Literacy skills

According to Stanford Psychologist Anne Fernold, the amount of dialogue a child experiences in the first 8 months is the best predictor of future language-processing and decision-making skills. The dialogue needs to be engaging, which means interactive, question-asking and answering and choice-offering in a attentive, non-threatening manner that is intended to explain things. It means making the child a 'conversational partner' from day one.

Story of Eve

“I couldn’t get past the idea that I’d been abandoned. In my mind I was like the victim because I wasn’t able to get him to stay. I seriously believed I was the best I’d ever be ..I was nothing without him. When he left, I felt like a failure ..like I wasn’t good enough ..he wanted someone better. I realize now that he wanted to better himself. Now I’m like, what the fuck ..? Who’s to say I didn’t abandoned him? I get a lot of things wrong.”

Ask Alice

Oh, by the way, if you'd really like to know, he went that way / Who did? / The White Rabbit / He did? / He did what? / Went that way / Who did? / The White Rabbit / What rabbit? / But didn't you just say / Can you stand on your head? / Oh!   ~ Artwork by [ Claudia McKinney ]

Online Comments

This morning I ran across a study that says inflammatory online comments are better at changing someone’s mind than civil comments [ link ]. Sounds intuitive enough. Provocation is more commanding than reason. However I’d like to see a study that shows how relevant these online comments really are. Most of the one’s I’ve read have little to do with the topic they’re commenting on and more to do with broadcasting whatever’s on someone’s mind. For instance, I bet comments on an article about Ben Affleck wining the Oscars will mention Jennifer Lopez almost as often as they mention the movie Argo.

Ricardo

I think Ricardo mistook the phrase “lets do coffee ..”  for  “..lets do it tomorrow.”   He’s accusing the guy of being a flake because he didn’t show. He goes on to tell me that he’s learned to text blindfolded so he can do it while hiding the cell phone in the pocket of his jacket during class. It almost sounds like he’s backpedaling when he says his friends have a real problem ..they can’t stop texting even when they’re talking to him at lunch. What do I make of this ..? I think he wants to impress me with his cleverness but at the same time make sure I don’t get the wrong idea ..he’s not like the other kids his age. It sounds that way because I don’t have a stereotype of other kids his age. I figure it feels to him like he’s talking to one of his parents when he’s talking to me because he’s still in high school and everything. Not sure I can level the playing field.  Too tired to try really. Oh well, doesn't make that much difference.

Willingness to yield

Occupational therapy:

“Jen, is it really necessary for me to take a behind-the-wheel test for the  6-week   follow-up ..?”
“Well, it is optional but it’ll help make a better case to present the    DMV ..”

     This is where I cut her off to explain ‘the agreement’

“Dr Bryson said she was going to wait for the 6-week follow-up before deciding whether she even needs to notify the DMV ..”
“Well, any doctor can notify the DMV anytime ..”
“Yeah, but we agreed ..”
“Let me explain how it works ..”
“Wait, first let me explain the agreement ..”
“I think I need to tell you how it works first ..” 

I sense things getting a little edgy and now I forget who actually went first but I blame myself for not being more ‘yielding’. Jen has no idea about a verbal agreement I made as an inpatient, which is an exception to the way it works. But if I'd given her a chance to explain how it works, I’d have understood hat it’s totally up to the whim of the doctor and nothing I could say was really going to matter much. Not even the agreement. It’s out of our hands and that’s good enough for me ..yielding soul I aspire to be.

