Computer Theology

System law

2013-03-04T10:38:00.000-06:00

A system is only as good at its worst programmer.

Bertrand du Castel

Fact and opinion

2012-10-02T19:55:00.001-05:00

An opinion is an opinion is a fact, a fact is a fact is an opinion.

Bertrand du Castel

Feelings and thoughts

2011-09-20T11:04:00.000-05:00

I think that on average, women are more prone to show they feelings and conceal their thoughts, while men are more prone to conceal their feelings and expose their thoughts.

Bertrand du Castel

Human-Centered Oilfield Automation

2011-07-26T07:11:00.001-05:00

My Human-Centered Oilfield Automation paper, originally published in the Schlumberger Journal of Modeling, Design, and Simulation, Vol 2, June, 2011, and now on the web puts, in a way, the two sides of my scientific life together.

On one side, the oilfield, its huge and intricate technology, global and remote geography, and fierce pursuit of business opportunities. On the other side, the mind with its most salient human revelations, from language to religion, sensation to sentiment, gesture to metaphor, and the stochastic consistency of its inner constitution.

Unifying both sides is the computer, which extends the mind and the knowledge, actions and operations, and constitutes the framework of our new social organizations. In Human-Centered Oilfield Automation, I show how quintessential neurocomputation, supported by stochastic grammars, allows bringing automation to the oilfield by providing extensions of the mind while supporting the preciousness of human innovation, understanding, and capability to act and react in a way that is in most cases well ahead of computer progress.

Bertrand du Castel

Zimmerman's theory as evolutionary psychology

2011-07-22T11:07:00.002-05:00

As a reminder, Zimmerman's theory of the great leap forward some 50,000+ years ago is that a confluence of two cultural phenomena could be enough to explain it. In this case, I have ventured that it could be ecstasy and ritual, or, in other terms, religion. What was lacking in this overall explanation was a plausible brain evolution corresponding to that theory. Well, an article in Scientific American dated 20 July 2011 by Katherine Harmon, Fast Evolving Brains Helped Humans out of the Stone Age, sheds some light on the subject:

A traditional, more passive take on evolutionary psychology "fails to recognize that humans are changing their environment," and not at all randomly or haphazardly, Laland says. "We've built environments that are well suited to our biology, so we don't find ourselves massively maladapted for the contemporary world."

The view then, in my terms, is that the discovery of religion would itself lead to compatible changes in the molding of the environment. Henceforth, caves in the South of France some 30,000 years ago and cathedrals in the modern time.

Talking of Computer Theology, the picture in the article is that of a computer drawn over parietal art. Of course, parietal art is on the cover of Computer Theology. We missed the computer though ... reparation done.

Bertrand du Castel

Blending and the four-layer semantic theory of concepts of generics and metaphors

2011-07-20T15:12:00.002-05:00

Interesting article by Karen Sullivan and Eve Sweetser: Is ‘Generic is Specific’ a Metaphor? in Meaning, Form and Body, Fey Parrill, Vera Tobin, and Mark Turner (eds.), Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications: 309-327, 2009.

Their article doesn't provide a formal mechanism describing generics and metaphors in unison but our own article on the subject does by providing a Montague's type theory for a unification in Bertrand du Castel and Yi Mao: Generics and Metaphors Unified under a Four-Layer Semantic Theory of Concepts in the proceedings of The Third Conference on Experience and Truth, November 24, 2006, Taipei, Taiwan.

However, Sullivan and Sweetser provide a means to construct the formal model of our article, using the blending theory developed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner: The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

So here is another unification. Gilles Fauconnier helped me back in the 70s by suggesting a facet of an article I wrote for Linguistic Inquiry: Bertrand du Castel, Form and Interpretation of Relative Clauses in English, Linguistic Inquiry Volume 9 Number 2 (Spring, 1978) 275-289, MIT Press. Here is note 1 in the article:

¹ I am greatly indebted to Gilles Fauconnier for having suggested, after reading an earlier version of this article, the ideas that are similar to those developed in Fauconnier (1976) on other grounds.

Well, life has interesting twists. We both worked for the same laboratory in France, and then we went our separate ways, both in the United States. And we've not seen each other since then except now we have again two complementary theories -- or so I think.

Bertrand du Castel

About time

2011-07-20T06:04:00.004-05:00

In Scientific American of 19 Jun 2011, Why Does Time Fly? by Martin P. Paulus:

Something moving toward you has more relevance than the same stimulus moving away from you: You may need to prepare somehow; time seems to move more slowly.

