idiolect

Men protect women, a man once told me indignantly.
Sure,
some do.
Who do they protect them from?
Other women?
Children?
Wild rutabagas? *
Rampaging rabbits?

Helen Potrebenko

* A kind of swede

Now, from Defra, you can get a noisemap of the UK, searchable by postcode. This is the area around my house:

Dutch institutional investors and company executives are pressing for more rules to govern activist shareholders, news agency Reuters reports.
…
‘We have all seen that investors with a short term horizon and a strategy of shareholder activism try to make life miserable for companies,’ Jan Hommen, chairman of publishing group Reed Elsevier, was quoted as saying. ‘They have no loyalty at all to the company or other stakeholders.’

dutchnews.nl, 9 May 2008

Thesis: Irony is so corrosive that even the slightest drop in anything you pursue will eventually destroy all seriousness and purpose. The project will then be impossible to sustain, except for the regular injection of large quantities of self-importance (for examples see critical theory, purportedly ‘post-modern’ art).

I have this recurring fantasy where a younger me is looking out of my eyes as I go about my daily life. The fifteen year old me can’t read my thoughts, or affect my actions. He doesn’t know how he got here, temporarily trapped inside the thirty year old me, doesn’t know what is going on. All he can do is read what I look at, listen to what I say, and try and deduce what kind of destiny awaits his future self. Is he pleased with how he ends up? Is he amazed at the confidence, the responsibility, the freedom that I have? Does he smile in recognition when I call up people he already knows, obviously still in touch? Does he wonder how some things worked out? He can’t ask any questions, trapped there. He just has to look for clues. Some people leave a trace on my adult life while he’s visiting, others are agonisingly absent. He watches the adult me and tries to figure out if these absences distress him, tries to figure out what he likes and avoids, what he loves and hates. He can’t tell for sure, just watches me, as I watch myself, swept through my own life.

Lorna said to me, ‘You know Riddley theres some thing in us it dont have no name.’
I said, ‘What thing is that?’
She said, ‘Its some kind of thing it aint us but yet its in us. Its looking out thru our eye hoals. May be you dont take no noatis of it only some times. Say you get woak up suddn in the middl of the nite. 1 minim youre a sleap and the nex youre on your feet with a spear in your han. Wel it wernt you put that spear in your han it wer that other thing whats looking out thru your eye hoals. It aint you nor it don’t even know your name. Its in us lorn and loan and sheltering how it can.’
I said, ‘If its in every 1 of us theres moren 1 of it theres got to be a manying theres got to be a millying and mor.’
Lorna said, ‘Wel there is a millying and mor.’
I said, ‘Wel if theres such a manying of it whys it lorn then whys it loan?’
She said, ‘Becaws the manying and the millying its all 1 thing it dont have nothing to gether with. You look at lykens on a stoan its all them tiny manyings of it and may be each part of it myt think its sepert only we can see its all 1 thing. Thats how it is with what we are its all 1 thing. Thats how it is with what we are its all 1 girt big thing and divvyt up amongst the many. Its all 1 girt thing bigger nor the worl and lorn and loan and oansome. Tremmering it is and feart. It puts us on like we put on our cloes. Some times we dont fit. Some times it cant fynd the arm hoals and it tears us a part. I dont think I took all that much noatis of it when I ben yung. Now Im old I noatis it mor. It dont realy like to put me on no mor. Every morning I can feal how its tiret of me and readying to throw me a way. Iwl tell you some thing Riddley and keap this in memberment. What ever it is we dont come naturel to it.’

Russell Hoban, in Riddley Walker, p6

Reed Elsevier, the publisher and exhibitions group, will be challenged tomorrow by Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) at its annual general meeting over its failure to sell its controversial defence exhibitions business….However, sources insisted that a sale was a matter of weeks away, with private equity-owned Clarion Events, the organiser of The Baby Show and the London International Horse Show at Olympia, the preferred bidder.

Full article in yesterday’s Times: link

Adam:

Lady,

I’ve not had a moment’s love

since I was expelled.

Let me in.

Eve:

Lord,

I’ve not had a moment’s rest

since I was a rib.

Put me back.

We must, then, consider what does actually happen more often than not when we say that we remember. The first notion to get rid of is that memory is primarily or literally reduplicative, or reproductive. In a world of constantly changing environment, literal recall is extraordinarily unimportant. It is with remembering as it is with the stroke in a skilled game. We may fancy that we are repeating a series of movements learned a long time before from a text-book or from a teacher. But motion study shows that in fact we build up the stroke afresh on a basis of the immediately preceding balance of postures and the momentary needs of the game. Every time we make it, it has its own characteristics.

Bartlett, F. C. (1995). Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Cambridge University Press. my emphasis

If I dig in the mines of the frozen north,
I’ll dig with a will; the ore I bring forth
May yet make a knife - a knife for the throat of the Tsar.
If I toil in the south, I’ll plough and sow
Good honest hemp; who knows, I may grow
A rope - a rope for the neck of the Tsar!”