Jen
Therapist Extraordinaire

Pathways

“The cerebral cortex, of all parts of the central nervous system, must be regarded as the most plastic in recent evolution, reflecting new behavioral requirements of niches carved out by increasingly complex relations between predator and prey, and the increasing demands for more subtle relationships within the species.” Harting (1973)

I have a theory. I believe present-day verbal abilities are an extension of our sense of tracking in the wild. Our female ancestors must have found a way to code and convey this experience before their young hit the road on their own and either got lost or devoured. A test of concept would be to see if a short course in wilderness tracking offered by Outward Bound significantly improves verbal skills. I don’t expect it will do much for phonics or vocabulary but it may help students track and comprehend discourse better as well as improve their ability to speak and write coherently. Although these skills may seem dissimilar on the surface ..they do share some common components of cognition. They both require attention, orientation and ‘signal detection’ .. or the ability to focus and distinguish between relevant and irrelevant/distracting information. Granted outdoor tracking is largely ‘spatial’ and ‘visual’ while language is ‘conceptual’ and ‘auditory’ .. the cerebral cortex responsible for conceptual thought did evolve from the sensory areas of the brain, which in humans is largely visual. Anyway, it’s just a theory.

Selene

Four and a half billion years ago, a celestial female body named Theia crashed into the male body ProtoEarth. The remaining debris gave rise to the moon Selene. Looking back, astronomers have tried to piece together the whole story surrounding this cosmic event. Given the discursive nature of the analytic mind, one story split into three:

• Theia crashed into ProtoEarth and Theia  was obliterated. Her remnants were reconstituted as Selene..our moon.
• Theia crashed into ProtoEarth and both were obliterated. Remnants of the two constitute the moon Selene.
• Theia crashed and merged with ProtoEarth. A vapor trail created in the heat of the union coalesced into the moon Selene. 

Given the interpretative nature of the mind; I’ve heard each possibility extended into a  lengthy discourse regarding the human condition. I just want to take a moment and pay homage to Selene as she appears in the night sky

Loaded questions

Hard to be neutral without coming across as partial and perhaps even disloyal. I remember in 2008 my father asking me “Bill, who do you think will be the next president ..?” I interpreted this as a request for information and, thinking back to some poll results, replied “Looks like Obama” He reacted with disgust and terminated our conversation. Since then he looks at me with suspicion and considers me an Obama fan with liberal views. He swiftly ends our discussions with “I know exactly where you’re coming from, Bill” and calls me a “behaviorist” ..which is a polite way of calling me a “socialist”. I’ve been an independent all my life. I think I see where I went wrong though. He wasn’t asking for an independent assessment ..so my answer appeared more like a preference than an forecast. He’s been that way all his life. When he asks me which team I think will win a football game ..he’s never looking for the answer that an odds-maker would give. Today I’m reading where Obama’s adversaries are accusing him of “appeasement to Iran” in response to his handling of Israel’s saber rattling. I may be going out on a limb here but I think I’m beginning to see a built-in tendency to interpret straightforward answers as prejudice bordering on disloyalty.

Closed feedback loop

“What shows up on the Internet and cable television today is shaped by what we choose to click on and watch in the past” [link] 

I’m an information analyst. I study both computer and human information. Two systems that frequently dovetail on the Internet. That’s why I feel like my Internet experience is becoming increasingly shallow. Far from opening up possibilities, or sending me down information superhighways ..I’m being lead down increasingly narrow avenues that present me with only the most superficial hype. All I can figure is that I’ve entered a ‘closed feedback loop’. Simply put, a closed feedback loop narrows-down a range of activity based on feedback it receives about prior activity. On the Internet, activity means information. In other words, what rises to the foreground is determined by the things I paid attention to in the past while everything else recedes into the background. Robert Lewis Stevenson said it best “Attention to one thing is sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.” The Internet narrows it down beautifully. 

Sites like Google and Facebook are tuned to deliver information based on popular choice .. not credibility or merit. On the other hand, humans are hard-wired to receive and share information ..but not necessarily weigh its validity or merit. What we come away with is a feeling of familiarity based on prior experience. The Internet assures me I’ll get few surprises. That’s why the music I’m most likely to hear right now is from Rihanna or Jay Z ..when I know there’s so much more talent out there, it just doesn’t rise to the surface of ‘what’s trending’.

Following Charlie

If I follow the stream of utterances coming from Charlie when he’s raving like a lunatic; I can sometimes pick up a tread of coherent thought. This morning it went something like this (edited for sanity):

“Americans are psychopaths!”

