Grammar wars

In linguistics, there's a bit of a line in the sand drawn between the descriptivists and the prescriptivists.  The former believe that the role of linguists is simply to describe language, not establish hard-and-fast rules for how language should be.  The latter believe that grammar and other linguistic rules exist in order to keep language stable and consistent, and therefore there are usages that are wrong, illogical, or just plain ugly.

Of course, most linguists don't fall squarely into one camp or the other; a lot of us are descriptivists up to a point, after which we say, "Okay, that's wrong."  I have to admit that I'm far more of a descriptivist bent myself, but there are some things that bring out my inner ruler-wielding grammar teacher, like when I see people write "alot."  Drives me nuts.  And I know it's now become acceptable, but "alright" affects me exactly the same way.

It's "all right," dammit.

However, some research published in Nature shows, if you're of a prescriptivist disposition, eventually you're going to lose.

In "Detecting Evolutionary Forces in Language Change," Mitchell G. Newberry, Christopher A. Ahern, Robin Clark, and Joshua B. Plotkin of the University of Pennsylvania describe that language change is inevitable, unstoppable, and even the toughest prescriptivist out there isn't going to halt the adoption of new words and grammatical forms.

The researchers analyzed over a hundred thousand texts from 1810 onward, looking for changes in morphology -- for example, the decrease in the use of past tense forms like "leapt" and "spilt" in favor of "leaped" and "spilled."  The conventional wisdom was that irregular forms (like pluralizing "goose" to "geese") persist because they're common; less common words, like "turf" -- which once pluralized to "turves" -- eventually regularize because people don't use the word often enough to learn the irregular inflection, and eventually the regular one (in this case, "turfs") takes over.

The research by Newberry et al. shows that this isn't true -- when there are two competing forms, which one wins is more a matter of random chance than commonness.  They draw a very cool analogy between this phenomenon, which they call stochastic drift, to the genetic drift experienced by evolving populations of living organisms.

"Whether it is by random chance or selection, one of the things that is true about English – and indeed other languages – is that the language changes,” said Joshua Plotkin, who co-authored the study.  "The grammarians might [win the battle] for a decade, but certainly over a century they are going to be on the losing side.  The prevailing view is that if language is changing it should in general change towards the regular form, because the regular form is easier to remember.  But chance can play an important role even in language evolution – as we know it does in biological evolution."

So in the ongoing battles over grammatical, pronunciation, and spelling change, the purists are probably doomed to fail.  It's worthwhile remembering how many words in modern English that are now completely accepted by descriptivist and prescriptivist alike are the result of such mangling.  Both "uncle" and "umpire" came about because of an improper split of the indefinite article ("a nuncle" and "a numpire" became "an uncle" and "an umpire").  "To burgle" came about because of a phenomenon called back formation -- when a common linguistic pattern gets applied improperly to a word that sounds like it has the same basic construction.  A teacher teaches, a baker bakes, so a burglar must burgle.  (I'm surprised, frankly, given how English yanks words around, we don't have carpenters carpenting.)

Anyhow, if this is read by any hard-core prescriptivists, all I can say is "I'm sorry."  It's a pity, but the world doesn't always work the way we'd like it to.  But even so, I'm damned if I'm going to use "alright" and "alot."  A line has to be drawn somewhere.  And I'm gonna draw it a lot, all right?

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Cosmological conundrums

Three of the most vexing problems in physics -- and ones I've hit on a number of times here at Skeptophilia -- are:

1. dark matter -- the stuff that (by its gravitational influence) seems to make up 26% of the mass/energy of the universe, and yet has resisted every effort at detection or inquiry into what other properties it might have.
2. dark energy -- a mysterious "something" that is said to be responsible for the apparent runaway expansion of the universe, and which (like dark matter) has defied detection or explanation in any other way.  This makes up 69% of the universe's mass/energy -- meaning the ordinary matter we're made of comprises only 5% of the apparent content of the universe.
3. the conflict between the general theory of relativity (i.e. the theory of gravitation) and quantum physics.  In the realm of the very small (or at high energies), the theory of relativity falls apart -- it's irreconcilable with the nondeterministic model of quantum mechanics.  Despite over a century of the best minds in theoretical physics trying to find a quantum theory of gravity, the two most fundamental underpinnings of our understanding of the universe just don't play well together.

