Irene Pepperberg, not only to mimic speech but to understand that it has meaning, connecting sounds to objects in a consistent fashion.  There's no indication that Alex comprehended syntactic structure -- and the jury's still out as to whether he was simply learning to behave in a particular way to get a reward, similar to training a dog to sit or stay or roll over.  (Although -- as you'll see if you watch the video -- Alex did know how to count, at least up to five, which is pretty impressive.)

The blur only gets worse when you consider corvids, the group that contains crows and ravens.  Corvids are widely considered to be among the most intelligent birds, and their ability to problem solve is astonishing.  They do a great many higher-level behaviors, including having a sophisticated sense of play -- such as the crow that used a plastic lid as a sled on a snow-covered roof, doing it for no apparent reason other than the fact that it was fun.  But some research released recently in the journal EvoLang has shown another facet of corvid intelligence; they can apparently distinguish between different human languages.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Aomorikuma（あおもりくま） , Carrion crow 20090612, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Sabrina Schalz (Middlesex University) and Ei-Ichi Izawa (Keio University) studied eight large-billed crows (Corvus macrorhynchos) that were raised in captivity in Japan, cared for by fluent Japanese speakers.  Schalz and Izawa wanted to find out if the birds were able to distinguish that language from another, so they played recordings of people speaking Japanese and people speaking Dutch.  The Japanese recordings didn't elicit much of a response; their attitude seemed to be, "Meh, I've heard that before."  But the Dutch recordings were a different story.  The crows gathered around the speaker, and sat perfectly still, their attention fixed on the sounds they were hearing.

It was clear that they were able to recognize the sound of Dutch as being foreign!

The cadence of a language, and how one differs from another, is a fascinating topic.  It has not only to do with the phonemic repertoire (the exact list of sounds that occur in the language) but pacing, stress, and tone.  The latter is why to non-Mandarin speakers, Mandarin sounds "sing-song" -- the rising and falling pitches actually change the meanings of the words being spoken.  Put another way, the same syllable spoken with a rising tone means something entirely different to the same syllable spoken with a falling tone, something that is not true in non-tonal languages like English (with minor exceptions such as the rising tone at the end of a sentence indicating a question).

Besides the different sounds in the Japanese language as compared to Dutch, the two languages also differ greatly in how words are stressed.  Japanese syllables can differ in length (and in fact, that carries meaning, much as tone does in Mandarin), but they're all stressed about equally.  This is why the way most Americans pronounce the city name Hiroshima is distinctly non-Japanese -- usually either hi-RO-shi-ma or hi-ro-SHI-ma.  The Japanese pronunciation stresses the syllables evenly.  (Try saying the word out loud with no change in syllable stress, and you'll hear the difference.)

So what were the crows picking up on?  I doubt seriously that they were thinking, "Okay, I don't know that word," but was it the sound system differences, the stress patterns, or something else?  Probably impossible to know, although it would be interesting to try to tease that out -- having someone speak Dutch with artificially even stress, or Japanese with non-Japanese syllable stress, and seeing what the reaction is, would be an interesting next step.  If it's the sound repertoire, then the reaction of crows to two mutually-unintelligible languages with similar phonetics, one of which they'd heard and one which is novel -- say, Dutch and German -- should elicit identical reactions.

Whatever's going on here, it's fascinating, and another indication of how intelligent these creatures are.  And it does make me wonder if I should be a little more careful when I'm talking outdoors -- who knows?  Maybe the crows are taking notes of what they overhear, in hopes of eventual world domination.

**************************************

I know I sometimes wax rhapsodic about books that really are the province only of true science geeks like myself, and fling around phrases like "a must-read" perhaps a little more liberally than I should.  But this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is really a must-read.

No, I mean it this time.

Kathryn Schulz's book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error is something that everyone should read, because it points out the remarkable frailty of the human mind.  As wonderful as it is, we all (as Schulz puts it) "walk around in a comfortable little bubble of feeling like we're absolutely right about everything."  We accept that we're fallible, in a theoretical sense; yeah, we all make mistakes, blah blah blah.  But right now, right here, try to think of one think you might conceivably be wrong about.

Not as easy as it sounds.

She shocks the reader pretty much from the first chapter.  "What does it feel like to be wrong?" she asks.  Most of us would answer that it can be humiliating, horrifying, frightening, funny, revelatory, infuriating.  But she points out that these are actually answers to a different question: "what does it feel like to find out you're wrong?"

Actually, she tells us, being wrong doesn't feel like anything.  It feels exactly like being right.

