Generally Thinking

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  • 3D Printing – A new form of life?

    Imagine your kitchen floor is dirty. Since you don’t want to clean it yourself you log in to a robot design website, tell them that you want a robot capable of cleaning your kitchen floor. They give you a quote, you pay, and then they email the design to you. You click “Print,” the design goes to your 3D printer, and out pops a fully functioning robot, yours to command.

    That might sound far fetched, yet perhaps it’s not so far away. 3D printing has been around for around three decades and can now print objects in glass, metal, plastics and even bio-degradable materials. It has been used to create everything from jewellery, shoes, aeroplane components and even mechanical devices.

    Peter Schmitt of MIT has already successfully printed a mechanical clock, and is working on servo mechanism which could be used to make custom-built robots. Much has been made over 3D printing’s potential to revolutionise industry, putting manufacturing more strongly in the hands of garage hobbyists (if you think piracy of digital goods is a big issue, wait until everyone can pirate 3D objects!). But imagine if manufacturing was taken out of everyone’s hands.


    The Prusa Mendel RepRap 3D Printer from RepRap.org

    Evolution. Skip this section if you know it.

    Evolution works through a combination of replication, mutation and selection. Organisms develops through instructions contained within their DNA, which they gets from their parent/s. For example, daddy tiger and mommy tiger copy some of their DNA and store it in their sex cells. After an evening of tiger love, they combine these sets of DNA to create a new set of instructions for “building” baby tiger.

    But the DNA copying process isn’t perfect, and mistakes — called mutations — cause changes a given trait or characteristic — called a phenotype — of the organism to which that DNA will eventually belong. These phenotypic variations may affect the organism’s chances of surviving or reproducing.

    If a mutation in daddy tiger’s DNA causes baby tiger to have sharper claws, it might get food more easily and therefore have more chance of surviving and passing this beneficial mutation on. If it results in weaker knees, the tiger might not catch any food and then die without passing on it’s DNA. This is evolution through natural selection. It is this process that eventually produced intelligent humans like yourself, able to ponder their own ancestry.

    Replication, mutation, and selection. If machines can print 3D items, mechanical devices and even robots, is it possible to create “life,” or at least, objects that reproduce and whose offspring is subject to selection pressures?

    Replication

    Replication would require a 3D printer able to print, and construct, itself. The RepRap machine, designed by Adrian Bowyer of Bath university and seen the video above, is almost there. It knows how to print the plastic parts necessary to build itself. With the ability to build components out of different materials, it doesn’t seem infeasible that a modified RepRap could include construction as well as production capabilities. The printer contains a small hard drive, and the parent copies its own design onto its child’s hard drive. Replication achieved.

    Mutation

    Naturally, you want your printer to build things perfectly, so designers will try to remove mutations from the process. Also, the “DNA” in this analogy is the design on the computer, which we know is highly resilient to copying errors. However, you could imagine some flaw that creates mutations in the child design, or a non-natural form of mutation where the printer theorises about future designs that would increase its child’s ability to reproduce itself, and tests these, keeping logs of previous “tests” in its hard drive.

    Selection

    Natural selection could work here, as the printers need access to a source of power and raw materials. For power, you could imagine each one has a solar panel, and tests theories on how to build more efficient ones. The raw materials area a harder part though.

    Automation

    At what point would you be able to leave the printer running, then move all humans off the planet with confidence that they would continue to thrive? Presumably, you’d need to give the printers a head start, for example, the ability to build none-replicating drone scouts to look for raw materials, and transport robots to return it to the replicating “queens,” with the queens playing a sort of real-life game of Civilization. Or perhaps the queens themselves would produce new queens that could move and source the raw materials. Perhaps the queens see scouts from other printer families as threats, and build warrior drones to fight their resource wars.

    If self-replicating machines were made that were capable of finding the resources and energy they needed to continue to reproduce, at what point do you call it life?

    Of course I’m just thinking out loud with all this, but I think it’s interesting and fun to consider the possibilities. Many people think of 3D printing as a door to a techno-utopian future where the means of production is held inside every household — and maybe it is. However, if we manage to build completely self-replicating machines with the capacity for mutation and a form of selection pressure, I’m just saying, they might lead to a different future.


    🙂

  • Why debating doesn’t work (and how to fix it)

    Here’s another TV program that made me want to throw my shoes at the TV – Prime Minister’s Questions.