A nineteenth century jewish anarchist hymn, apparently, quoted in “Jenks, C. (2004). Urban culture: critical concepts in literary and cultural studies. Taylor & Francis.”. I’d love to hear the rest if you’ve got it

It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us, but if that is so then let us set up a last agonising, bloodcurdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance!

Henry Miller, ‘Tropic of Cancer’, 1934

In Pursuit of Happiness: Empirical Answers to Philosophical Questions
Pelin Kesebir and Ed Diener
Perspectives on Psychological Science
March 2008 - Vol. 3 Issue 2, pages 117–125

Since the early studies showing that lottery winners were not happier than controls and that even paralyzed accident victims revert approximately to their initial levels of happiness (e.g., Brickman, Coates, & Janoff-Bulman, 1978), the hedonic treadmill theory—the idea that our emotional systems adjust to almost anything that happens in our lives, good or bad—has been embraced by psychologists as a guiding principle in happiness research. In affiliation with the hedonic treadmill model, the set-point theory posits that major life events, such as marriage, the death of a child, or unemployment, affect a person’s happiness only temporarily, after which the person’s happiness level regresses to a default determined by genotype (Lykken & Tellegen, 1996). The implication of these assertions is that no matter how hard we try to be happier, adaptation on the one hand and our temperament on the other will ensure that our venture will remain just a futile rat race with an illusory goal.

Our conviction is that the time is ripe for a revision of hedonic adaptation theories. Accumulating evidence reveals that, even though adaptation undeniably occurs to some extent and personal aspirations do rise and adjust, people do not adapt quickly and/or completely to everything (Diener, Lucas, & Scollon, 2006). Lucas, Clark, Georgellis, and Diener (2003, 2004), for example, have observed in a 15-year longitudinal study that individuals who experienced unemployment or widowhood did not, on average, fully recover and return to their earlier life satisfaction levels. Other studies have shown that people hardly, if ever, adapt to certain elements in their lives such as noise, long commutes, or interpersonal conflict (Haidt, 2006), whereas other events such as plastic surgery may have long-lasting positive effects on one’s psychological well-being (Rankin, Borah, Perry, & Wey, 1998).

From O’Regan, J. K., & Noë, A. (2002). A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(05), 939-973:

Particularly interesting is the work being done by Lenay (1997), using an extreme simplification of the echolocation device, in which a blind or blindfolded person has a single photoelectric sensor attached to his or her forefinger, and can scan a simple environment (e.g., consisting of several isolated light sources) by pointing. Every time the photophotosensor points directly at a light source, the subject hears a beep or feels a vibration. Depending on whether the finger is moved laterally, or in an arc, the subject establishes different types of sensorimotor contingencies: lateral movement allows information about direction to be obtained, movement in an arc centered on the object gives information about depth. Note several interesting facts. First, users of such a device rapidly say that they do not notice vibrations on their skin or hear sounds, rather they “sense” the presence of objects outside of them. Note also that at a given moment during exploration of the environment, subjects may be receiving no beep or vibration whatsoever, and yet “feel” the presence of an object before them. In other words, the experience of perception derives from the potential to obtain changes in sensation, not from the sensations themselves. Note also that the exact nature or body location of the stimulation (beep or vibration) has no bearing on perception of the stimulus – the vibration can be applied on the finger or anywhere else on the body. This again shows that what is important is the sensorimotor invariance structure of the changes in sensation, not the sensation itself.

Lenay, C. (1997) Le mouvement des boucles sensori-motrices aux représentations cognitives et langagières. Paper presented at the Sixième Ecole d’Eté de l’Association pour la Recherche Cognitive.

I’m going to tell you about an experience that I often have rock-climbing and then I’m going to offer you some speculation as to the cognitive neuroscience behind it. If you rock-climb I’m sure you’ll find my description familiar. If you’re also into cognitive neuroscience perhaps you can tell me if you think my speculation in plausible.

Rock-climbing is a sort of three-dimensional kinaesthetic puzzle. You’re on the side of rock-wall, and you have to go up (or down) by looking around you for somewhere to move your hands or feet. If you can’t see anything then you’re stuck and just have to count the seconds before you run out of strength and fall off. What often happens to me when climbing is that I look as hard as I can for a hold to move my hand up to and I see nothing. Nothing I can easily reach, nothing I can nearly reach and not even anything I might reach if I was just a bit taller or if I jumped. I feel utterly stuck and begin to contemplate the immanent defeat of falling off.

But then I remember to look for new footholds.