“They’ve got the mentality of high school jocks!!”

“Their idea of getting ahead is self-promotion and putting other people down. Pumps their head full of artificial well-being.”

“Look at facebook, man .. it’s a campfire of vanity. In other parts of the world they’re using it as a tool for revolution. We’re using it as a tool to avoid dealing with the rest of the world.”

“It ain’t look’n good for Ron Paul either. He’s a truth-teller, you know that..? His opponents are a bunch of jocks. They’re going around saying he’s too extreme. Think about it, man. What are they saying ..? They’re saying the truth is too extreme ! They know voters prefer the comfort of phoniness to the cutting edge of reality !!”

“Listen to this, man ..says here: ‘a group of Korean monks, practicing Sunmudo, successfully repelled a Japanese invasion during World War II. The Sunmudo master said it had nothing to do with show-of-force and everything to do with balance. Practicing martial arts for show is a deterrent to balance ..and balance is what’s necessary for success’.”

“Doncha’ see, Bill ..?”

“We’re fucking doomed, man ..!”

Inference making

“Your job as a reader is to use your imagination and analytical skills where the author has left off.”

Intentional fallacy: it’s not what an author means to say that’s important ..it’s how the reader interprets what they say. What they intended is subject to interpretation, which isn’t necessarily going to turn out  the same. But if we’re the readers, our interpretation is what matters. Communication is mostly an interpretive process. We add our perspective and ingenuity to whatever we hear or read. Attempts by the writer to narrow it down are futile ..or sterile [link]. In Harry Potter, some may see Dumbledore as gay; others might view him as quirky and without a particular sexual identity. I'm reminded of the ghost in “Hamlet” and how little we really know about him. Is he the spirit of his murdered father asking to be avenged ..? Is he a hellish apparition sent to make Hamlet commit murder ..? Or, is he just a figment of Hamlet's imagination ..? And who really gives a shit now what Shakespeare meant ..?

Parsing Gabrielle

Notes made during interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC.

Her speech centers are still intact ..but some of the pathways that connect speech with concepts may have been severed. They show her a picture of a table and she comes up with words all right ..just not the right ones. She’s guessing and her therapy involves prompting her to narrow down the range of possibilities until she’s in the vicinity of ‘table-ness’. It is geared toward building alternate pathways to replace the one’s she lost. The connection between her lexicon (the place where words are stored) and semantic memory (memory for meaning) may be all that’s affected. Prognosis is good. She can read words from her lexicon OK. Her difficulty is connecting them with ideas in the mind. So it’s just a process of generating alternate pathways. I wonder if she can write or type in complete sentences. I wonder if there’s a way to prompt the language pathways of the brain to act with equipotentiality, same as they did during childhood, to help facilitate the regenerative process. Apparently music can help because it activates greater brain-area ..and she can sing the words she has difficulty coming up with on her own.  Spontaneously however, she doesn’t speak in full sentences yet. Her two word utterances show a ‘return to the kernal’ ..meaning she can express the main idea without the generating the phrase-structure necessary to produce a full sentence. Hopefully, she hasn’t lost the rules of grammar ..only the ability to pick-out the words to express them. 

Kernal: When asked if she wants to return to Congress, she relies: “No, better ..!”
 Generative grammar: Embedded verb phrases are required to turn the kernal “No, better!” into a full sentence: “No, I want to get better first” 

Parsing Nixon

The transcript of Nixon’s testimony about Watergate became public Thursday, providing a detailed view of Nixon - combative, defensive and mindful of his place in history [link]. As an exercise in deception-detection, I suggested we parse a short passage of Nixon’s testimony. We limited it to the response Nixon gave to a specific question asked by federal prosecutors. We examined the implications Nixon made in order to give prosecutors the impression that he was acting as Chief Executive and giving high-level ‘directives’ to his staff ..and not ordering the Watergate break-in. When prosecutors asked about White House efforts to target Lawrence O'Brien (Chairman of the Democratic National Committee) and the events leading up to the break-in at his office in the Watergate complex, Nixon replied:

“I do not recall suggesting Mr. O’Brien files be checked ..I only suggested that in this campaign, we should be as effective in conducting our investigations as they (the Democrats) had been in conducting their investigations.”