    In PMQ’s, members of the opposition get to ask the PM questions about their party’s policies and actions. Ostensibly the point of this is to reach useful conclusions and actionable steps that will improve the country. Occasionally there is an inkling of that happening. But the bulk of it is shoe-throwing-bad (if you’re wondering, the other program that made me wish for more aerodynamic footwear is Big Brother).

    I watch in complete disbelief as questions on issues affecting the country were answered with ducking, weaving, and ad hom attacks aimed at the asker. The aim is to “beat” the asker, rather than respond intelligently to the question. These attacks are always followed by jeering and cheering – this is all considered normal and acceptable.

    This philosophy, of winning the discussion rather than productively debating, you also see disgustingly often when politicians are being interviewed on TV. It’s often done with a restatement of their  position on the issue, or some random hyperbole. Something like:

    Q: “How do you respond to the claim that your policies have increased unemployment?”
    A: “This is a complex issue and we need to look at all our options and make the right moves going forward, to encourage growth and get the economy back on track.”

    Or…

    Q: “How do you respond to the claim that your policies have caused unnecessary death during the pandemic?”
    A: “What I’m focused on now, is making sure that our brave front-line workers have the PPE they need to do their jobs, so they can keep themselves, and us safe.”

    They don’t answer the question. They just say words.

    The problem here is that free-form debating of a topic isn’t very useful. It’s too open to hacking. We are able to out-debate people even when we are wrong and they are right. We are able to change people’s minds to our way of thinking regardless of what the actual truth is. We even have scientifically researched ways of doing so — although sometimes good old-fashioned talking over the other person is all that’s needed.

    This problem is exacerbated when groups of people are mass-debating because it’s hard to come to a satisfactory conclusion without someone else butting in first.

    Free-form verbal debate is highly effective in finding out who the most charismatic, silver tongued and/or dominant person is. It’s not very effective in reaching productive conclusions.

    For that, the scientific way is better. Scientist A writes a paper, and scientist B responds with their criticisms. Scientist A can then publish another addressing these, perhaps after collecting more data. And so on. Because it’s all laid out in writing, it is obvious to everyone if a question has been dodged.

    This is too slow for politics, but maybe there’s a middle ground…

    Who Dares Wins

    Future of British politics? (Note the isolation booth)

    Who Dares Wins was a game show in which opposing contestants sit in sound-proofed booths, betting on which one of them can list the most items from a particular category, for example, films starring Johnny Depp, or number 1 singles. As soon as I saw this, I knew it was essential to politics.

    I propose that this studio be repurposed for interviewing politicians, CEOs of companies that have done something naughty, and perhaps built into the House of Commons itself (neon lights, dramatic music and all).

    Here’s how it would work.

    The interviewer sits in one booth, the politician in the other. In the middle is be a large screen to display the arguments and responses thus far. A number of online tools have been created to visually represent debates in this way, so we already know how to do that.

    The interviewer asks their first question, and it appears on the screen. During this time, the microphone in the politician’s booth is switched off. The booth is sound-proof, so no one can hear them no matter how loudly they shout.

    Next, the politician gets his chance to respond. The interviewer’s booth is switched off and the politician’s turns on. They get their chance to reply, and their responses appear on the screen. Then the response is analysed by an impartial adjudicator, to ensure that it does in fact answer the question, and isn’t some clever ducking and weaving.

    If the answer is suitable, it goes up on the board, and the interviewer gets to challenge these responses. The process continues in this way.

    If the answer isn’t suitable, it will be quite obvious to all. The interviewer or adjudicator could then challenge the response, and if it cannot be defended, that answer would be stricken from the board and they could be invited to answer again.

    Personal attacks and logical fallacies from either side would also be stricken off the board, and perhaps a small punishment applied, such as a smacked bottom or a gunging.

    Head-to-head debates would work in a similar way, with each debater’s booth switched off while the other is talking.

    Advantages

    • No longer would people be able to dodge questions without appearing to do so.
    • No longer would people be able to win arguments through verbal jiu jitsu.
    • No longer would people be able to win arguments by having the loudest voice.
    • Potentially hilarious.

    Disadvantages

    • None.

    Political debate is broken, people. To fix it we need sound-proofed booths and neon lights. Especially neon lights.

  • Where is my mind? Is the materialistic model of reality incorrect?

    My belief about the nature of reality is that the only “thing” that exists is matter. That is, there is no soul, no heaven and no hell. Effects aren’t caused without an interaction with different pieces of matter, and consciousness exists within the confines of the physical head that gives rise to it.