A while back I was discussing this with the fiddler in my band, who also happened to be a Cornell physics lecturer.  Her comment was that the mess physics is currently in suggests we're missing something major -- the same way that the apparent constancy of the speed of light in a vacuum, regardless of reference frame, created an intractable nightmare for physicists at the end of the nineteenth century.  It took Einstein coming up with the Theories of Relativity to show that the problem wasn't a problem at all, but a fundamental reality about how space and time work, to resolve it all.

"We're still waiting for this century's Einstein," Kathy said.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons ESA/Hubble, Collage of six cluster collisions with dark matter maps, CC BY 4.0]

There's no shortage of physicists working on stepping into those shoes -- and just last week, two papers came out suggesting possible solutions for the first two problems.

One claims to solve all three simultaneously.

Both of them start with a similar take on dark matter and dark energy as Einstein did about the luminiferous aether, the mysterious substance that nineteenth-century physicists thought was the medium through which light propagated; they simply don't exist.  

The first one, from Rajendra Gupta of the University of Ottawa, proposes that the need for both dark matter and dark energy in the model comes from a misconception about how the laws of physics change on a cosmological time scale.  The prevailing wisdom has been "they don't;" the laws now are the same as the laws thirteen billion years ago, not long after the Big Bang.  Gupta suggests that making two modifications to the model -- assuming that the strength of the four fundamental forces of nature (gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear forces) have decreased over time, and that light loses energy as it travels over long distances, explain all the astrophysical observations we've made, and obviates the need for dark matter and dark energy.

"The study's findings confirm that our previous work -- JWST early-universe observations and ΛCDM cosmology -- about the age of the universe being 26.7 billion years [rather than the usually accepted value of 13.8 billion years] has allowed us to discover that the universe does not require dark matter to exist," Gupta said.  "In standard cosmology, the accelerated expansion of the universe is said to be caused by dark energy but is in fact due to the weakening forces of nature as it expands, not due to dark energy."

The second, by Jonathan Oppenheim and Andrea Russo of University College London, suggests a different solution that (if correct) not only gets rid of dark matter and dark energy, but in one fell swoop resolves the conflict between relativity and quantum physics.  They propose that the problem is the deterministic nature of gravity; if a quantum-like uncertainty is introduced into gravitational models, the whole shebang works without the need for some mysterious dark matter and dark energy that no one has ever been able to find experimentally.

The mathematics of the model -- which, I must admit up front, are beyond me -- introduce new terms to explain the behavior of gravity at low accelerations, which are (not coincidentally) the regime where the effects of dark matter become apparent.  It's a striking approach; physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, who is generally reluctant to hop on the latest Grand Unified Theory bandwagon (and whose pessimism has been, unfortunately, justified in the past) writes in an essay on the new theory, "Reading Oppenheim’s new papers—published in the journals Nature Communications and Physical Review X—about what he dubs 'Post-Quantum Gravity,' I have been impressed by how far he has pushed the approach.  He has developed a full-blown framework that combines quantum physics with classical physics, and he tells me that he has another paper in preparation which shows that he can solve the problem of infinites that plague the Big Bang and black holes."

Despite this, Hossenfelder is still dubious about Post-Quantum Gravity.  "I don’t want to withhold from you that I think Oppenheim’s theory is wrong, because it remains incompatible with Einstein’s cherished principle of locality, which says that causes should only travel from one place to its nearest neighbours and not jump over distances," she writes.  "I suspect that this is going to cause problems sooner or later, for example with energy conservation.  Still, I might be wrong...  If Oppenheim’s right, it would mean Einstein was both right and wrong: right in that gravity remained a classical, non-quantum theory, and wrong in that God did play dice indeed.  And I guess for the good Lord, we would have to be both sorry and not sorry."

