Word search

I've always wondered why words have the positive or negative connotations they do.

Ask people what their favorite and least-favorite sounding words are, and you'll find some that are easily explicable (vomit regularly makes the "least-favorite" list), but others are kind of weird.  A poll of linguists identified the phrase cellar door as being the most beautiful-sounding pair of words in the English language -- and look at how many names from fantasy novels have the same cadence (Erebor, Aragorn, Celeborn, Glorfindel, Valinor, to name just a handful from the Tolkien mythos).  On the other hand, I still recall passing a grocery store with my son one day and seeing a sign in the window that said, "ON SALE TODAY: moist, succulent pork."

"There it is," my son remarked.  "A single phrase made of the three ugliest words ever spoken."

Moist, in fact, is one of those universally loathed words; my surmise is the rather oily sound of the /oi/ combination, but that's hardly a scholarly analysis.  The brilliant British comedian Miranda Hart had her own unique take on it:

Another question is why some words are easier to bring to mind than others. This was the subject of a fascinating paper in Nature Human Behavior titled, "Memorability of Words in Arbitrary Verbal Associations Modulates Memory Retrieval in the Anterior Temporal Lobe," by neuroscientists Weizhen Xie, Wilma A. Bainbridge, Sara K. Inati, Chris I. Baker, and Kareem A. Zaghloul of the National Institute of Health.  Spurred by a conversation at a Christmas party about why certain faces are memorable and others are not, study lead author Weizhen Xie wondered if the same was true for words -- and if so, that perhaps it could lead to more accuracy in cognitive testing for patients showing memory loss or incipient dementia.

"Our memories play a fundamental role in who we are and how our brains work," Xie said in an interview with Science Daily.  "However, one of the biggest challenges of studying memory is that people often remember the same things in different ways, making it difficult for researchers to compare people's performances on memory tests.  For over a century, researchers have called for a unified accounting of this variability.  If we can predict what people should remember in advance and understand how our brains do this, then we might be able to develop better ways to evaluate someone's overall brain health."

What the team did is as fascinating as it is simple; they showed test subjects pairs of functionally-unrelated words (say, "hand" and "apple"), and afterward, tested them by giving them one word and asking them to try to recall what word it was paired with.  What they found is that some words were easy to recall regardless of what they were paired with and whether they came first or second in the pair; others were more difficult, again irrespective of position or pairing.

"We saw that some things -- in this case, words -- may be inherently easier for our brains to recall than others," said study senior author Kareem Zaghloul.  "These results also provide the strongest evidence to date that what we discovered about how the brain controls memory in this set of patients may also be true for people outside of the study."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mandeep Singh, Emotions words, CC BY 4.0]

Neither the list of easy-to-remember words nor the list of harder-to-remember ones show any obvious commonality (such as abstract versus concrete nouns, or long words versus short ones) that would explain the difference.  Each list included some extremely common words and some less common ones -- tank, doll, and pond showed up on the memorable list, and street, couch, and cloud on the less-memorable list.  It was remarkable how consistent the pattern was; the results were unequivocal even when the researchers controlled for such factors as educational level, age, gender, and so on.

"We thought one way to understand the results of the word pair tests was to apply network theories for how the brain remembers past experiences," Xie said.  "In this case, memories of the words we used look like internet or airport terminal maps, with the more memorable words appearing as big, highly trafficked spots connected to smaller spots representing the less memorable words.  The key to fully understanding this was to figure out what connects the words."

The surmise is that it has to do with the way our brains network information.  Certain words might act as "nodes" -- memory points that connect functionally to a great many different concepts -- so the brain more readily lands on those words when searching.  Others, however familiar and common they might be, act more as "dead-ends" in brain networking, making only a few conceptual links.  Think of it as trying to navigate through a city -- some places are easy to get to because there are a great many paths that lead there, while others require a specific set of roads and turns.  In the first case, you can get to your destination even if you make one or two directional goofs; in the second, one wrong turn and you're lost.