    However, although I used to be extremely firm in this position, now I am less sure, because of one question. I don’t know how to answer this from a materialist perspective. Maybe there’s just a really simple answer that I’m missing, but I’ve spoken to many people on this and no one has given it to me. Maybe you can. So here’s the question.

    Where is the cat?

    “HAHAHA puny humans you will never find me. (Photo by Tambako the Jaguar

    I can make a picture of a cat in my head; I can close my mind and think of it. So I’m perceiving this image of a cat.

    Where is the image? Where is the cat?

    I first heard this question (well, I added the cat part myself) in a lecture on the mind/body problem, and my initial answer is that the cat is simply a 1:1 correlate of certain neurological activity in the brain. That is, if you open up my head you won’t see a picture of a cat, but you’d see something that’s the equivalent of it, sort of like the dots and dashes of Morse code are not English characters, but they are equivalents of them. From a materialistic perspective, you’d theoretically be able to interpret the activity in my brain through some technology, and recreate the image of the cat that I am picturing on a screen.

    In fact, we’re past theorising on this, as a famous experiment last year that was widely reported as “Mind Reading” in the media demonstrated. Here’s what they did:

    1) Measured brain activity as someone watched a load of YouTube videos
    2) Linked up the brain imaging data with the image on the screen, creating a sort of database whereby such-and-such brain activity relates to, say, a red object in the middle of the screen, such-and-such relates to certain shape moving to the left, and so on. I’m probably over-simplifying, but that’s the gist.
    3) Get the same person to watch a new set of YouTube videos, again while in the scanner measuring brain activity.
    4) Use the database created in step 2 to predict what the person was seeing in step 3.

    Here’s how the reconstructions compared to the original videos:

    It’s important to note that the brain may not code imagined images in the same way as those you see with your own eyes, and also that each person’s brain will likely code the image of the cat in different ways (hence the need for steps 1 and 2), but, since all of the activity of the mind is thought to have a direct neural correlate, the principle is the same.

    So when I was asked “where” my mental image of the cat is, that’s why I responded in this way — the image is located in the brain – it’s just in a different format.

    But really, I’m not satisfied with that answer. Because in my mind I can see (well maybe not see, but certainly perceive) the cat; not the equivalent neural ‘code’, but the actual cat. I know where the neural code is, but I don’t know where the cat is.

    I can’t think how the materialistic model can explain where the cat is. Doesn’t this mean then that there’s more to reality than the purely materialistic? That the materialistic model is incomplete? What am I missing?

    To use a computer analogy, the words you are reading now (hello!) are represented in a chip in a computer as a string of 0’s and 1’s. That’s like the neural code in your brain. But the actual words are represented on the screen in front of your eyes. What’s the equivalent of the screen in the case of the cat? Where is it?

    I’m actually asking this to you – do you know where the cat is? Am I making a simple mistake? Please leave a comment and help me out!

    Where is reality?

    That’s probably enough for one day, but just to take this one step further; we know that what we see is not the world. The image we see is a mental construction of the world, and psychology has identified numerous examples of how we each see the world a little differently. An obvious example is colour-blindedness. Since the brain is constructing the world we see around us, and if we assume that the neural code and the image are different things… where is reality?

    Ref:

    Nishimoto S, Vu AT, Naselaris T, Benjamini Y, Yu B, & Gallant JL (2011). Reconstructing visual experiences from brain activity evoked by natural movies. Current biology : CB, 21 (19), 1641-6 PMID: 21945275

  • Playing Tetris reduces the effects of traumatic events

    A study in 2009 tested the effect of Tetris on memory consolidation. Forty participants were split into two groups. After watching a film showing traumatic stuff (surgery, people drowning etc), one group sat quietly while the other was told to play Tetris for 10 minutes. All participants kept a diary for a week where they recorded their flashbacks. The Tetris group reported fewer, and scored lower on the Impact of Events questionnaire.

    Before we go on to the reasons and implications of this, might I suggest this listening music for the rest of the post?:


    Photo Credit: Profound whatever

    The idea is, that if you keep the visuo-spatial system busy, it has a harder time consolidating this memory. Other tests have suggested that the visuo-spatial element is key – verbal tasks, for instance seem to make flashbacks worse. This is thought to be because PTSD and flashbacks stem from two kinds of mental processing – visuo-spatial, and verbal/narrative. If the ratio is too heavy on the visuo-spatial side, you’re more likely to get flashbacks. This is also in line with other research on the beneficial effects of expressive writing as a form of therapy — perhaps this helps to bring the ratio back towards the verbal/narrative side.