So we'll just have to wait and see.  If either of these theories is right, we're talking Nobel Prize material.  If the second one is right, it'd be the physics discovery of the century.  Like Sabine Hossenfelder, I'm not holding my breath; attempts to solve definitively the three problems I started this post with are, thus far, batting zero.  And I'm hardly qualified to make a judgment about what the chances are for these two.  But like many interested laypeople, I'll be fascinated to see which way it goes -- and to see if we might, in the words of my bandmate/physicist friend, be "looking at the twenty-first century's Einstein."

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Memory boost

About two months ago I signed up with Duolingo to study Japanese.

I've been fascinated with Japan and the Japanese culture pretty much all my life, but I'm a total novice with the language, so I started out from "complete beginner" status.  I'm doing okay so far, although the fact that it's got three writing systems is a challenge, to put it mildly.  Like most Japanese programs, it's beginning with the hiragana system -- a syllabic script that allows you to work out the pronunciation of words -- but I've already seen a bit of katakana (used primarily for words borrowed from other languages) and even a couple of kanji (the ideographic script, where a character represents an entire word or concept).

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons 663highland, 140405 Tsu Castle Tsu MIe pref Japan01s, CC BY-SA 3.0]

While Duolingo focuses on getting you listening to spoken Japanese right away, my linguistics training has me already looking for patterns -- such as the fact that wa after a noun seems to act as a subject marker, and ka at the end of a sentence turns it into a question.  I'm still perplexed by some of the pronunciation patterns -- why, for example, vowel sounds sometimes don't get pronounced.  The first case of this I noticed is that the family name of the brilliant author Akutagawa Ryūnosuke is pronounced /ak'tagawa/ -- the /u/ in the second syllable virtually disappears.  I hear it happening fairly commonly in spoken Japanese, but I haven't been able to deduce what the pattern is.  (If there is one.  If there's one thing my linguistics studies have taught me, it's that all languages have quirks.  Try explaining to someone new to English why, for instance, the -ough combination in cough, rough, through, bough, and thorough are all pronounced differently.) 

Still and all, I'm coming along.  I've learned some useful phrases like "Sushi and water, please" (Sushi to mizu, kudasai) and "Excuse me, where is the train station?" (Sumimasen, eki wa doko desu ka?), as well as less useful ones like "Naomi Yamaguchi is cute" (Yamaguchi Naomi-san wa kawaii desu), which is only critical to know if you have a cute friend who happens to be named Naomi Yamaguchi.

The memorization, however, is often taxing to my 63-year-old brain.  Good for it, I have no doubt -- a recent study found that being bi- or multi-lingual can delay the onset of dementia by four years or more -- but it definitely is a challenge.  I go through my hiragana flash cards at least once a day, and have copious notes for what words mean and for any grammatical oddness I happen to notice.  Just the sheer amount of memorization, though, is kind of daunting.

Maybe what I should do is find a way to change the context in which I have to remember particular words, phrases, or characters.  That seems to be the upshot of a study I ran into a couple of days ago in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, about a study by a group from Temple University and the University of Pittsburgh about how to improve retention.

I'm sure all of us have experienced the effects of cramming for a test -- studying like hell the night before, and then you do okay on the test but a week later barely remember any of it.  This practice does two things wrong; not only stuffing all the studying into a single session, but doing it all the same way.

What this study showed was two factors that significantly improved long-term memory.  One was spacing out study sessions -- doing shorter sessions more often definitely helped.  I'm already approaching Duolingo this way, usually doing a lesson or two over my morning coffee, then hitting it again for a few more after dinner.  But the other interesting variable they looked at was that test subjects' memories improved substantially when the context was changed -- when, for example, you're trying to remember as much as you can of what a specific person is wearing, but instead of being shown the same photograph over and over, you're given photographs of the person wearing the same clothes but in a different setting each time.

