Spider Eyes

While looking for images for yesterday's post I found a wealth of images of spider eyes. Many of the images come from Thomas Shahan. As far as I know, all of these images are in the Creative Commons. Thought they were interesting enough to share.

Public Speaking

My biggest fear? Speaking in front of a room full of spiders.

The Internet went out for a few hours today, and with an upset stomach, and nothing to do; I started to wonder about why so many people fear public speaking. Why are so many of us adverse to it? Supposedly seventy-five percent of people experience some sort of anxiety when publicly speaking. Sometimes it happens to me, all of a sudden my sympathetic nervous system kicks in, and I start to get sweaty, and my heart races, and oh jeez.

Evolutionary psychologists suggest that our fears have been hardwired into our brains. We fear heights, spiders, and the dark because our ancestors that didn't, were promptly genetically pruned. Of course the problem with this theory is that there is no way to test it without a time machine.

Can the same be true to public speaking? Would expressing your views to a group put you in as much danger as being somewhere high up, or being attacked by a wild animal? Ostracization could have certainly meant death in certain situations. Then again, many people who do speak out are put in danger (Martin Luther King, John Lennon, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Yitzhak Rabin, Gandai, Larry Flint, Jesus, George Harrison, Alan Berg).

But the concept of public speaking being so dangerous is astounding to me. Perhaps  it is the same reason why the judgment of others is so important to us? I don't know... only questions to think about...

The Ethics of Cog Sci

Unfortunately, because my degree program in Cognitive Science is in science (instead of the humanities) there isn't any room for an ethics class. There is however room for the mandatory Calculus I and II. I hope that comes in handy, considering statistics was rejected from my final degree proposal. On the other hand I could have taken an ethics course as a general education requirement. Well possibly... after transferring between schools with completely different gneral education requirements, in order to pursue the BS in Cognitive Science; I don't know if I can blame myself.

In late night conversations in smoke filled rooms my friends and I talk about the future, and ethics of Cognitive Science. It is my hope that after I graduate I can do lab-research in the field. Perhaps eye tracking, an ERP lab, machine learning, doing work with games, or some other cognitive psychology laboratory. A question always arises "Why"? Why would one want to continue research in such a field? Usually the interrogator of the question is concerned that technology will eventually lead to humanity's downfall, "the end of the world". I do not necessarily disagree. 

I have often been criticized about how I use what I know about how people work in every day situations. When I explained to my friend that if I am in a club, sometimes I will approach a woman with another woman around my arm. The reason for this is building social report, simply put, if this person is invested in me, than there must be a good reason why. My friend told me that I was being sexist and manipulative. I argue that if after approaching someone with a friend, if I can get that person to open up to me, and have a meaningful relationship with them, then there is nothing wrong with what I am doing.

On the other hand, I could just as well take her home for the night. Is this still manipulative? Even after a string of other social engineering techniques? No, pinking up women isn't necessarily Cognitive Science; I would argue it is more social engineering, which I would argue can be a part of Cog Sci. The point I am getting at is that is just like any other form of technology, Cognitive Science could be used for good and bad. Yes computers can provide us with a wealth of information, but they've also proved quite well at collecting off of our personal information, and as much as they bring us together, they drive us farther apart through isolation, etceteria, etceteria.

The question remains, why is it important that we know what human eyes pay most attention to, and for how long, why do we need to know if the sound of a beer bottle opening triggers more brain activity in a alcoholic than an average person, why do we need to have computers that can "think" on their own. Obviously nothing good can come fro technology like this, and will only be exploited more by people like advertisers.

And the reason I give is a personal philosophy. It is that if heaven could ever exist, it would have to be manifested here on Earth. If we are ever going to achieve such a state, we need to understand how we operate, why we do the things we do. We need to understand that we operate on the same brains we had when we were cavemen; and that's why we are aggressive, why we believe in ancient superstitions, why our genitals control actions we make, when the woman in the club sees me approach her with another woman in my arm and recognizes what is happening.

Being able to understand the ways in which the cognitive biases, and facilities we make affect our judgement is a form of transcendence. If man can't understand that, than I believe that he deserves to be pruned from existence. Not necessarily "the end of the world", the end of the human race. The earth is 4.54 billion years old, we're 200,000 years old. Whatever we can cook up I am sure the planet can handle it.

Meaning and Cognition Readings

Yesterday I posted about one of the reading for my Meaning and Cognition class. Instead of a textbook, we have selections from various books in which we must read. These readings were made publicly available, so if you are interested in reading them yourself, you can find them here.

Word Order

Many of the concepts and examples in this article come from a chapter in a book written by Dirven and Radden, I have included the citation at the bottom of this article.

The word order of a sentence is crucial. "Loaf a store went of to the to bread I buy" doesn't make a lot of sense, even though you might be able to figure out that "I went to the store to buy a loaf of bread", it would certainly take you longer to understand when reading the former example. Other examples, such as "I want you to know" and "I want to know you" would need clarification if ever mixed up.

Sentences like "I came, I saw, I conquered" also rely on word order, so do "binary" examples (those that refer to two opposites) "give and take", "cause and effect"... "park and ride". Switching take and give, or cause and effect, do not sound right to a native speaker of English.

As mentioned before, word order defines the meaning of the sentence;

"Sam painted the green door".
"Sam painted the door green".

The word green, based on it's location in relation to the word "door" states the condition of the door before and after the event of the door being painted. You could of course include the state of the door before and after; "Sam painted the red door green".

Some languages can circumvent these rules, German is one of them; due to the existence of cases. In the sentence, "The boy threw the ball", both the words take thier respective cases; with the boy as the subject, and the ball as the object.

The boy threw the ball.
Der Junge warf den Ball.
Den ball warf der Junge.

Although the latter sentence would probably sound strange, the case of the word defines the subject, and object in German; not necessarily the position. 

Another concept that appears in language is that of the distance between words. Things which belong together conceptually tend to be put together linguistically, and vice-verse.

"A noisy group was hanging around the bar".
"A noisy group of youngsters were hanging around the bar".

Furthermore the difference between the sentences "I made her leave", and "I hoped that she would leave" is the influence of the noun on the situation. The sentence with the direct effect has a shorter distance between the subject and verb, the sentence with the least impact has a larger distance. The difference between "Romeo sent his girlfriend a valentine" and "Romeo sent a valentine to his girlfriend" is that the more direct sentence (the first one) suggests she received a valentine. However, if you change the sentences to say that "Romeo is sending..." then it is NOT assumed that she received the valentine! In this case, would there be anything different between the two sentences?


Dirven. "The Cognitive Basis of Language, Language and Thought." Cognitive Exploration of Language and Linguistics. Ed. Radden. 2004. 1-21. Print.