    So if you want to reduce unpleasant flashbacks, it’s best to carry a Gameboy around with you at all times, and if something traumatic happens, just whip it out and play for 10 minutes.

    But since that’s pretty inconvenient for most people, there might be another way. Other research suggests that memories can be altered when you recall them, that is, the memory is loaded up and then “re-saved” when you’re done reminiscing/ruminating, and it’s possible to make “edits” to the “file” while it’s “loaded.” Maybe this plus tetris could equal something useful in therapy or self-help sessions. The idea is, you think back over the traumatic event and hold it mind. Then, start playing Tetris. I don’t know if this would work but if the authors of this paper are right that Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy (holding a memory in mind while moving your eyes around) works due to demand on the visuo-spatial system, then Tetris should too. Another advantage is you don’t have to feel like a twit sitting there moving your eyes while thinking bad thoughts.

    Other suggestions would be basically to do the opposite of anthing related to accelerated learning during this session. So no exercise before hand, which helps sprout new neurons and aid learning, and no sleep afterwards, which also helps with memory creation. It’s like Accelerated Unlearning. How’s that for a book title? All I need to do is take this simple idea, explain it in five pages, then throw in 245 pages of anecdotes and other filler. Bestseller!

    Interestingly, this only seems to affect involuntary flashbacks, because when a questionnaire about the film was administered after 1 week, the groups scored about even. Which is good since that would cause problems for students who use computer games as a break!

  • Open listening: a way to improve spoken language comprehension

    One huge frustration I have with learning Spanish — and I understand I’m not alone on this — is missing loads of what’s being said while translating one particular word.

    While listening to a dialogue, my attention latches on to words I recognise and I try to retrieve the English translation. But before I find the English word, the speaker is three sentences away and talking about something else.

    This is probably a consequence of the way we tend to learn second languages — that is, using our first language as a useful intermediate between a new foreign word and a meaning we already know. But it can be a detriment in comprehension, especially in the earlier stages of learning a language, when listening is far more of a conscious process.


    This has nothing to do with the topic. I just find it funny. (Credit: Elephi Pelephi)

    Generally I think conscious translating is a mistake. There are times where it’s OK to do this, such as when there’s a gap in the conversation, but I find it’s best to stay focused on what’s being said, not to “zoom in” on any particular word.

    I’m hardly an expert and I don’t know what the more linguistically talented might think, but that’s my opinion. Just let go of the words you 50% understand, and keep listening.

    The Cohort Model of spoken language comprehension, first proposed by Marslen-Wilson and Welsh (1978), might explain why this works:

    “According to this theory, the first few phonemes of a spoken word activate a set or cohort of word candidates that are consistent with that input. These candidates compete with one another for activation. As more acoustic input is analyzed, candidates that are no longer consistent with the input drop out of the set. This process
    continues until only one word candidate matches the input; the best fitting word may be chosen if no single candidate is a clear winner.” (ref)

    Here’s what happens, according to the cohort model. You hear a Spanish word, say “beber” meaning “to drink.” It sounds familiar but you don’t immediately get the meaning. So you try to translate it, probably rolling your eyes upwards as you do so. Behind the scenes, your brain is creating a cohort of possibilities as to what the word was. Maybe it creates a shortlist of Spanish words starting with “b,” plus a few others that rhyme, and looks up their associated meaning.

    Perhaps the reason you stop and put some conscious effort into translating this word, is that you intuitively feel that this is a serial process, where the brain translates words one-by-one, and either gets the meaning or loses it forever — but it is not. The brain does not stop searching for the meaning of an unknown word even though it continues to listen to other words — in fact, it actually uses the input from future words to help filter down to the correct meaning of previously heard words, presumably while they are held in the phonological loop.

    Have you every thought you understood what someone said, only to realise you misheard it based on something they said later? You could also deduce, then, that the brain doesn’t even have a concept of a correct word, and is always feeding back data based on probabilities; what it thinks is the most probable meaning.

    So to continue the example, if you continued to listen to the speaker instead of temporarily disengaging your attention to consciously translate “beber,” you might hear “cerveza,” the Spanish word for beer and put two-and-two together. The meaning of the previous word comes to you in a flash.

    Open Monitoring/Listening

    This method of listening is very similar to a type of meditation called open monitoring. In this you sit and just allow any thought or perception to pass through your consciousness, being fully observant of it but not holding your attention on it.

    Likewise, in open listening, as it could be called, you focus on the entirety of what is being said, rather than trying to follow the dialog word by word. By not focusing on a single word, you devote more of your attentional capacity to collecting more input.