"We were able to ask how memory is impacted both by what is being learned -- whether that is an exact repetition or instead, contains variations or changes -- as well as when it is learned over repeated study opportunities," said Emily Cowan, lead author of the study.  "In other words... we could examine how having material that more closely resembles our experiences of repetition in the real world -- where some aspects stay the same but others differ -- impacts memory if you are exposed to that information in quick succession versus over longer intervals, from seconds to minutes, or hours to days."

I can say that this is one of the things Duolingo does right.  Words are repeated, but in different combinations and in different ways -- spoken, spelled out using the English transliteration, or in hiragana only.  Rather than always seeing the same word in the same context, there's a balance between the repetition we all need when learning a new language and pushing your brain to generalize to slightly different usages or contexts.

So all things considered, Duolingo had it figured out even before the latest research came out.  I'm hoping it pays off, because my son and I would like to take a trip to Japan at some point and be able to get along, even if we don't meet anyone cute named Naomi Yamaguchi.  But I should wind this up, so for now I'll say ja ane, mata ashita (goodbye, see you tomorrow).

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The haunted sentry box

A while back, my wife and I were lucky enough to have the opportunity to visit the lovely island of Puerto Rico.  On the way there, Carol asked me what I wanted to do while we were in San Juan.  I thought about all the possibilities -- lounging on the beach, swimming, snorkeling, hiking, seeing the sights -- so of course what I said was, "I want to see the Haunted Sentry Box."

I first ran into the tale of the Haunted Sentry Box of Old San Juan when I was perhaps twelve years old, and happened upon a copy of C. B. Colby's book Strangely Enough.  This book is a whimsical, often scary, sometimes hilarious account of dozens of "true tales of the supernatural," each only a page or two long.  It was one of my first encounters with someone who claimed that ghosts, UFOs, and monsters could be real, and is one of the things that started me down the long and twisty road that led to Skeptophilia.  (I still have my battered and much-reread copy.)

The Tale of the Haunted Sentry Box is chilling in its simplicity.  In it, we hear about a sentry "many years ago" in the fortress of San Cristóbal in the oldest part of San Juan, who was assigned duty in one of the stone sentry boxes that jut out from the main wall.  He was reluctant, we're told, because it was a lonely post, and he had a "feeling of foreboding."  And sure enough, when another soldier went to relieve him some hours later, the sentry box was empty.  His superiors were certain the man had deserted.

One of the sentry boxes on the wall of San Cristóbal.  I have to admit, it wouldn't be a job for the claustrophobic.

So the second soldier was assigned to take the missing man's place, and a watch was set on the wall overlooking the sentry box.  Only shortly afterwards, a searing light blazed from inside the sentry box, shining out through the slit-like windows, and a "piercing scream" split the night.  The watchman roused his superiors from sleep, and they ran to investigate.  The second soldier was now missing as well -- the inside walls were "black with soot," and there was a strong smell of sulfur.

The sentry box was, understandably, never used again.

See why I wanted to go there?  So we hiked on over to San Cristóbal, paid our five bucks' admission fee, and explored the ancient walls and rooms of the fortress.  But although "La Garita del Diablo" was marked on maps -- proving that Colby hadn't, at least, made the story up himself -- we couldn't find the actual item.

Me, exploring one of the non-haunted sentry boxes of San Cristóbal.  I detected no soot, sulfur, or traces of missing soldiers.

Finally, after perhaps an hour of wandering around, I decided to ask in the souvenir shop (of course there's a souvenir shop) about the Haunted Sentry Box.  Could I have directions for how to get there?

The young woman behind the counter looked alarmed.  "Oh, no, no," she said, her eyes wide.  "We do not allow anyone to go there, sir."

"Really?" I said.  "Why?  I was hoping to see it for myself."

"It is not allowed," she said firmly.  From her expression, she looked torn between crossing herself and forking the sign of the evil eye in my direction.