Reading Schulz's book makes the reader profoundly aware of our own fallibility -- but it is far from a pessimistic book.  Error, Schulz says, is the window to discovery and the source of creativity.  It is only when we deny our capacity for error that the trouble starts -- when someone in power decides that (s)he is infallible.

Then we have big, big problems.

So right now, get this book.  I promise I won't say the same thing next week about some arcane tome describing the feeding habits of sea slugs.  You need to read Being Wrong.

Everyone does.

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

The meaning of love

There's no denying that as careful as we try to be, language can be ambiguous.  One of the first things I used to do with my Critical Thinking classes was to get them to think about how terms are defined, and how that can change the meaning of what someone says or writes -- sometimes causing serious misunderstandings.  They start with a list of words -- love, evil, truth, beauty, loyalty, jealousy, and so on -- and first try to define them on their own, then for each one, come up with a word that's a synonym but has a differing emotional weight.  Then they compare their answers to their classmates'.

The results are eye-opening.  Not only do the definitions differ wildly, when they try to come up with synonyms, there is a huge variety of suggestions, many of which don't carry the same connotations at all.  For evil I've had students with bad, wrong, hateful, destructive, wicked, immoral, sinister, and despicable -- which themselves carry drastically different meanings.

And that's for just one word.  By the time we're done with the whole exercise, they have a pretty good idea why misunderstandings are so common.

A study that came out yesterday in Science adds a new layer of complication to the situation.  Apparently the connotations of emotionally-laden words differ greatly between languages.  So if you look up how to translate the word love into Latvian, you'll certainly find a corresponding word -- but the associations that a native speaker of Latvian has with the word might differ greatly from yours.

The paper was entitled, "Emotion Semantics Show Both Cultural Variation and Universal Structure," and was the work of a team of linguists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and mathematicians led by Joshua Conrad Jackson of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  What they did was to use a statistical model to create networks of words that had associations with each other, for no less than 2,474 languages from twenty different language families.

The results were fascinating.  The authors write:

[W]e take a new quantitative approach to estimate variability and structure in emotion semantics.  Our approach examines cases of colexification, instances in which multiple concepts are coexpressed by the same word form within a language.  Colexifications are useful for addressing questions about semantic structure because they often arise when two concepts are perceived as conceptually similar.  Persian, for instance, uses the word-form ænduh to express both the concepts of “grief” and “regret,” whereas the Sirkhi dialect of Dargwa uses the word-form dard to express both the concepts of “grief” and “anxiety.”  Persian speakers may therefore understand “grief” as an emotion more similar to “regret,” whereas Dargwa speakers may understand “grief” as more similar to “anxiety.”

It takes long enough to become fluent in a second language; how much longer would it take to understand all of the subtle connotations of words?  Even if you're using the "right word" -- the one a native speaker would use -- you might still misjudge the context unless you had a deep understanding of the culture.

Here are four examples of their linguistic networks:

The most interesting thing I noticed about these maps was the placement of the word anger.  In Austronesian languages, anger connects most strongly to hate; in Austroasiatic languages, to envy; and in Indo-European languages, to anxiety.  I can only imagine the misunderstandings that would occur if a speaker of a language from one of those families was speaking to a speaker of a language from another, and said something as simple as, "I am angry with you."

Another curious example is the familiar Hawaiian word aloha, which is usually translated into English as love.  The researchers found that to a native speaker of Hawaiian, aloha does mean love, but it is strongly connected with a word that is surprising to English speakers; pity.  The meaning of love, which is supposed to transcend all cultural barriers somehow, is apparently not as uniform across languages as one might expect.

The authors conclude thus;

Questions about the meaning of human emotions are age-old, and debate about the nature of emotion persists in scientific literature...  Analyzing these networks sheds light on the cultural and biological evolutionary mechanisms underlying how emotions are ascribed meaning in languages around the world.  Although debates about the relationship between language and conscious experience are notoriously difficult to resolve, our findings also raise the intriguing possibility that emotion experiences vary systematically across cultural groups...  Analyzing the diverse ways that people use language promises to yield insights into human cognition on an unprecedented scale.

And considering how interlinked our societies are across the globe, anything we can do to foster deeper understanding is worth doing.

*****************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun, and a perfect holiday gift for anyone you know who (1) is a science buff, and (2) has a sense of humor.  What If?, by Randall Munroe (creator of the brilliant comic strip xkcd) gives scientifically-sound answers to some very interesting hypothetical questions.  What if everyone aimed a laser pointer simultaneously at the same spot on the Moon?  Could you make a jetpack using a bunch of downward-pointing machine guns?  What would happen if everyone on the Earth jumped simultaneously?