    You might also reason that the more practice one has with open monitoring meditation, the better they should be at language comprehension.

    If you speak a second language let me know if you found the same when you were learning. Also, if you meditate a lot, let me know how you find language learning, or comprehending people in even your native language. Do you seem to find it easier than others to understand people with strange accents? Has this improved after your meditation experiences?

  • Playing Medal of Honor improves cognitive abilities

    Just to expand on the previous post about the effect of action video games on attention, here’s a little more detail about the experiment in the paper.

    In this test, a group of participants, all with little or no video game playing experience, were randomly assigned to two groups.

    The first group (9 people) were asked to play Medal of Honor, for one hour per day, for 10 straight days. The second (8 people) played Tetris for the same time period. This is a good control condition, because it helps to cancel out improvements that might be made in, for instance, hand-eye coordination as opposed to actual cognitive improvements.

    Playing this game may bring cognitive benefits.

    At the end of the training, participants were giventhe enuration, useful-field-of-view and attentional blink tests described in this post. The group who played Medal of Honor performed better than the Tetris group, and this difference was statistically significant at the .05 level.

    Additionally, the researchers carried out a mediation analysis, to see if the benefits on these tasks could be accounted for by game playing skill. In other words, did the people who improved the most at Medal of Honor over these 10 days also perform the best on the cognitive tasks? The results did not reach statistical significance (0.13), altough the effect was pretty strong with an adjusted r squared of 0.43. That means 43% of the variation in cognitve performance was accounted for by improvements in playing Medal of Honor.

    These results suggest that playing Medal of Honor garners improvements in the attentional processing systems of the brain. However, note the limitations I mention in the previous post on this study.

    Note that the version of Medal of Honor they played was Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, from 2002 (the study was fromn 2003). However, it’s perfectly reasonable that the results apply to more recent versions of the game (both are first person shooters).

  • The cognitive benefits of playing video games

    It’s often said that the youth of our society wastes their time playing video games; ostensibly a purely diversionary activity with no inherent merit. However, as someone with a youth misspent in this way, I have to disagree. There are many ways I feel video game-playing may serve me well in the future. For example, should powerful aliens invade our planet and challenge our species to a Street Fighter II tournament, killing all those who they defeat, I for one would fancy my chances. However on a more mundane level, research published in Nature indicated that video game brings cognitive benefits that transfer to activities other than the game itself.


    Waste of time or brain trainer? credit: blindfutur3

    Flanker compatibility

    In this test, participants are distracted on a task by stimuli, which they have to ignore. The task becomes progressively more difficult, so it’s a good way of testing attentional capacity. When video game players were tested against non-players, they performed better on this task, suggesting they have greater attentional capacity.

    Enumeration task

    In this second task, squares flash on a screen briefly, and participants simply have to say how many there are. If there’s a small number of squares, you just ‘know’ how many there are. This is called ‘subitizing.’ As more and more squares are displayed you eventually lose your ability to subitize and must count the squares manually.

    Video game players could subitize greater number of squares than non players (4.9 vs 3.3 on average), again this is consistent with the idea that video games bring beneficial effects — or at least, that video game players possess these benefits. In this case, the benefit is being able to focus on more distinct objects at once.

    Widening the training zone

    The next task was the “Useful Field of View” task, where the aim is to locate a certain target amongst a field of distracting ones. However, the twist here is that the field of view is extended to three eccentricities — 10, 20, and 30 degrees. The field of view when playing video games typically reaches around 20 degrees, so this is a good way to see whether the attentional benefits video game players have extends beyond the range of view they experience whilst playing. The results indicated that the players outperformed non-players at all ranges.

    As with the previous tests, this is tricky to interpret. On one hand it could indicate that video games bring attentional benefits, and that these benefits extend beyond the normal field of vision experienced while playing. On the other hand, it could simply indicate that some people take to video game playing because they have better attentional qualities to begin with. Because this task is further from the conditions of the video game playing itself, you might reason that it is more in line with the latter. It’s impossible to say because this was a quasi experiment — there was no randomisation of group assignment.

    Quick thinking – the attentional blink task

    A common aspect of the games played by the participants is the need to act fast under pressure (see below for a list of games). To see if there was a difference on this ability between video game players and non-players, a variation on the attentional blink task was used.

    In this task, a stimuli is displayed, followed 200-500 ms later by another. Typically, people have trouble processing the second stimuli because of fixation on the first. In the variation, participants had to detect a certain following stimuli from a sequence which included a few distractors. Again, the video game players out-performed the non-players.