She added reluctantly that there was, however, a point on the exterior wall where one can lean out and peer down toward La Garita del Diablo, if I was so determined to blight the memory of my visit with such a place.  Eager to so blight myself, I followed her directions to the wall's edge, and leaned over.  And here it is:

Not impressive at this distance, perhaps.  And I wasn't able to pick up any presentiments of evil through my binoculars when I scanned the place.  No black smoke curling up from the windows, no leering face in the shadows of the door.  It looked just like all of the other sentry boxes we saw, both in San Cristóbal and in the big fortress of El Morro only a mile westward along the coast of San Juan Harbor.

So the whole thing was a little anticlimactic.  Here I hoped to give Satan a good shot at me, and I was prevented from doing so by some silly regulation about protecting the tourists from being vaporized.

I'm happy to say that the remainder of the trip was wonderful, and I did get to spend a lot of time lounging on the beach in swim trunks, drinking coconut rum, and trying unsuccessfully to get rid of all the sand stuck to my legs.  We also spent a happy half-day hiking in the El Yunque Rain Forest, only an hour's drive to San Juan, which is a must-see for birders and other nature lovers.

But I have to confess to some disappointment about the Haunted Sentry Box.  So near, and yet so far.  Not only did I not get incinerated by Satan, our airplane crossed the Bermuda Triangle (twice) and we didn't disappear.  You know, if the world of the paranormal is so eager to interact with us living humans -- and to give a skeptic his well-deserved comeuppance -- they really aren't taking these opportunities very seriously.

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I've got your number

An inevitable side-effect of writing six times a week here at Skeptophilia is that I get some weird gifts sometimes.

This explains why I am the proud owner of:

• a cardboard-cutout Bigfoot that you can dress up with various stickers (he's currently wearing a kilt and a jaunty-looking tam-o'shanter)
• a certificate insuring my dog in case of alien abduction
• a very creepy-looking ritual mask from the Ivory Coast
• a book entitled UFOs: How to See Them
• a deck of steampunk Tarot cards
• a drawing of a scowling alien with a speech bubble saying "Nonbelievers Will Be Vaporized"
• a car air freshener shaped like a Sasquatch (fortunately, it doesn't smell like one)
• the poster made famous from Fox Mulder's office, with a UFO and the caption "I Want To Believe"

The latest addition to my collection comes to me from a loyal reader of Skeptophilia.  I got a surprise package from him in the mail, and when I opened it up, it turned out to be a book called...

... Mysteries and Secrets of Numerology.

This book, by Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe, is a complete analysis of the practice of numerology across the world, as viewed through the critical lens of believing every bit of it without question.  I checked out how it has fared on Amazon, and found that it has thus far received two reviews:

1: This book is full of wonderful information regarding numerology.  I got a copy from the library, but I will be buying my own to keep as a reference for numerology and sacred geometry.  Well Done!... and:

2: Fine.  This purchase was for some research I was doing and I came away amazed that anyone can take this entire subject matter area seriously.  The book drones on forever and that makes it great bedtime reading...  Yes, I did work the examples on my own set of numbers as well as those other family members and it didn't help me understand them any better than I did before.  They're still boring.  I put this book in the same category as those purporting to provide proof of alien abductions happening every day, all over planet earth.  If you really must find something in which to believe to give your life purpose, or help you amaze your friends, this book is for you.

So it's gotten a fairly mixed reception so far.

Undeterred by the second review, I read through it.  I will admit that I skimmed past the parts of it where the authors calculate numerological values for everyone from Hippocrates to Alexander Graham Bell.  I did note that the authors concluded that the "dark side of his numerological 1" for the famous British murderer Hawley Crippen "may have been what drove him to the rash and impetuous murder" of his second wife, Cora.  Which seems like a stretch, as from pure statistics one out of every nine people on Earth are "numerological 1s," and as far as I can tell, very few of them murder their second wives.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The practice of numerology goes back a long way.  The whole thing seems to have begun with the mystical practice called gematria, which basically assigned numbers to damn near everything -- and woe be unto you if your number turned out to be bad.  The whole 666 being the Number of the Beast thing comes from gematria; and there's a lot of equating one thing for another because they "have the same number."  Here's an example from the Third Book of Baruch, one of the biblical apocrypha, as explained in the above-linked Wikipedia article:

A snake is stated to consume a cubit of ocean every day, but is unable to ever finish consuming it, because the oceans are also refilled by 360 rivers.  The number 360 is given because the numerical value of the Greek word for snake, δράκων, when transliterated to Hebrew (דרקון) is 360.