All of which is fascinating. I know as I've gotten older I've had the inevitable memory slowdown, which most often manifests as my trying to recall a word I know that I know. I often have to (with some degree of shame) resort to googling something that's a synonym and scanning down the list until I find the word I'm looking for, but it makes me wonder why this happens with some words and not with others.  Could it be that in my 64-year-old brain, bits of the network are breaking down, and this affects words with fewer working functional links than ones with a great many of them?

All speculation, of course. I can say that whatever it is, it's really freakin' annoying.  But I need to wrap up this post, because it's time for lunch.  Which is -- I'm not making this up -- leftover moist, succulent pork.

I'll try not to think about it.

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

Memory offload

In James Burke's brilliant series The Day the Universe Changed, there's a line that never fails to shock me when I think about it, but which goes by so quickly you might miss it if you're not paying attention.  (This is typical of Burke -- I've heard his deservedly famous series Connections as being like "watching a pinball game on fast-forward.")

The line comes up at the beginning of the last episode, "Worlds Without End," in which he's giving a quick summary of humankind's progression through technology.  He says, "In the fifteenth century, the invention of the printing press took our memories away."

Recording our knowledge in some kind of semi-permanent fashion is at odds with our need to keep anything important in memory.  I'm riffing on that concept in my current work-in-progress, The Scattering Winds, which is about a post-apocalyptic world in which some parts of society in what is now the United States have gone back to being non-literate.  All of the knowledge of the culture is entrusted to the mind of one person -- the Keeper of the Word -- whose sacred task it is to remember all lore, language, music, and history.

Then... because of a refugee from another place -- the apprentice to the Keeper learns about written language, and acquires the rudiments of reading, then goes in search of any books that might have survived the disasters and plagues that ended the world as we know it.  He realizes that this (re)discovery will end the vocation he's studied his whole life for, but the lure of lost knowledge is too powerful to resist even so.

He knows that in a very real sense, the rediscovery of written language will take his memory away.

The internet, of course, has only deepened the scope of the problem.  A few years ago, I had a student who had what seemed to me a weird approach to figuring things out.  When presented with a question he didn't know the answer to, his immediate response was to pull out his school-issued iPad and Google it.  Often, he didn't even give his brain a chance to wrestle with the question; if the answer wasn't immediately obvious, out came the electronics.

"What have you learned by doing that?" I recall asking him, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice.

"I got the right answer," he said.

"But the answer isn't the point!"  Okay, at that point my frustration was pretty clear.

I think the issue I had with this student comes from two sources.  One is the education system's unfortunate emphasis on Getting The Right Answer -- that if you have The Right Answer on your paper, it doesn't matter how you got it, or whether you really understand how to get there.  But the other is our increasing reliance on what amounts to external memory.  When we don't know something, the ease and accessibility of answers online makes us default to that, rather than taking the time to search our own memories for the answer.

The loss of our own facility for recall because of the external storage of information was the subject of a study in the journal Memory.  Called "Cognitive Offloading: How the Internet is Increasingly Taking Over Human Memory," the study, by cognitive psychologists Benjamin Storm, Sean Stone, and Aaron Benjamin, looked at how people approach the recall of information, and found that once someone has started relying on the internet, it becomes the go-to source, superseding one's own memory:

The results revealed that participants who previously used the Internet to gain information were significantly more likely to revert to Google for subsequent questions than those who relied on memory.  Participants also spent less time consulting their own memory before reaching for the Internet; they were not only more likely to do it again, they were likely to do it much more quickly.  Remarkably, 30% of participants who previously consulted the Internet failed to even attempt to answer a single simple question from memory.

This certainly mirrors my experience with my students.  Not all of them were as hooked to their electronics as the young man in my earlier anecdote, but it is more and more common for students to bypass thinking altogether and jump straight to Google.

"Memory is changing," lead author Storm said.  "Our research shows that as we use the Internet to support and extend our memory we become more reliant on it.  Whereas before we might have tried to recall something on our own, now we don't bother.  As more information becomes available via smartphones and other devices, we become progressively more reliant on it in our daily lives."