[ I only suggested .. ] implies no direct orders were given. Although prosecutors may infer ‘tacit approval’, without knowing what was going on in the minds of the White House staff at the time; prosecutors couldn’t go there. That information was only available in discussions leading up to this point. But the previous 18 minutes were erased from the White House tape. *See Footnote*

[conducting our investigation .. ] implies they were only discussing an equitable response to what Democrats were doing during the campaign. Since there was no evidence of criminal activity on the part of Democrats, prosecutors could only conclude Nixon wasn’t suggesting anything inappropriate.

It’s clear Nixon was using pragmatic implications [link] ..a trick that lawyers routinely recommend to their clients. He could deny culpability but, at the same time, avoid perjury in the advent investigators found evidence that he actually did order the break-in. Instead of denying it outright, he says is he was making what amounts to a ‘suggestion’ that they conduct an ‘equitable investigation’. If it comes out later that he gave orders, he cannot be accused of perjury for the inferences federal prosecutors made in response to his statements. In other words, implications are not grounds for perjury. To the end, Nixon played the role of an attorney trying to create ‘reasonable doubt’ in the minds of his jurors (Historians).

* Footnote: Congress actually did infer that, by omission, the 18-minute gap probably contained incriminating information turning Nixon’s statement into a criminal act. This is what led to a vote of impeachment by over two-thirds of the House.

Network communication theory

I have a theory that says whenever messages are transmitted between people in different locations; the accuracy of communication drops by 60%. I call it the ‘displacement theory of communication’ and it's an extension of findings in the field of human information-processing [link].

This drop in communication is wide-scale and can occur anywhere from cell phones to air traffic control systems. Messages are by nature incomplete and often assume knowledge of local conditions that aren’t available to the receiver. Without exacting protocols, like those developed in the air traffic control industry, incomplete messages are at best probabilistic and rely on the receiver to supply the most likely meaning intended. Since this is an innate function of human information-processing; it can happen quickly and imperceptibly. When it does, we are prone to making overconfident and faulty decisions about the most likely meaning intended. It has long been know that the most frequent decision we make during conversation is about the intention of others .. it’s also the one we get wrong most often. So, facebook users and text messagers ..beware! We are making the rules up as we go.

transformation cycle

Dr George, professor of ‘lifespan development’, can identify what year you graduated from high school during a 20-minute interview while blindfolded. Clues? Verbal expressions, vocabulary, explanatory-style, values, ideals, etc. “..basically, it’s recognizing what’s in focus and what’s on the periphery of their narrative. Tells you what cohort they belong to.” What’s a cohort ..? “A cohort is a group of people who pass through periods of historical and social change at around the same age. As a result, they experience these events during the same period of development. People who were in their adolescence when 9/11 occurred for example, or those who were coming-of-age while fighting in Iraq. It makes a difference in the way they express themselves and how they explain current events. Their narrative is an interaction between lifespan-development and socio-cultural development.” He says, however, if college was a transformational experience .. they’re not so easily pegged. “It’s a game changer” Why’s that ..? “Because it sets in motion a transformation-cycle that follows them throughout life. Like recurring periods of renewal ..they shed what’s out-of-date and adapt more contemporary elements to their narrative. In other words, they periodically cover their tracks.”