Makes perfect sense to me.

In any case, back to the Fanthorpes' book.  The last section, while no less ridiculous, was at least kind of interesting.  We're told therein that because all sorts of factors can contribute to a person acting a particular way, or an action having a particular outcome, there's no reason not to believe that "numbers can exert invisible and unsuspected influences just as powerful."  We're then instructed that we should all pay more attention to the numbers in our lives, and especially look for the good influences of the numbers 1 (which, I note, didn't help Crippen much), 3, 6, 7, and 9.  Only in the second-to-last paragraph do the Fanthorpes bring up the central problem with the whole thing: "These attempts to use numbers as influences to attract good things and to protect against negative things are very interesting, but are open to the question of whether -- when they seem to work -- they are actually self-fulfilling prophecies."

Well, yeah.  The whole book is basically Confirmation Bias "R" Us.

So I'm sure you're all dying to know what my number is.  The book gives detailed instructions on how to calculate your number, although it does say there are different ways of doing so.  "Therefore," the authors write, "two equally well-qualified and experienced numerologists working with slightly different systems could reach very different conclusions."  (Which to me, is just a fancy way of saying, "we admit this is bullshit.")

I used what they say the "simplest way" is -- writing out the English alphabet underneath the numbers 1-9, starting with A=1, B=2, and so on; after you reach I=9, you start over with J=1.  Following this protocol, my whole name adds up to 76.  You're then supposed to add the digits (giving 13) and then add those (giving a final answer of 4).

So my number is 4, which unfortunately is not one of the "auspicious numbers" mentioned above.  Four, apparently, means "a foundation, the implementation of order, a struggle against limits, and steady growth."

I suppose it could be worse.

In any case, I'm not going to lose any sleep over the fact that I didn't get "9" (the number of "immense creativity").  Nor am I going to do what the authors say some folks have done, which is change their name to one that has a better number.

It might be worth getting a second opinion, however. Maybe I should see what the "steampunk Tarot cards" have to say on the matter.  That should be illuminating.

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In memoriam

I want you to recall something simple.  A few to choose from:

• your own middle name
• the street you grew up on
• your best friend in elementary school
• the name of your first pet
• your second-grade teacher's name

Now, I'm presuming that none of you were actively thinking about any of those before I asked.  So, here are a couple of questions:

Where was that information before I asked you about it?  And how did you retrieve it from wherever that was?

The simple answer is, "we don't know."  Well, we have a decent idea about where in the brain specific kinds of information are stored, mostly from looking at what gets lost when people have strokes or traumatic brain injury.  (A technique my Anatomy and Physiology professor described as "figuring out how a car functions by smashing parts of it with a hammer, and then seeing what doesn't work anymore.")

But how exactly is that information is encoded?  That's an ongoing area of research, and one we're only beginning to see results from.  The prevailing idea for a long time has been that interactions between networks of neurons in the brain allow the storage and retrieval of memories -- for example, you have networks that encode memory of faces, ones that involve familiarity, ones that activate when you feel positive emotions, possibly ones that fire for particular stimuli like gray hair, glasses, being female, being elderly, or tone of voice -- and the intersection of these activate to retrieve the memory of your grandmother.

The problem is, all attempts to find a Venn-diagram-like cross-connected network in the brain have failed.  Even so, the idea that there could be a much smaller and more specific neural cluster devoted to a particular memory was ridiculed as the "grandmother cell model" -- the term was coined by neuroscientist Jerome Lettvin in the 1960s -- it was thought to be nonsense that we could have anything like a one-to-one correlation between memories and neurons.  As neuroscientist Charles Edward Connor put it, the grandmother cell model had "become a shorthand for invoking all of the overwhelming practical arguments against a one-to-one object coding scheme.  No one wants to be accused of believing in grandmother cells."

