txt msgs r running language

*ruining

^lol, jk!! 🙂

In many casual discussions of language and the internet, it’s not uncommon to hear about how such “textspeak ruins language” – how technology has made everybody lazy with their speech and writing. Major media outlets such as the LA Times, the BBC and The Daily Mail have all bemoaned the ways in which people communicate through technology.

Of course, language does change when it’s used to text or write messages on the internet. It’s even become the focus of the field of linguistics known as Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC). Although it specifies computers in its name, CMC refers to the study of interaction facilitated by technology like computers, mobile phones and tablets.

And contrary to the idea that these innovations are corrupting language, they actually demonstrate a creative repurposing of symbols and marks to a new age of technology. These evolutions of language are swift, clever and context-specific, illustrating the flexibility of the language to communicate nonverbal meaning in a nuanced, efficient manner.

Change doesn’t mean decay

It turns out that people have been complaining about language being “ruined” for as long as they’ve been writing and speaking.

In a TED Talk, linguist John McWhorter shared stories of people complaining about language change through the ages. For example, in 63 AD a Roman scholar groused that students of Latin were writing in an “artificial language” – a language that would become French!

And a 1871 quote from Charles Eliot, the President of Harvard University, might sound familiar:

Bad spelling, incorrectness, as well as inelegance of expression in writing, ignorance of the simplest rules of punctuation… are far from rare among young men otherwise well prepared for college studies.

Young Theodore Roosevelt – a student at Harvard in the 1870s – was possibly among those young men being described. As historian Kathleen Dalton observed in her biography of Roosevelt, the future president would eventually support the revision of American English spelling rules, many of which we still use today, like changing -re endings to -er in words like center and changing -our to -or in words like color.

The emoticon: more than a face

Today, people are able to communicate rapidly through a range of mediums – and perhaps no linguistic development better indicates changes in the ways we communicate than the ubiquitous emoticon.

The emoticon 🙂 – a colon followed by a parenthesis – is a visual representation of a smiley face turned sideways. Although an emoticon may look like a smile, a frown or any number of facial expressions, it doesn’t represent a face, as many internet users assume. It’s actually intended to convey a feeling (“I’m happy,” or “just joking”).

This meaning is evident even in the first emoticon, credited to Scott Fahlman at Carnegie Mellon University. In a 1982 e-mail, Fahlman suggested 🙂 as a “joke marker” to indicate wisecracks or sarcasm in text communication. In this legendary e-mail, he also used the first instance of the frown emoticon :-(.

Words that represent these feelings are what linguists call discourse particles, or little pieces of language that convey information about the tone of the statement. Folklorist Lee-Ellen Marvin called them the “paralanguage of the internet, the winks which signal the playfulness of a statement over the seriousness it might denote.”

In a study of instant messaging, scholar Shao-Kang Lo describes emoticons as “quasi-nonverbal cues” – something that looks like a word, but performs the functions of a nonverbal cue, like a hand gesture or nod.

In fact, the variations in how you construct this emoticon can imply something about your identity, just like whether you use a soda, pop or Coke can suggest what part of the United States you come from. For example, as linguist and data scientist Tyler Schnoebelen pointed out in a 2012 study, people who put a “nose” in their emoticons tend to be older than non-nose emoticon users.

Though emoticons have been the subject of numerous studies, individual symbols – which serve a different purpose than emoticons – can add meaning to a message or express meaning all on their own.

Fluid conversation and clarified meaning

Have you ever seen someone fix a typo in a message with an asteriks?
(*asterisk)

The asterisk signals a repair of an error in language. Conversational repair, or the act of correcting ourselves or others in spoken language, has been discussed for decades by conversation analysts in spoken language. Saying “sorry, I meant to say” or “er, I mean” can be awkward and interrupt the dynamics of a spoken conversation.

This conversational move has made its way into online written language, where that awkwardness is reduced to a single symbol. Instead of saying “oops, I mispelled ‘asterisk’ in my previous sentence,” people can avoid a conversational detour by simply typing an asterisk before the word: *asterisk.