What concerns me is something that the researchers say was outside the scope of their research; what effect this might have on our own cognitive processes.  It's one thing if the internet becomes our default, but that our memories are still there, unaltered, should the Almighty Google not be available.  It's entirely another if our continual reliance on external "offloaded" memory ultimately weakens our own ability to process, store, and recall.  It's not as far-fetched as it sounds; there have been studies that suggest that mental activity can stave off or slow down dementia, so the "if you don't use it, you lose it" aphorism may work just as much for our brains as it does for our muscles.

In any case, maybe it'd be a good idea for all of us to put away the electronics.  No one questions the benefits of weightlifting if you're trying to gain strength; maybe we should push ourselves into the mental weightlifting of processing and recalling without leaning on the crutch of the internet.  And as Kallian discovers in The Scattering Winds, the bounty of information that comes from the external storage of information -- be it online or in print -- comes at a significant cost to our own reverence for knowledge and depth of understanding.

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

Word search

I've always wondered why words have the positive or negative connotations they do.

Ask people what their favorite and least-favorite sounding words are, and you'll find some that are easily explicable (vomit regularly makes the "least-favorite" list), but others are kind of weird.  A poll of linguists identified the phrase cellar door as being the most beautiful-sounding pair of words in the English language -- and look at how many names from fantasy novels have the same cadence (Erebor, Aragorn, Celeborn, Glorfindel, Valinor, to name just a handful from the Tolkien mythos).  On the other hand, I still recall passing a grocery store with my son one day and seeing a sign in the window that said, "ON SALE TODAY: moist, succulent pork."

"There it is," my son remarked.  "A single phrase made of the three ugliest words ever spoken."

Moist, in fact, is one of those universally loathed words; my surmise is the rather oily sound of the /oi/ combination, but that's hardly a scholarly analysis.  The brilliant British comedian Miranda Hart had her own unique take on it:

Another question is why some words are easier to bring to mind than others.  This was the subject of a fascinating paper in Nature Human Behavior this week, "Memorability of Words in Arbitrary Verbal Associations Modulates Memory Retrieval in the Anterior Temporal Lobe," by neuroscientists Weizhen Xie, Wilma A. Bainbridge, Sara K. Inati, Chris I. Baker, and Kareem A. Zaghloul of the National Institute of Health.  Spurred by a conversation at a Christmas party about why certain faces are memorable and others are not, study lead author Weizhen Xie wondered if the same was true for words -- and if so, that perhaps it could lead to more accuracy in cognitive testing for patients showing memory loss or incipient dementia.

"Our memories play a fundamental role in who we are and how our brains work," Xie said in an interview with Science Daily. "However, one of the biggest challenges of studying memory is that people often remember the same things in different ways, making it difficult for researchers to compare people's performances on memory tests.  For over a century, researchers have called for a unified accounting of this variability.  If we can predict what people should remember in advance and understand how our brains do this, then we might be able to develop better ways to evaluate someone's overall brain health."

What the team did is as fascinating as it is simple; they showed test subjects pairs of functionally-unrelated words (say, "hand" and "apple"), and afterward, tested them by giving them one word and asking them to try to recall what word it was paired with.  What they found is that some words were easy to recall regardless of what they were paired with and whether they came first or second in the pair; others were more difficult, again irrespective of position or pairing.

"We saw that some things -- in this case, words -- may be inherently easier for our brains to recall than others," said study senior author Kareem Zaghloul.  "These results also provide the strongest evidence to date that what we discovered about how the brain controls memory in this set of patients may also be true for people outside of the study."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mandeep Singh, Emotions words, CC BY 4.0]

Neither the list of easy-to-remember words nor the list of harder-to-remember ones show any obvious commonality (such as abstract versus concrete nouns, or long words versus short ones) that would explain the difference.  Each list included some extremely common words and some less common ones -- tank, doll, and pond showed up on the memorable list, and street, couch, and cloud on the less-memorable list.  It was remarkable how consistent the pattern was; the results were unequivocal even when the researchers controlled for such factors as educational level, age, gender, and so on.

"We thought one way to understand the results of the word pair tests was to apply network theories for how the brain remembers past experiences," Xie said.  "In this case, memories of the words we used look like internet or airport terminal maps, with the more memorable words appearing as big, highly trafficked spots connected to smaller spots representing the less memorable words.  The key to fully understanding this was to figure out what connects the words."