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of photographer Michel Royon]

The problem came roaring back, though, when neurosurgeons Itzhak Fried and Rodrigo Quian Quiroga were working with an epileptic patient who had electrical brain-monitoring implants, and found that when he was shown a photograph of Jennifer Aniston, a specific neuron fired in his brain.  Evidently, we do encode specific memories in only a tiny number of neurons -- but how it works is still unknown.  

We have over eighty billion neurons in the brain -- so even discounting the ones involved in autonomic functioning, you'd still think there's plenty to encode specific memories.  But... and this is a huge but... there's no evidence whatsoever that when you learn something new, somehow you're doing any kind of neural rewiring, much less growing new neurons.

The upshot is that we still don't know.

The reason this comes up is because of a study at Columbia University that was published last week in Nature Human Behavior, that looked at a newly-discovered type of brain wave, a traveling wave -- which sweeps across the cerebrum during certain activities.  And what the researchers, led by biomedical engineer Joshua Jacobs, found is that when memories are formed, traveling waves tend to move from the back of the cerebrum toward the front, and in the opposite direction when memories are retrieved.

Of course, nothing in the brain is quite that simple.  Some people's brain waves went the other direction; it seems like the change in direction is what was critical.  "I implemented a method to label waves traveling in one direction as basically 'good for putting something into memory,'" said Uma Mohan, who co-authored the paper.  "Then we could see how the direction switched over the course of the task.  The waves tended to go in the participant’s encoding direction when that participant was putting something into memory and in the opposite direction right before they recalled the word.  Overall, this new work links traveling waves to behavior by demonstrating that traveling waves propagate in different directions across the cortex for separate memory processes."

The other limitation of the study is that it doesn't discern whether the traveling waves, and the change in direction, are a cause or an effect -- if the change in direction causes recall, or if the shift in wave direction is caused by some other process that is the actual trigger for recall -- so the direction change is merely a byproduct.  But it certainly is an intriguing start on a vexing question in neuroscience.

Me, I want to know what's going on with the "tip of the tongue" phenomenon.  Just about everyone experiences it -- you know the memory is in there somewhere, you can almost get it, but... nope.  Most puzzling (and frustrating), I find that giving up and going to The Google often triggers the memory to appear before I have the chance to look it up.  This happened not long ago -- for some reason I was trying to come up with the name of the third Musketeer.  Athos, Porthos, and... who?  I pondered on it, and then finally went, "to hell with it," and did a search, but before I could even hit "return" my brain said, "Aramis."

What the fuck, brain?  Do you do this just to taunt me?

At least I comfort myself in knowing that we don't really understand how any of this works.  Which is slim consolation -- but at least it means that my own brain is no more baffling than anyone else's.

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Speaking beauty

My novel In the Midst of Lions, the first of a trilogy, has a character named Anderson Quaice, who is a linguistics professor.  He also has a strong pessimistic streak, something that proves justified in the course of the story.  He develops a conlang called Kalila not only as an entertaining intellectual exercise, but because he fears that civilization is heading toward collapse, and he wants a way to communicate with his friends that will not be understood by (possibly hostile) outsiders.

Kalila provides a framework for the entire trilogy, which spans over fourteen centuries.  I wanted the conlang to follow a similar trajectory as Latin did; by the second book, The Scattering Winds, Kalila has become the "Sacred Language," used in rituals and religion; by the third, The Chains of Orion, it has been relegated to a small role as a historical curiosity, something learned (and mourned!) only by academics, and which few speak fluently. 

But of course, in order to incorporate it into the narrative, I had to invent the conlang.  While I'm not a professor like Quaice, my master's degree is in historical linguistics, so I have a fairly solid background for comprehending (and thus creating) a language structure.  I've mostly studied inflected languages, like Old Norse, Old English, Latin, and Greek -- ones where nouns, verbs, and adjectives change form depending on how they're being used in sentences -- so I decided to make Kalila inflected.  (Interestingly, along the way English lost most of its noun inflections; in the sentences The dog bit the cat and The cat bit the dog you know who bit whom by word order, not because the words dog and cat change form, as they would in most inflected languages.  English does retain a few inflections, holdovers from its Old English roots -- he/him/his, she/her/hers, they/them/theirs, and who/whom are examples of inflections we've hung onto.)