That’s not the only use of the asterisk. A pair of them around a word or phrase can indicate emphasis. This style has gradually given way to words in all caps and repeated letters to show intensity and emphasis, as linguist Deborah Tannen and communication scholar Erika Darics have noted. Tannen provides an example of a text message that uses multiple styles to convey an intensely apologetic, sincere tone:

JACKIE I AM SO SO SO SORRY! I thought you were behind us in the cab
and then I saw you weren’t!!!!! I feel soooooooo bad! Catch another cab and ill
pay for it for youuuuu

Meanwhile, punctuation marks like hyphens and periods suggest a change in voice and tempo. One example is the ubiquitous ellipses. Traditionally, this mark has been used in text to denote deleted text. Now, it can also indicate a tone of voice that’s trailing off or hesitating, such as the following example from a conversation in the popular online role playing game World of Warcraft:

So… since we live in the same city, do you wanna like… meet up sometime…?

This use of the ellipses adds that extra meaning to the text and it can also do the work of denoting someone else’s turn in the conversation.

It’s even been incorporated into user interfaces. In instant messaging and chat programs like Skype, an ellipsis is used to show that the other party is typing.

A single symbol conveys a complex message

A single symbol can also be an entire message on its own. In her contribution to the book Discourse 2.0: Language and New Media, Susan Herring describes how a single question mark can be an entire message that indicates that the user is “confused or does not know what to say.”

In other words, a question mark does the job of asking for clarification in a single keystroke. Similarly, a single exclamation point as a message can illustrate surprise and excitement. You can repeat either of these symbols for as a superlative to show a greater level of surprise. Consider this exchange in which B uses nothing but symbols to express reactions to A’s statements:

A: So I have some good news.

B: ?

A: I got a raise today

B: !

A: And it came with a promotion

B: !!!

These two aren’t the only punctuation that can stand on their own as a message. In my 2012 study of World of Warcraft players, I found that in this community, and others, the carat (^) can stand alone as an entire message that indicates agreement with another person. Meanwhile, an arrow-shaped symbol (<–) signaled volunteering for a task, like raising a hand in the classroom.

Here’s a hypothetical interaction:

A: I am so ready for vacation.

B: ^

A: Who wants to go to Florida with me?

B: <–

Far from crippling language, these examples indicate how people can now communicate complex feelings in a streamlined manner – perfect for our modern, fast-paced world.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
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Human beings are information seekers. We are constantly taking in details – big and small – from our environment. But the majority of the stuff we encounter in a given day we rarely need to remember. For instance, what are the chances that you need to remember where you ate lunch with a friend last Wednesday?

But what if later on you learned that there was something important to remember about that lunch? The brain has a remarkable ability to store information that seems inconsequential at the time.

So, if you learn that your friend got sick from what they ordered at lunch last week, then details from the meal become relevant: which restaurant was it and what did your friend order? Did you get the same thing? Now those not-so-important details from lunch aren’t so trivial.

Given new and relevant information, human beings have an amazing capacity to strengthen weak memories. This points to the adaptive nature of human memory.

Over the past several years, we’ve been interested in understanding how the brain stores memories for emotionally neutral events that gain significance through subsequent experience. How does the brain store all of this information? And how does emotion strengthen mundane memories?

We remember emotional events best

The study of emotional enhancement of memory largely focuses on how we remember emotionally arousing stimuli or events, like evocative imagery or traumatic events, like 9/11, which is the subject of a long-term study on what affects memory retention.

We take for granted that we remember highly emotional events (like 9/11) better than we remember neutral events, (like that lunch date).

Emotion increases our ability to remember by affecting activity in brain regions involved in emotional processing, particularly the amygdala and striatum, and also the regions involved in encoding new experiences, like the hippocampus. Emotion also increases the strength of our memory over time, a process called consolidation.