    Incidentally, experienced meditators also do better on this task.

    Experimental task

    As mentioned earlier, it’s impossible to determine cause and effect conclusively with this type of study. By selecting specific groups (players versus non-players) instead of randomising, you never know if you’re simply selecting groups who differ on the variable you’re studying to begin with. For instance, do video games attract or create people with enhanced attentional abilities.

    To get around this, and experimental task was performed, where a group was told to go play an action video game, while another went off to play a puzzle game. The action video game players did better on the enumeration, useful field of view, and attentional blink tasks after training.

    Video games are beneficial for attention?

    While these results are consistent with the idea that video game playing brings cognitive benefits, the studies do have some limitations. Mainly, the sample size was pretty low. The enumeration task had the highest number of participants, and even that had only 13 per group. The others has only eight or nine per group.

    For the quasi-experiments, this makes it even more likely that the results were due to the samples selected, despite the fact that they were highly statistically significant. For the experiment, the same applies. The significance levels were higher in the latter but that’s expected given it was only for 10 days.

    Also, the transfer is fairly similar. Action video games and these tasks still involve sitting and looking at a screen. We don’t know if the results would be different in other situations in more natural settings. But overall it’s nice that by video game playing might, possibly, have benefits beyond helping me defeat an invasion by 2D beat-em-up-obsessed aliens.

    Which games did they play?

    In the tests comparing video game players with non-video game players, here’s a list of games that the players were into. Note that this study is from 2003!

    • Grand Theft Auto 3
    • Half-Life
    • Counter-Strike
    • Crazy Taxi
    • Team Fortress Classic
    • 007
    • Spider-Man
    • Halo
    • Marvel vs Capcom
    • Roguespear
    • Super Mario Cart

    Reference:

    Green, C. S., & Bavelier, D. (2003, May 29). Action video game modifies visual selective attention. Nature, 423, 534 –537.

  • The phonological loop and language comprehension

    I’ve been digging into research papers again, looking for ways to enhance second language acquisition. After working through a few papers and an introductory text book, I was left thinking “When are they going to get to the part about how to learn languages better?”  Most of the research seems to be on the processes and issues surrounding second-language acquisition, rather than how to enhance it. So I went right back to the drawing board and started looking at the cognitive processes involves in language comprehension and production, looking for clues. I started with the phonological loop.

    The phonological loop is the aspect of working memory that deals with auditory input. Loads of studies have been done on this which I won’t go into here, but one hugely important point is that the loop’s capacity is time-based. For example, memory of two syllable words is worse if they are longer (voodoo, harpoon) than if they are shorter (bishop).

    Something I’m particularly interested in, is improving language comprehension. I often find that I can listen to something in Spanish, not understand it at all, but upon reading a transcript realise that I know all those words. I think the time-based limitation of the phonological loop might be a key to improving this.

    If a person is speaking to you in a foreign language, you often find that although you’re focused on what they are saying, nothing makes sense. Then, they pause for a moment, and the meaning of the last few seconds of speech magically comes to you. It’s as though the brain is occupied with attending to the incoming speech, then when there’s a pause it takes the chance to process whatever’s in the phonological loop. Assuming this is true, there are a few things that might help with language comprehension:

    1 – Increase the capacity of the phonological loop

    The bigger this is, the more you can hear and keep in your working memory until the pause comes. I couldn’t find any research on actually improving the size of the loop’s capacity, but I’ll keep looking. Let me know if you know of any. Something to consider here is the difference between actual gains in the loop’s size versus the use of strategies to more efficiently store information within it (chunking, etc) — and how and if it is possible to distinguish between the two.

    This is important because if capacity could seemingly be improved on some task via a strategy, but that strategy doesn’t transfer to languages, it’s a false friend, so to speak.

    Presumably, tasks specific to comprehension would improve the capacity of the loop, that’s assuming that it can be improved at all. Maybe things like the n-back task, set to audio only, or simply listening to short speech clips and trying to repeat it back straight afterwards (ideally in the target language), could be good exercises.

    2 – Ability to pay attention

    I’ve noted previously that attention is key to memory, and it’s pretty clear how attention fits into this model. If you keep focused on what they are saying you’ll get more of what they say into your phonological loop for later processing. Then when the conversational pause comes, your brain has more data to transform into something meaningful.