Sometimes I’ve already had a go at this and haven’t seen anything promising, but in desperation I move one foot to a new hold, perhaps one that is only an inch or so further up the wall. And this is when something magical happens. Although I am now only able to reach an inch further, I can suddenly see a new hold for my hand, something I’m able to grip firmly and use to pull myself to freedom and triumph (or at least somewhere higher up to get stuck). Even though I looked with all my desperation at the wall above me, this hold remained completely invisible until I moved my foot an inch — what a difference that inch made.

Psychologists have something they call affordances (Gibson, 1977, 1986), which are features of the environment which seem to ‘present themselves’ as available for certain actions. Chairs afford being sat on, hammers afford hitting things with. The term captures an observation that there is something very obviously action-orientated about perception. We don’t just see the world, we see the world full of possibilities. And this means that the affordances in the environment aren’t just there, they are there because we have some potential to act (Stoffregen, 2003). If you are frail and afraid of falling then a handrail will look very different from if you are a skateboarder, or a freerunner. Psychology typically divides the jobs the mind does up into parcels : ‘perception’, (then) ‘decision making’, (then) ‘action’. But if you take the idea of affordances seriously it gives lie to this neat division. Affordances exist because action (the ‘last’ stage) affects perception (the ‘first’ stage). Can we experimentally test this intuition, is there really an effect of action on perception? One good example is Oudejans et al (1996) who asked baseball fielders to judge were a ball would land, either just watching it fall or while running to catch it. A model of the mind that didn’t involve affordances might think that it would be easier to judge where a ball would land if you were standing still; after all, it’s usually easier to do just one thing rather than two. This, however, would be wrong. The fielders were more accurate in their judgements — perceptual predictions basically — when running to catch the ball, in effect when they could use base their judgements on the affordances of the environment produced by their actions, rather than when passively observing the ball.

The connection with my rock-climbing experience is obvious: although I can see the wall ahead, I can only see the holds ahead which are actually within reach. Until I move my foot and bring a hold within range it is effectively invisible to my affordance-biased perception (there’s probably some attentional-narrowing occurring due to anxiety about falling off too, (Pijpers et al, 2006); so perhaps if I had a ladder and a gin and tonic I might be better at spotting potential holds which were out of reach).

There’s another element which I think is relevant to this story. Recently neuroscientists have discovered that the brain deals differently with perceptions occurring near body parts. They call the area around limbs ‘peripersonal space’ (for a review see Rizzolatti & Matelli, 2003). {footnote}. Surprisingly, this space is malleable, according to what we can affect — when we hold tools the area of peripersonal space expands from our hands to encompass the tools too (Maravita et al, 2003). Lots of research has addressed how sensory inputs from different modalities are integrated to construct our brain’s sense of peripersonal space. One delightful result showed that paying visual attention to an area of skin enhanced touch-perception there. The interaction between vision and touch was so strong that providing subjects with a magnifying glass improved their touch perception even more! (Kennett et al, 2001; discussed in Mind Hacks, hack #58). I couldn’t find any direct evidence that unimodal perceptual accuracy is enhanced in peripersonal space compared to just outside it (if you know of any, please let me know), but how’s this for a reasonable speculation — the same mechanisms which create peripersonal space are those which underlie the perception of affordances in our environment. If peripersonal space is defined as an area of cross-modal integration, and is also malleable according to action-possibilities, it isn’t unreasonable to assume that an action-orientated enhancement of perception will occur within this space.

What does this mean for the rock-climber? Well it explains my experience, whereby holds are ‘invisible’ until they are in reach. This suggests some advice to follow next time you are stuck halfway up a climb: You can’t just look with your eyes, you need to ‘look’ with your whole body; only by putting yourself in different positions will the different possibilities for action become clear.

(references and footnote below the fold)

footnote:
My intuition is that this is the area around which we feel ‘an aura’ if someone reaches towards us; this is completely unsubstantiated speculation however

References:

Gibson, J.J. The theory of affordances. In R.E. Shaw and J. Bransford,
eds., Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing, Erlbaum Assoc., Hillsdale. N.J., 1977.

Gibson, J. J. (1986). The ecological approach to visual perception. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc, US.

Kennett, S., Taylor-Clarke, M., & Haggard, P. (2001). Noninformative vision improves the spatial resolution of touch in humans, Current Biology, 11(15), 1188-1191.

Maravita, A., Spence, C., & Driver, J. (2003). Multisensory integration and the body schema: close to hand and within reach, Current Biology, 13(13), 531-539.

Oudejans, R. R., Michaels, C. F., Bakker, F. C., & Dolne, M. A. (1996). The relevance of action in perceiving affordances: perception of catchableness of fly balls., J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform, 22(4), 879-91.

Pijpers, J. R. R., Oudejans, R. R. D., Bakker, F. C., & Beek, P. J. (2006). The role of anxiety in perceiving and realizing affordances, Ecological Psychology, 18(3), 131.