Munroe's answers make for fascinating, and often hilarious, reading.  His scientific acumen, which shines through in xkcd, is on full display here, as is his sharp-edged and absurd sense of humor.  It's great reading for anyone who has sat up at night wondering... "what if?"

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

Meaning in music

As someone fascinated by neuroscience, language, and music, you can imagine how excited I was to find some new research that combined all three.

A link sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia describes a study that is the subject of a paper in Nature Neuroscience last week with the rather intimidating title "Divergence in the Functional Organization of Human and Macaque Auditory Cortex Revealed by fMRI Responses to Harmonic Tones."  Written by Sam V. Norman-Haignere (Columbia University), Nancy Kanwisher (MIT), Josh H. McDermott (MIT), and Bevil R. Conway (National Institute of Health), the paper shows evidence that even our close primate relatives don't have the capacity for discriminating harmonic tones that humans have -- that our perception of music may well be a uniquely human capacity.

"We found that a certain region of our brains has a stronger preference for sounds with pitch than macaque monkey brains," said Bevil Conway, senior author of the study.  "The results raise the possibility that these sounds, which are embedded in speech and music, may have shaped the basic organization of the human brain."

Monkeys, apparently, respond equally to atonal/aharmonic sounds, while humans have a specific neural module that lights up on an fMRI scan when the sounds they hear are tonal in nature.  "These results suggest the macaque monkey may experience music and other sounds differently," Conway said.  "In contrast, the macaque's experience of the visual world is probably very similar to our own.  It makes one wonder what kind of sounds our evolutionary ancestors experienced."

[Image is in the Public Domain]

It immediately put me in mind of tonal languages (such as Thai and Chinese) where the same syllable spoken with a rising, falling, or steady tone completely changes its denotative meaning.  Even non-tonal languages (like English) express connotation with tone, such as the rising tone at the end of a question.  And subtleties like stress patterns can substantially change the meaning.  For example, consider the sentence "She told me to give you the money today?"  Now, read it aloud while stressing the words as follows:

• SHE told me to give you the money today?
• She TOLD me to give you the money today?
• She told ME to give you the money today?
• She told me to GIVE you the money today?
• She told me to give YOU the money today?
• She told me to give you the MONEY today?
• She told me to give you the money TODAY?

No two of these connote the same idea, do they?

I'm reminded of how the brilliant neuroscientist David Eagleman describes the concept of the umwelt of an organism:

In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll introduced the concept of the umwelt.  He wanted a word to express a simple (but often overlooked) observation: different animals in the same ecosystem pick up on different environmental signals.  In the blind and deaf world of the tick, the important signals are temperature and the odor of butyric acid. For the black ghost knifefish, it's electrical fields.  For the echolocating bat, it's air-compression waves.  The small subset of the world that an animal is able to detect is its umwelt... 

The interesting part is that each organism presumably assumes its umwelt to be the entire objective reality "out there."  Why would any of us stop to think that there is more beyond what we can sense?

So tone, apparently, is part of the human umwelt, but not that of macaques (and probably other primate species).  Perhaps other animals include tone in their umwelt, but that point is uncertain.  I'd guess that these would include many bird species, which communicate using (often very complex) songs.  Echolocating cetaceans and bats, maybe.  Other than that, probably not many.

"This finding suggests that speech and music may have fundamentally changed the way our brain processes pitch," Conway said.  "It may also help explain why it has been so hard for scientists to train monkeys to perform auditory tasks that humans find relatively effortless."

I wonder what music sounds like to my dogs?  I get a curious head-tilt when I play the piano or flute, and I once owned a dog who would curl up at my feet while I practiced.  Both my dogs, however, immediately remember other pressing engagements and leave the premises as soon as I take out my bagpipes.

Although most humans do the same thing, so maybe that part's not about tonal perception per se.

************************************

The subject of Monday's blog post gave me the idea that this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation should be a classic -- Konrad Lorenz's Man Meets Dog.  This book, written back in 1949, is an analysis of the history and biology of the human/canine relationship, and is a must-read for anyone who owns, or has ever owned, a doggy companion.

Given that it's seventy years old, some of the factual information in Man Meets Dog has been superseded by new research -- especially about the genetic relationships between various dog breeds, and between domestic dogs and other canid species in the wild.  But his behavioral analysis is impeccable, and is written in his typical lucid, humorous style, with plenty of anecdotes that other dog lovers will no doubt relate to.  It's a delightful read!

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