One of the interesting choices I had to make centers on phonetics.  What repertoire of sounds did I want Kalila to have?  I decided I was aiming for something vaguely Slavic-sounding, with a few sound combinations and placements you don't find in English (for example, the initial /zl/ combination in the word for "quick," zlavo.)  I included only one sound that isn't found in English -- the unvoiced velar fricative (the final sound in the name Bach), which in accordance with the International Phonetic Alphabet I spelled with a letter "x" in the written form; lexa, pronounced /lekha/, means "hand."

Of course, in the end I used about one percent of all the syntax and morphology and lexicon and whatnot I'd invented in the actual story.  But it was still a lot of fun to create.

The topic comes up because of a really cool study that recently came out in the journal Language and Speech, by a team led by linguist Christine Mooshammer of Humboldt University in Berlin.  The researchers wanted to find out why some languages are perceived as sounding more pleasant-sounding than others -- but to avoid the bias that would come with actual spoken languages, they confined their analysis to conlangs such as Quenya, Sindarin, Dothraki, Klingon, Cardassian, Romulan, and Orkish.

The first stanza of a poem in Quenya, written in the lovely Tengwar script Tolkien invented [Image is in the Public Domain]

The results, perhaps unsurprisingly, rated Quenya and Sindarin (the two main Elvish languages in Tolkien's world) as the most pleasant, and Dothraki (from Game of Thrones) and Klingon to sound the most unpleasant.  Interestingly, Orkish -- at least when not being snarled by characters like Azog the Defiler -- was ranked somewhere in the middle.

Some of their conclusions:

• Languages with lower consonantal clustering were rated as more pleasant.  (On the extreme low end of this scale are Hawaiian and Japanese, which have almost no consonant clusters at all.)
• A higher frequency of front vowels (such as /i/ and /e/) as opposed to back vowels (such as /o/ and /u/) correlates with higher pleasantness ratings.
• Languages with a higher frequency of continuants (such as /l/, /r/, and /m/) as opposed to stops and plosives (like /t/ and /p/) were ranked as more pleasant-sounding.
• Higher numbers of unvoiced sibilants (such as /s/) and velars (such as the /x/ I used in Kalila) correlated with a lower ranking for pleasantness.
• The more similar the phonemic inventory of the conlang was to the test subject's native language, the more pleasant the subject thought it sounded; familiarity, apparently, is important.

This last one introduces the bias I mentioned earlier, something that Mooshammer admits is a limitation of the study.  "One of our main findings was that Orkish doesn’t sound evil without the special effects, seeing the speakers and hearing the growls and hissing sounds in the movies," she said, in an interview with PsyPost.  "Therefore, the average person should be aware of the effect of stereotypes that do influence the perception of a language.  Do languages such as German sound orderly and unpleasant and Italian beautiful and erotic because of their sounds, or just based on one’s own attitude toward their speakers?"

I wonder how the test subjects would have ranked spoken Kalila?  If the researchers want a sample, I'd be happy to provide it.

It's a fun study, which I encourage you to read in its entirety.  It brings up the bigger question, though, of why we find anything aesthetically pleasing.  I'm fascinated by why certain pieces of music are absolutely electrifying to me (one example is Stravinsky's Firebird) while others that are considered by many to be masterpieces do nothing for me at all (I've yet to hear a piece of music by Brahms that elicits more than "meh" from me).  There's an emotional resonance there with some things and not others, but I'm at a loss to explain it.

So maybe I should end with a song by Enya, which is not only beautiful musically, but is sung in the conlang she invented, Loxian.  Give this a listen and see where you'd rank it.

I don't know about you, but I think that's pretty sweet-sounding.

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