Strong emotion can increase memory for positive events, like a surprise birthday party thrown by your closest friends, and for negative events, like making an embarrassing faux pas in front of your boss at the office holiday party.

Of course many details are not intrinsically emotionally arousing. But they can gain emotional significance through our experiences.

For example, the memory of a surprise birthday party includes details like what you were wearing and who was there. On the face of it, these details are not emotionally significant, but you remember them because of the context in which they were experienced.

How do you study memory?

Our research has shown that people have better memory for boring information when presented in an emotional context, regardless of if it is rewarding or negative.

In some of our earlier studies, we found that people selectively remember neutral pictures if the pictures had been associated with an electrical shock the previous day, even when the volunteers were unaware that we would later test their memory.

We have also shown that people remember neutral pictures if they are warned that if they forget them, they will receive a shock the next day. Likewise, being rewarded with money for remembering certain pictures the next day can boost memory for those pictures as well.

These experiments focus on emotional factors at the time the original memory is created and the findings show how seemingly trivial information associated with a meaningful event can be selectively preserved in memory.

Emotion enhances our memory of minor details

But what happens when the emotional event happens after the original memories were formed? In a recent study, we found that an emotional experience can enhance memory for neutral information encountered previously.

Volunteers viewed a series of trivial pictures from two categories, either animals or tools. After a delay, volunteers were presented with a new set of animal and tool pictures – only this time, when the volunteer saw the pictures they received an electrical shock to the wrist.

We already knew that memory would be strengthened for the pictures paired with the electrical shock. But here we found that if we paired shocks with pictures of animals, memory was strengthened for pictures of animals volunteers saw before any shocks were delivered. If we shocked volunteers when they where shown pictures of tools, memory for the earlier pictures of tools was strengthened.

Like remembering details from lunch last Wednesday after you discovered your friend got sick, the negative experience selectively increased memory for related information that was completely trivial when it was originally experienced.

We use our memory not only to remember the past, but to guide our decisions in the future. Emotion helps us remember relevant information to determine our choices. But without the ability to strengthen seemingly trivial past experiences with new important information, we might end up missing out on future rewards or repeating the same mistakes.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
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Do you ever have trouble telling right from left? For example you’re taking a driving lesson and the instructor asks you to take a left turn and you pause, struggling to think of which way is left. If so, you’re not on your own – a significant proportion of our population has difficulty in telling right from left.

Left-right discrimination is a complex neuro-psychological process involving several higher neurological functions such as the ability to integrate sensory and visual information, language function and memory. For some it is second nature but for others a considerable challenge. You can take a test here to see how well you do.

One further problem facing the health profession is that when a doctor or nurse faces a patient, their right-side is on the patient’s left-side. So correctly distinguishing right from left in a patient also involves the visuo-spatial function of mentally rotating images.

Wrong turns to avoidable errors

It’s hardly the end of the world if you take the wrong direction on a journey, but there are many situations where confusing right from left can have devastating consequences. Some of the most tragic errors in medicine have been when surgery was performed on the wrong side of a patient: removing the wrong kidney or amputating the wrong leg. While there are systems, checks and balances in place to anticipate and minimise these kinds of mistakes, when they do occur, human error is often at the root of the cause.

Error is an inherent characteristic of human behaviour – sometimes we just get things wrong – but left-right ones may be more than a one-off accident. Evidence would suggest that right-left confusion is more common in women. The literature would appear to suggest that men demonstrate a greater degree of visuo-spatial function.

The ‘distraction effect’

Distinguishing right from left also never occurs in isolation. Hospitals and other health settings are busy and complex places to work in. Doctors are often subject to distractions while working; receiving telephone calls, cardiac monitors bleeping, taking questions from colleagues, patients and their relatives – the clinical environment can be very challenging.

In research we published in Medical Education, we explored the impact of such interruptions on medical students’ ability to correctly discriminate right from left. While objectively measuring 234 medical students’ ability to distinguish right from left, we subjected them to the typical ambient noise of a ward environment and interrupted them with clinical questions.