The surmise is that it has to do with the way our brains network information.  Certain words might act as "nodes" -- memory points that connect functionally to a great many different concepts -- so the brain more readily lands on those words when searching.  Others, however familiar and common they might be, act more as "dead-ends" in brain networking, making only a few conceptual links.  Think of it as trying to navigate through a city -- some places are easy to get to because there are a great many paths that lead there, while others require a specific set of roads and turns.  In the first case, you can get to your destination even if you make one or two directional goofs; in the second, one wrong turn and you're lost.

All of which is fascinating.  I know as I've gotten older I've had the inevitable memory slowdown, which most often manifests as my trying to recall a word I know that I know.  I often have to (with some degree of shame) resort to googling something that's a synonym and scanning down the list until I find the word I'm looking for, but it makes me wonder why this happens with some words and not with others.  Could it be that in my 59-year-old brain, bits of the network are breaking down, and this affects words with fewer working functional links than ones with a great many of them?

All speculation, of course.  I can say that whatever it is, it's really freakin' annoying.  But I need to wrap up this post, because it's time for lunch.  Which is -- I'm not making this up -- leftover moist, succulent pork.

I'll try not to think about it.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is pure fun, and a great gift for any of your friends who are cryptid fanciers: Graham Roumieu's hilarious Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir.

In this short but hysterically funny book, we find out from the Big Guy's own mouth how hard it is to have the reputation for being huge, hairy, and bad-smelling.  Okay, even he admits he doesn't smell great, but it's not his fault, as showers aren't common out in the wilderness.  And think about the effect this has on his self-image, not to mention his success rate of advertising in the "Personals" section of the newspaper.

So read this first-person account of the struggles of this hirsute Everyman, and maybe even next time you're out hiking, bring along a little something for our australopithecene distant cousin.

He's very fond of peach schnapps.

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

Acceleration causation station

You might have heard that a while back, there was a recall on Toyotas because of a problem with stuck accelerator pedals, a malfunction that cost several lives and had one man unjustly imprisoned for vehicular manslaughter.  Toyota was accused of covering up the problem to avoid the cost of a recall, and ultimately paid out $1.2 billion in repairs and reparations to avoid prosecution.

What you may not know is that the entire problem was caused by...

... HAARP.

Yes, HAARP, the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, the array of creepy-looking antennas out on the Alaskan tundra that has been blamed for everything from the Fukushima earthquake to Hurricane Katrina.  

Okay, I know HAARP shut down in 2014.

That's what they want you to believe.

HAARP [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So now here's another thing to lay at the feet of the Illuminati, who are (of course) the ones who operate the research station.  At least, that's the contention of the people over at the David Icke Forum, which acts as some kind of clearinghouse for loonies who don't think that anything happens by chance.

Here's the actual quote:

There seems [sic] to be a lot of accidents happening lately because of electronics failure. Many aircraft have fallen out of the sky due to autopilot error, etc. 

Trains have collided because switching stations have failed. 

Now the Toyota accelerator problem.  Truth is, GM, Ford and Toyota have all had the problem for years. 

I suggest that the nanoscale particles of silver released from the Chemtrail program in the form of silver-iodide that allows electrically charged ions to be directed and controlled through HAARP technologies is getting into electronics and reeking [sic] havoc by "tricking" (shorting) electro-mechanical switches.

Well, that's definitely the first thing I think of when I have car problems.  A while back, my 2007 Honda Element, which I love even though it looks kind of like a blue toaster on wheels, started making a weird grinding noise that seemed to come from the rear passenger side.  I immediately took it to my mechanic, Rick.

"Rick," I said, "I think something's wrong with the suspension or brakes back there.  Or, possibly, silver iodide nanoparticles released in the form of chemtrails by an atmospheric monitoring station in Alaska are tricking my car's electro-mechanical parts, thus "reeking havoc."

Turned out it was a stuck brake caliper.  Or at least that's what Rick told me.  There's always the possibility that he might be a secret Illuminati member himself, in which case I've now revealed to Them that I know what they're up to.