    3 – Speed of processing

    Note that this only applies to words you don’t know “automatically.” If they said “Gracias” or “Merci,” or something in your native language, the meaning would come to you. So at the most basic level, there’s an issue of learning the language well and knowing the words well, preferably without having to do “real-time” translations via your native language. The more of the data in the PL that you just “know,” the more time your brain has to work on the bits it doesn’t already know, and also, it can use the words it does know to narrow down the range of possibilities (more on that later).

    Phonological loop in language acquisition

    Just to turn everything I’ve just said upside-down, another consideration with the phonological loop is that it’s not solely applied to language comprehension — in fact, it may not even be critical for that (except perhaps in the cases I’ve noted above, during the initial stages of learning a language where listening is an active — and draining — task!).  It is strongly implicated in our ability to learn languages. For example, Gathercole and Baddeley (1989) found that a children’s performance on a word-repeating task predicted their vocabulary a year down the line. So we must be careful here not to confuse correlation with causality, because, for instance, we don’t know if changing our ability on word repeating tasks would improve our language acquisition abilities. It does seem more reasonable that this would improve our ability to comprehend language, however, for the reasons I described above.

  • Bilinguals perform better in the false belief task

    Anything you do for an extended period of time has neurological and cognitive effects. Speaking another language is one thing that seems to have a wide range of effects, one of which being performance in tasks involving reasoning about other people’s beliefs, such as the false belief task.

    The False Belief Task

    The false belief task had usually been applied to samples of children (and you’ll soon understand why), but Rubio-Fernández and Glucksberg (2011) of UCL and Princeton applied it to a sample of adults — after a few modifications

    The task involves a puppet show (told you), where two puppets, Sally and Anne are playing with a toy. Then then put the toy in a box, and Anne leaves the scene. While Anne is away, Sally puts the toy in a different box before she returns. When Anne does get back, the participants are asked where she will look for the toy.

    Monolingual children start getting this right at about age four on average. It’s part of the idea of a “Theory of Mind,” where you adopt the belief that other people have a mind just like yours, but separate, and with different knowledge to  you have they will take different actions.

    However, bilingual children are better at this task, correctly guessing that Anne will look in the box where she saw it last, as opposed to where they saw Sally place it, from around age three.

    The idea is that because bilingual kids have experience talking to people in one language and receiving blank stares, they learn earlier that other people have a separate mind to their own. Which is also in line with the idea that the theory of mind is just a social construct, something that people “figure out” as opposed to a module that develops.

    The adult version (not what you’re thinking…)

    The False Belief task. Ecological validity?

    Although everybody loves a good puppet show, you might see a difficulty in applying this same task to adult bilinguals – adults are all going to answer the task correctly, regardless of their lingual status. So the researchers added an eye tracking element to the test.

    Rather than using the participant’s guess as to the location of the toy as the dependent variable, they used eye movements – did the participants first look at the box where the toy actually was (using their own knowledge) before looking at the original box (reasoning about other people’s beliefs)?

    Oh, and the puppet show was replaced with a cartoon on a computer (I know, I was disappointed too).

    How did the adults do?

    As with the children, the adult bilinguals out-performed their monolingual peers. Comparisons of gaze directions between the two groups just sneaked under the holy .05 significance level: X2(1, N = 45) = 3.94, p < .048. So did the fixation latency – the time take to focus the gaze on the correct box – at t(44) = 2.07, p < .045, as you might expect given that more monolinguals looked in the wrong place first.

    The Simon Task

    The researchers also used another test – the Simon Task. In this, a key is assigned for “LEFT” and another for “RIGHT.” the words LEFT and RIGHT flash up on the screen, and you have to press the right key. Only, sometimes, “RIGHT” appears on the left of the screen, and vice-versa. If you want to give it a go, you can play a Java version here.

    Success in this game relies on overriding your natural instinct to press the button on the right, even when the game tries to trick you into doing so. This is called “Executive Control” in cognitive psychology, after the catch-all term “Central Executive” which is used to describe pretty much anything we don’t understand yet. 🙂 See this article on working memory for more information.

    As with the False Belief test, the bilinguals did better here too. Why would this be? It’s thought to be because this sort of executive control is old hat to bilinguals. They have to suppress the other language while speaking and thinking, and this transfers to other tasks involving executive control.

    Combining the Two

    The paper also reports a correlation between performance on the Simon task and performance on the False Belief task – so presumably, the same cognitive ability is involved in both tasks, and bilingualism is the cause of this improved ability – or something that goes hand-in-hand with bilingualism, at the least.

    What’s a bilingual?