Reading behavior

When I make a conscious effort, I can kind of catch a glimpse of whatever’s going on inside my head that helps me grasp the meaning of what I’m reading and relate it to other things I know about. It may be part of my training, but ..what I’m seeing is not unique to me. It is a process that’s common to everyone. It’s universal. It’s been observed and documented by linguists all over the world. As I read, I’m building an ‘event-chain’. An event-chain is made up of information from prior-sentences, which I get from working-memory, and prior-experience, which I get from long-term memory. When I read about the rebel invasion of Tripoli this week, I immediately built a relatively simple event-chain based on a limited set of events stored in long-term memory. It looked something like this:

However, as I read further ..I discovered this was not the case. The invasion was the result of Kadafi’s own undoing. Now my event-chain looks something like this:

Suddenly NATO air strikes don’t seem quite so important anymore. My first reading was in error. It doesn’t take into account a whole heap of events I didn’t know about. My second event-chain probably doesn’t either. However, I still come away with the feeling that I’m sufficiently informed, which leads me to another observation: I resist yielding to the probability of the unknown, which is always greater than what I can fit into an event-chain. However, an event-chain is about all that I can fit into my pea-brain.

a wheel inside a wheel

I’m walking over to the high-school athletic fields nearby when I run into my neighbor Ron. I say hello how are you and stuff, and he says “fine ..the same old thing as yesterday and the day before. ” I detect a hint of discontent. My first reaction is to try and counter this by suggesting it’s something we all have in common. “Well then, I’m catching you at a moment when I, too, am doing the same old thing as yesterday and the day before.” He shakes his head in agreement (?) ..which looks more like weariness. I figure there must be something else going on and tell myself not to counter whatever that might be. Neither of us really have time to talk right now, so I just go “You know Ron, it’s alright ..the world is a cycle.” He looks at me while taking a hit off his cigarette. I don’t know why, but I’ve got this urge to continue. “I’m following a cycle of going to the track, which means running in circles, which are made up of tiny cycles of intense respiration” I laugh and go “if my senses didn’t re-cycle themselves periodically ..I’d experience white-out.” Now he’s walking away, looking at me out of the corner of his eye and going “yeah, right ..” like he’s heard that one before. Now I’m wondering if I didn’t just repeat a cycle of bullshit that I mistake for reassurance ..but is really the start of another cycle of avoidance. Oh well oh well, I go, thinking ..at least I don’t have a nicotine cycle to worry about, which triggers a whole new cycle of rationalizations.

agents of expression

Most children learn to speak and understand what’s said effortlessly. It’s a spontaneous process that doesn’t require classroom training. The brain is innately tuned to extract the rules of spoken language. Observations show that parents rarely correct for rules of grammar during early childhood. However, they frequently correct for the rules of semantics ..making sure their children convey the proper idea [link]. That’s why it’s interesting for me to see that, while children may discover the correct rules of grammar on their own ..by adolescence they’re playing pretty loose with the rules of semantics they’d been taught. In other words, they frequently use well-formed sentences to fabricate and misrepresent what’s going down.

The loop

The Internet is not an open system. It is warped by the focus of its participants. Anyone can skip from blog to facebook to youtube to talk radio and back without encountering a single thought to challenge their own. This turns the Internet into a closed feedback loop. A closed feedback loop reinforces beliefs that may have started out as a figment of someone’s imagination. The Internet makes it possible for such insubstantial phenomena to gain widespread popularity. Without the benefit of open dialogue, insubstantial phenomena can become ‘counter-factual narrative’ bordering on delusion and paranoia. Take for instance the notion that Osama Bin Laden death was a ‘hoax’ ..or that President Obama’s birthplace was a ‘deception’. Look at where Bush’s axis-of-evil designation has led. Back in the 1960’s, historian Richard Hofstadter examined “the paranoia in American politics” and describes it as a self-perpetuating cycle. “Since the enemy is thought of as evil ..it must be totally eliminated” he says. But when the enemy is a figment of the imagination ..the bubble bursts. Instead of finding peace with that ..a new focus of attack must be found to appease the wrathful deities of discrimination ..and the cycle goes on through perpetuity. Reminds me of a Buddhist parable I once heard [link]. Anyway, I do believe the Internet has sped-up the process.