Our findings were startling. Even the background noise of a ward environment was enough to throw some medical students off when making right-left judgements. Asking them a series of questions while they were trying to distinguish right from left had an even greater impact. The “distraction effect” was greater for older and female students.

An individual’s ability to self-determine how well they could distinguish right from left was also often imprecise. So many students thought they were good at distinguishing right from left when, objectively measured, they weren’t.

Counter techniques

Those who have difficulty in telling right from left often develop their own techniques – for example placing their left thumb at right angles to their index finger to make an “L” representation for their “left” side. It appears however that these techniques remain fallible and fail to combat this issue in all cases.

In healthcare, training – starting at an undergraduate level – needs to make students mindful of the challenges of making right-left decisions and the impact that distractions can have on such critical decisions. We need to develop strategies to reduce such error-provoking situations and to raise student and teacher awareness of the fact that some individuals are more prone to right-left confusion.

As the people at risk often don’t think they have a problem, testing of the ability to discriminate against right-left discrimination – for example through online psychometric tests – could be offered to students to measure their ability. Those who are revealed to be challenged in making right-left decisions, would at least have this deficiency flagged up and could apply extra vigilance in certain situations.

Minimising distractions is also particularly important. During the critical phases of a flight, pilots must refrain from all non-essential conversation to avoid unnecessary distractions. Such cockpit rules, and other strategies lend themselves well to healthcare.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
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Throughout our lives we have multitudes of experiences that shape how we then behave in the world. Some of these lessons are learnt rapidly, such as why we shouldn’t put our hand on a hot pan on the stove. Other, more autobiographical experiences can be stored and recalled explicitly as our memories.

These memories can be recalled and described, such as what we did for certain birthdays, or experiences from our holidays. We can also learn to perform certain actions and behaviours that are totally new to us – for example, learning to ride a bike and drive a car. These actions can be thought of as muscle memories, or “non-declarative” memory.

Forgotten – but not gone

However, it seems we don’t retain all of our memories and experiences. There are times in your life when you find yourself pondering basic general knowledge questions and wonder where these gaps in information have sprung from. Despite all those hours of study at school, many of us can’t remember how to say “two beers please” in Spanish when we are on holiday, or how to work out a specific angle of a triangle, despite being proficient in these skills some years ago.

Why is it that we lose the information that we have learnt? Is it still there but inaccessible, or is it gone forever?

Memory can be thought of as having two components: storage – the process of encoding a memory, and retrieval – the process of recalling the memory. Memories are stored in short-term memory stores and then can be transferred to long-term memory.

Short-term memory has a limited capacity (about seven items) and duration (15-30 seconds). There are two ways in which capacity is tested, one being span, the other being recency effect. Miller’s (1956) “magic” number 7 (plus or minus two) provides evidence for the capacity of short-term memory.

Most adults can store between five and nine items in their short-term memory. The duration of short-term memory seems to be between 15 and 30 seconds, according to the researchers Atkinson and Shiffrin (1971). After this time the information decays and fades away unless repeated verbally (rehearsal), which keeps the information in short-term memory. Then information that survives in short-term memory can pass into long-term memory.

So a piece of information can be learnt through practice, making it easy to be recalled in a test a few days later. However, the strength of a memory at the time is misleading when it comes to predicting whether we will remember it in the future.

‘Every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain’ – Homer Simpson

This suggests that acquiring new memories interferes with previously stored information, and indicates that the human brain has a limit to how much information can be stored. We do not know the capacity of the brain, or the full capacity of our memory.

Theoretically, the capacity of long-term memory could be unlimited, the main constraint on recall being accessibility rather than availability. The brain contains a vast number of cells that are proposed to work together as a network to encode memories and store them.