So now that I've given myself away, I guess I better watch myself.  Who knows what they'll beam silver iodide into next?  Maybe my computer at school.  Although considering that it already takes twenty minutes just to boot up when I turn it on, maybe that'll make it work better.  Heaven knows nothing else the IT guys have tried has made any difference.  My own contention is that the problem is caused by the fact that my school computer is powered by a single hamster running in a wheel, and that it's as slow as it is because the hamster's kind of pooped out after all these years.

But I digress.

In any case, let me say it as clearly as I know how: HAARP was shut down three years ago.  Any problems you have with your car, up to and including a stuck accelerator, are caused by mechanical failures, not by "silver iodide particles," which you can't "direct and control" using some kind of magic laser beam from space anyhow.  So just relax, and go back to chewing at the straps of your straitjacket, or whatever it was you were doing before.

In any case, I'd better wrap this up, because I've got to get showered, get some breakfast and coffee, and head on out to school.  Turn my computer on, and then wait twenty minutes to see if the hamster is in the mood to run today.

Tuna meltdown

So we're starting the week with another hoax.

I probably wouldn't even bother to address this one if I hadn't already seen it four times.  It's an article from the site News 4 with the scary title, "Massive Bumble Bee Recall After 2 Employees Admit Cooking a Man and Mixing Him With a Batch of Tuna."

[image courtesy of artist Duane Raver Jr. and the Wikimedia Commons]

If you click the link -- and I don't for a moment suggest you should, because I don't want to be responsible for giving News 4 any more hits on their hit tracker -- you will notice something rather strange; although the headline starts with the words "Massive Bumble Bee Recall," the article mentions nothing about a recall.  Nada.  It goes into a rather horrifying story of one José Melena, who was performing maintenance inside a 35-foot-long industrial oven when two coworkers dumped 12,000 pounds of tuna into it and turned it on.  It wasn't until the oven was opened two hours later that the accident was discovered and Melena's body found.

Awful.  Nauseating, even.  The problem is that despite what the headline says, Melena's death and the recall have absolutely nothing to do with one another, and in fact, happened four years apart.  Not only that, Melena was not deliberately cooked and then "mixed with a batch of tuna."

Melena's death happened in October of 2012, and resulted in the California plant's Operational Director and its Safety Manager being charged with violating Occupational Safety & Health Administration rules that caused a death.  Bumble Bee Foods was fined $1.5 million.  The tuna, needless to say, was all destroyed.

The recall, on the other hand, happened in March of 2016, and sounds like it was a pretty minor incident.  Here's the recall notice:

Bumble Bee Foods, LLC announced today that it is voluntarily recalling 3 specific UPC codes of canned Chunk Light tuna due to process deviations that occurred in a co-pack facility not owned or operated by Bumble Bee.  These deviations were part of the commercial sterilization process and could result in contamination by spoilage organisms or pathogens, which could lead to life-threatening illness if consumed.  It is important to note that there have been no reports of illness associated with these products to date.  No other production codes or products are affected by this recall.

So as you can see, the two are completely separate events.  If you're concerned about having bought one of the cans of recalled tuna, the link I posted above has a list of the can codes affected.

Which took me all of five minutes of research to verify.  Too much, apparently, for some people, because the article seems to be causing widespread meltdown.  Here are some of the comments I've seen posted :

• EWWWWWWW I'm never eating tuna again
• I wonder what else is in canned food that we never find out about?
• This kind of thing probably goes unreported all the time -- surprised this one got out
• I'm throwing out every can of tuna in my kitchen.
• Why were those two not charged with murder?  Our legal system fucking sucks.
• Corporate America will do anything to turn a buck, why did they have to be forced to do a recall, and why am I only now hearing about this?  Nothing in the MSM, of course.

Yes, well, the reason there's nothing in the MSM (mainstream media) is that the story is being completely misreported.  The original incident definitely made the news -- I remember seeing it when it happened -- but the blending of the story with the recall notice is a pure falsehood.

So once again we're back at "check your damn sources before you post something."  If you're a worry-wart, and still have uneaten Bumble Bee tuna from March, give a glance at the can codes if you like.  But don't worry that there's bits of human mixed into it.

That's soylent green, not tuna.