Rizzolatti, G., & Matelli, M. (2003). Two different streams form the dorsal visual system: anatomy and functions, Experimental Brain Research, 153(2), 146-157.

Stoffregen, T. A. (2003). Affordances as properties of the animal-environment system, Ecological Psychology, 15(2), 115-134.

Crossposted at mindhacks.com

When I did my improvisation course recently the teacher, Chris, said something like this: When I have a group of kids and I ask them who wants to go first they all put their hands in the air and fight to get to the front, because they aren’t worried about success or failure on that attempt, they are just interested in having as many goes as possible. When I have a group of adults and I ask them who wants to go first they look at their shoes and try and hide behind each other, because they are worried about the quality of each individual go, about whether they can do it right, successfully. This is why children learn so quickly, he said, because they aren’t worried about getting it wrong. So, he said, when he asked for volunteers he wanted us not to worry about failure, instead to to expect it, and to remember that the most fun is to be had by trying to have as many goes as possible

The man on the radio said that the Human Rights Act (1998), which incorporates the EU Convention on Human Rights (1950) into English Law, is a ‘charter for terrorists and criminals’. Like that was a bad thing. The mistake here is to assume that human rights exist to look after people who obviously deserve it (you know, people like you and me, who listen to the radio and own sandals). Wrong. Human rights exist to look after everyone, and particularly those who are at risk of persecution. And we all know that the first thing the powerful do when they want to persecute an individual or a group is to redefine what they do as either criminal or (more recently) as terrorism. It’s as simple as that. Human rights laws that only looked after obedient and respectable members of society would be a sham. It is at the periphery of society that human rights are most important and where they should be least up for compromise.

But it is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired

George Eliot, in Middlemarch

it is in these acts called trivialisites that the seeds of joy are for ever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness - calling their denial knowledge

George Eliot, in Middlemarch (chapter 42)

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope

George Eliot, in Middlemarch (chapter 51 )

Does anyone know if capitalism requires economic growth, and if so, why it does?

It never goes away

Last line of The Two Jakes (reviewed here)

Times Online december 30th 2007:

THE professional publisher Reed Elsevier has failed to sell off its controversial arms fairs by the end of this year as planned.

The tiny but highly profitable division was put up for sale in June after key customers and authors took offence at Reed’s involvement in shows such as DSEi (Defence Systems & Equipment International), London’s main arms fair, where some exhibitors were ejected this year for trying to promote leg irons.

Sir Crispin Davis, Reed’s chief executive, was criticised at last year’s annual meeting by antiwar campaigners. F&C Asset Management and the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust also sold their shares in the company in protest.

Bids for the division, which includes the Abu Dhabi Idex fair, came in at close to £30m, but failed to progress. The sale is being handled by Price Waterhouse Coopers.

Reed said recently that there was “very active interest” in the portfolio.

There are only two species that have language — humans, and honeybees. Other animals communicate, but its only us two that have language. And language means grammar; some abstract structure which conveys meaning according to the arrangement of symbols in that structure.

Our language is vastly more sophisticated than the honeybees. Their language is something called a waggle-dance, which conveys information about a food source between a individual who has returned to the hive from foraging and between her fellow workers. She peforms her waggle dance and the length and orientation of different parts of the dance indicates the quality of the food source and the direction in relation the the current position of the sun. The dance has structure, and that structure conveys the meaning of the components within it — its a language, a primitive language, but still the only thing that looks close to ours in the animal kingdom.

Why is that? Why is the only other grammar not found in a fellow primate, nor even a fellow mammal but found in an insect?

Here’s my theory — language is a system with unparalleled power to communicate information. But this means that it also has unparalleled ability to deceive, which is what one of the basic properties of communication systems. If you can use language to convey a very specific message, you can also use it to make very specific deceptions, for example tricking someone the food is in one direction, while you go and enjoy it in another. Because of the unprecedented capacity of language to deceive, it exists at the top of a steep evolutionary mountain. Any species which is evolving language must have some protection against the threat of deception, otherwise the only defense is to ignore language-based communications all-together (in which case you don’t get any benefit, and so language-evolution never gets off the ground).

The human defense against deception-using-language is based on our other cognitive abilities — the ability to reason about who to trust and when to trust them. Co-evolving these capacities with language is one strategy which allows the evolution of language. The honeybees have used another, circumventing the threat of deception by making deception evolutionarily pointless: honeybees in a hive are all genetically identical, so although language inherantly contains the capacity to deceive, in honeybees there is no reason why deception itself would evolve to diminish the benefits of communicating through language.

Update: I was wrong about honey bees being genetically identical, but I don’t think it demolishes the argument (quoting N.) “Honey bees are not genetically identical. Worker sisters share 3/4 of the genes with each other, but would only share 1/2 their genes with any offspring they might produce, so they can better propagate their genes by helping the queen produce more sisters. Wikipedia link here