There is a theory of forgetting in cognitive psychology that suggests the encoding of new memories can cause interference with recall of memories previously encoded (known as retro-active interference). This interference is proposed to prevent the recall of a specific memory by competing for expression. So a new memory blocks the recall of an older memory.

Retrieval failure theory

Retrieval failure is where the information is in long-term memory, but cannot be accessed. When we form a memory we also learn about the situation and environment. These can form retrieval cues.

These cues prompt the retrieval of a memory and without them the information may not be accessible. These cues act as a hint or clue that can assist memory retrieval.

Forgetting is greatest when the situation where the information needs to be recalled is very different from when the information was encoded. This can mean that information that we have learnt in a school environment may not be as easily retrieved when in the “real world”. So, if you had learnt the Spanish phrase for “two beers please” in a bar, you would be able to recall it easily when in the same environment again.

These retrieval cues can be important for people suffering with memory impairments caused by neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Being unable to recall information is very upsetting. This can, in turn, cause a change in the internal (emotional) state of the person, which makes recalling a memory even more difficult. However, by providing retrieval cues such as old photographs, or returning to a childhood home, a flood of lost memories can be triggered.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
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Can training our brains help make the world a better place? Tania Singer from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences thinks it can. She’s a social neuroscientist and psychologist who says the brain’s plasticity means it can be trained to make us less selfish and more compassionate. In this video for the World Economic Forum, Singer shows how our decision making is driven by a set of psychological motivations – from power to fear – that can be altered to help us make better decisions for society and for our health. Her research has also influenced the development of a new model of “caring economics” that hopes to work towards sustainability and global cooperation.

Watch Tania Singer’s presentation in the video above, or read key quotes below.

On the plasticity of the brain
“The concept of plasticity is really the concept of changeability and trainability, not only of our brain but also of our immune system and stress system. So, I’m not just talking about the brain but the whole body. I’m presenting very fresh data about a one year longitudinal study.”

“You’ve probably have heard the concept of mindfulness, about training the attention of your mind, stabilising your mind, becoming present in the moment. This is what we spend the first three months training in the module we call presence. So it’s really just getting your mind stable and developing introspective body awareness. Then there’s a module called Affect, and this is about emotions and it’s about training compassion, loving kindness, empathy and how to regulate emotion in the context of anger or stress. This is juxtaposed with perspective – a cognitive model that allows you to get a perspective on yourself and on others.”

“People have to do these core exercises for 20 to 30 minutes each day, and integrate it into their daily routine, like brushing your teeth. We give them a cell phone and we can monitor their progress. We have exercises you do on your own and dyadic exercises where you have to call up a partner.”

On Compassion
“Compassion is really important. Psychopaths are very good at manipulating and understanding what the other person needs, but they have no compassion and empathy, so they don’t care. Participants go into the scanner five times in the year and they see screens. One screen shows videos of people explaining real suffering stories of their lives. And you measure the brain, the empathic response to these stories and also what they say they feel. The stories need a lot of belief and understanding, so you can compute a social intelligence score based on how well someone can do cognitive perspective taking.”

“What we have shown in our study, that just being tested in these exercise doesn’t do anything, doesn’t improve your theory of mind. Doing three months of mindfulness training does nice other things, but doesn’t do anything with theory of mind. It’s really the perspective taking module which brings a huge increase in theory of mind. Just breathing doesn’t make you more compassionate, but compassion training makes you more compassionate.”

On the brain as a muscle
“We are brain scientists, so we wanted to know if you can change the hardware of your brain. We always thought our brains are just declining after the age of 25. So this is showing whether you can increase in cortical thickness, the grey matter volume of your brain through training. We have data that shows that we can increase these abilities through training. You can train different networks in the brain, just as you train different muscles in the gym. This is what we do with the mind, so different mental practices cultivate different aspects.”

“I’m interested in how we can activate care and affiliation as this leads to prosocial behaviour and global cooperation. There are ways to shift our motivation system, like institutional design and changing laws, and there’s also internal mental training and education.”