    Bilinguals performed better, but at what point in second language acquisition does this effect occur? The authors note that “all participants were to some extent familiar with a second language.” So that includes people designated as monolingual. The actual criteria they used was:

    1. Learned the language before age 9
    2. Used it regularly for over 10 years

    However, the bulk of the group achieved bilingual status much sooner, with a self-reported mean acquisition age of 3. The extent of foreign language familiarity of the monolinguals was not reported. It could be a few years at school, it could be they bought a Spanish CD and listened to it twice.

    Presumably, this effect would occur no matter when in life the second language was acquired. This fits with the executive control explanation. I’m not sure how to explain these results without it, but if they did the same test on people who acquired language two after, say, age 30, and didn’t get the same results, it might be interesting to try to reconcile the two.

    Conclusion

    This is one of many studies demonstrating cognitive differences between bilinguals and monolinguals. Low ecological validity, and only marginally significant results (probably due to the fairly low sample size), also necessarily a quasi-experiment (non-random group assignment by default). However, the results are in line with a lot of other evidence – although bilinguals perform worse on some tasks, on this one they seem to do better.

    Reference:

    Rubio-Fernández P, & Glucksberg S (2011). Reasoning about other people’s beliefs: Bilinguals have an advantage. Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition PMID: 21875251

  • Resilience applied to food

    I saw a TED talk that made me think about resilience, and how it’s such a broad and useful concept to have in your mental repertoire. You can apply it to anything and it will give you useful, practical ideas. This example is access to food, but I think the general formula can apply to anything.

    For a culture that praises individuality and “making it on your own,” we’re pretty dependent on other people and external systems. That’s not necessarily bad, but for some people it sets off an internal alarm bell – what if these external systems were to fail?

    That idea is not implausible. It happened to every society that went before us and many more that once existed concurrently to ours.

    Resilience

    In psychology there’s an excellent concept called resilience. Some people are more negatively affected by trauma than others. These people are more resilient. Trauma and difficulties bounce off the highly resilient like bullets bounce off Robocop. Less resilient – more fragile — people are not so lucky. It takes a weaker blow to psychologically knock them down, and they have a harder time getting back on the horse afterwards. [1]

    Many factors determine who is psychologically resilient and who isn’t, and I can write about that if you want. But for the moment let’s expand the idea outside of psychology and into one of the basic survival needs – food. How resilient is our access to food?

    Getting Food

    At the moment you work for money, then buy food with that money. This relies on:

    • Having a job/money
    • There being affordable food in the shop

    Without either of these two things, you can’t get food.

    Money

    How resilient is your income? How secure is your job? What’s the economic outlook? Do you have savings? Is your currency’s value going to hold?

    Shops

    Shops rely on transport, which relies on fuel, which relies on the price and availability of oil. If oil prices go up, so do food prices. If your country is a net food importer, its system is fragile to the same extent as the countries from which it imports.

    Assessing Food Resilience

    Lots of other things could affect your access to money and your local supermarket’s access to food for it to sell. Look into them. For each one, ask yourself, “What would happen to my access to food if this happened?” For example, if oil prices went up, if you lost your job, if the government cut back unemployment benefits, etc.

    Knocks to the System

    Resilient systems can absorb trauma and keep going. Fragile systems crumble. Anti-fragile systems [1] get stronger through trauma.

    Now that you’ve researched and thought about it, is your “access to food” system resilient? What about in five years, or ten years?

    If you consider your system resilient, let me know why – Do you have a garden? Will the market provide? Are you Ray Mears?

    Increasing Resilience

    If you can maintain your access to food in the event of the factors you identified earlier, your system is resilient. What might this look like?

    • Growing food
    • Urban homesteading
    • Having chickens
    • Stored rations/preserving food
    • Foraging skills
    • Wasting less

    And so on. These are resilient to wider, global problems and hence are more resilient. But each one of these are fragile to different factors. If everyone in your town learned to forage, the skill would be useless if everyone quickly stripped the land. So you might have to go through this process several times, thinking out contingencies.

    I like the general process though and I think it’s worth going through these steps for a number of key areas (food, water, transport, energy, health, mental health, community, entertainment… etc).

    Here’s the visual aid:

    [1] Naseem Taleb has argued that these two concepts – resilience and fragility — are not opposites. The opposite of fragility, he argues, is anti-fragility – a quality whereby variance actually strengthens its possessor, as opposed to its possessor being simply immune to the negative effects of variability. A related concept in psychology is post-traumatic growth, which is a positive psychological-style approach to reaction to trauma; and a valid viewpoint I think – if you only study post-traumatic stress, that’s all you’ll find.