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to walk a mile (or 1.6 kilometres) in somebody else’s shoes? Or have you ever tried to send a telepathic message to a partner in transit to “pick up milk on your way home”?

Recent advances in brain-computer interfaces are turning the science fantasy of transmitting thoughts directly from one brain to another into reality.

Studies published in the last two years have reported direct transmission of brain activity between two animals, between two humans and even between a human and a rat. These “brain-to-brain interfaces” (BBIs) allow for direct transmission of brain activity in real time by coupling the brains of two individuals.

So what is the science behind this?

Reading the brainwaves

Brain-to-brain interface is made possible because of the way brain cells communicate with each other. Cell-to-cell communication occurs via a process known as synaptic transmission, where chemical signals are passed between cells resulting in electrical spikes in the receiving cell.

Synaptic transmission forms the basis of all brain activity, including motor control, memory, perception and emotion. Because cells are connected in a network, brain activity produces a synchronised pulse of electrical activity, which is called a “brain wave”.

Brain waves change according to the cognitive processes that the brain is currently working through and are characterised by the time-frequency pattern of the up and down states (oscillations).

For example, there are brainwaves that are characteristic of the different phases of sleep, and patterns characteristic of various states of awareness and consciousness.

Brainwaves are detected using a technique known as electroencephalography (EEG), where a swimming-cap like device is worn over the scalp and electrical activity detected via electrodes. The pattern of activity is then recorded and interpreted using computer software.

This kind of brain-machine interface forms the basis of neural prosthesis technology and is used to restore brain function. This may sound far-fetched, but neural prostheses are actually commonplace, just think of the Cochlear implant!

Technical telepathy

The electrical nature of the brain allows not only for sending of signals, but also for the receiving of electrical pulses. These can be delivered in a non-invasive way using a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).

A TMS device creates a magnetic field over the scalp, which then causes an electrical current in the brain. When a TMS coil is placed over the motor cortex, the motor pathways can be activated, resulting in movement of a limb, hand or foot, or even a finger or toe.

Scientists are now working on ways to sort through all the noise in brainwaves to uncover specific signals that can then be used to create an artificial communication channel between animals.

The first demonstration of this was in a 2013 study where a pair of rats were connected through a BBI to perform a behavioural task. The connection was reinforced by giving both rats a reward when the receiver rat performed the task correctly.

Hot on the heels of this study was a demonstration that a human could control the tail movements of a rat via BBI.

We now know that BBIs can work between humans too. By combining EEG and TMS, scientists have transmitted the thought of moving a hand from one person to a separate individual, who actually moved their hand. The BBI works best when both participants are conscious cooperators in the experiment. In this case, the subjects were engaged in a computer game.

Thinking at you

The latest advance in human BBIs represents another leap forward. This is where transmission of conscious thought was achieved between two human beings in August last year.

Using a combination of technologies – including EEG, the Internet and TMS – the team of researchers was able to transmit a thought all the way from India to France.

Words were first coded into binary notation (i.e. 1 = “hola”; 0 = “ciao”). Then the resulting EEG signal from the person thinking the 1 or the 0 was transmitted to a robot-driven TMS device positioned over the visual cortex of the receiver’s brain.

In this case, the TMS pulses resulted in the perception of flashes of light for the receiver, who was then able to decode this information into the original words (hola or ciao).

Now that these BBI technologies are becoming a reality, they have a huge potential to impact the way we interact with other humans. And maybe even the way we communicate with animals through direct transmission of thought.

Such technologies have obvious ethical and legal implications, however. So it is important to note that the success of BBIs depends upon the conscious coupling of the subjects.

In this respect, there is a terrific potential for BBIs to one day be integrated into psychotherapies, including cognitive behavioural therapy, learning of motor skills, or even more fantastical situations akin to remote control of robots on distant planets or Vulcan-like mind melds a la Star Trek.

Soon, it might well be possible to really experience walking a mile (or a kilometre) in another person’s shoes.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
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