This would be consistent with a stochastic grammar model of the brain. A stochastic grammar weights events in as they occur to determine prior probabilities, which in turn predict next possible events (posterior probabilities). When new events fit the predictions of highest probability, little change occurs in the stochastic grammar processing. However, when the predictions of lowest probability occurs, such as looming danger, the stochastic grammar incurs marked modifications of its weights, that in turns reset new expectations.

This change of weight in the stochastic grammars corresponds in the brain to a change in the glial and neuronal activity, which involves chemical and electrical mechanisms that are not instantaneous. So, if the activity of the stochastic grammar would be the measure that the brain uses for evaluating time elapsed, that would create a measure of the effect at hand, and a means to actually experiment with the validity of the model.

Bertrand du Castel

Strategy and tactic

2011-07-16T09:02:00.004-05:00

Some 20 years ago, I was at a social function with my wife, where we were seated at different tables. She reported to me that a discussion took on at her table on the subject of US Football and Everybody Else Football (which the US calls soccer). One of her fellow diners made the statement that soccer was uninteresting because it was all about tactics, not strategy, whereas US Football, obviously a superior product for that person, was about strategy as well as tactics. I have mumbled on that statement ever since.

The fundamentals finally downed upon me reading an Austin American Statesman article today about the 2011 Women's World Cup raise to team parity, which prompted in me the following thought:

If you don't understand the strategy, everything looks like tactics.

Actually, that maps very well with the model we developed with Yi Mao in Generics and Metaphors Unified under a Four-Layer Semantic Theory of Concepts. In technical terms, strategy is related to intensions (with an "s"), and tactic is related to extensions; variations in intensions modulate extensions by building on generics (the situation at hand) to expand metaphors (the situation in the making). In layman's terms, strategy is close to conception, tactic is close to action. I am ready to venture that this also maps the two paths of the brain to action. Tactic is the short loop that leads rapidly from perception in the (hypo)thalamus to action in the motor cortex ("jump when you see a snake"), and strategy is the long loop that adds another step, cognition, to that. In the long loop, perception goes to the (hypo)thalamus then to the pre-frontal cortex (cognition) and then only to the motor cortex ("calm down; the snake is not dangerous after all"). Naturally, both loops occur at the same time, with a delay for the long loop. Get out of a dangerous situation, but ponder whether it's the right move.

Well, football, whatever its incarnation, is the same thing. Create the situation (strategy) to profit from (tactic).

Bertrand du Castel

Mirror hurting

2011-07-08T06:35:00.008-05:00

Extraordinary movie: Buck

The theme is that we hurt others because we hurt ourselves. It is a beautiful illustration of mirror neurons: internal hurting and external hurting are both using the same circuitry. If we can't tame it inside, we'll try outside. But it is, the same thing.

I have written the above very carefully, to give you opportunity to experiment now in the first person what I am talking about. Take the phrase above "we hurt ourselves." As you can perceive, it is ambiguous. Does that mean that we consider that we are somehow acting at self hurting ("WE hurt ourselves") or that something unspoken hurts us ("we hurt OURSELVES").

That ambiguity between we-as-agents and we-as-recipients in that one sentence is triggered by the mirror neurons mechanism. Mirror neurons trigger both action and reaction. In technical terms, the syntax represents the conduit (the mirror neurons) and the semantics represent the effect (action or reaction)?

This is, by the way, also a new and wonderful account of the relationship of syntax and semantics. I need to ponder some more on that.

Bertrand du Castel

Zimmerman's theory in Turkey

2011-06-28T18:56:00.002-05:00

In National Geographic of July 2011, a great article on Göbekli Tepe, the excavation of a pre-agricultural set of temples from 11,600 years ago just next to where the oldest traces of agriculture have been independently found (the origin of wheat agriculture, south of Turkey also). So both religion and agriculture found in forms similar to today, and at the same place.

That's exactly what Zimmerman's theory of the great leap forward predicted, but interestingly enough, Zimmerman's theory was in answer to the puzzle of the human expansion some 70,000 years ago, not the recent post-glacial one. So what we'd find here is that Zimmerman's theory may apply to more than one expansion, an interesting proposition indeed.

Regarding the 70,000 years ago expansion, I reported in Zimmerman's theory and phonemes that new discoveries where emerging in that part of the prediction too, although in a more abstruse way yet.

Bertrand du Castel

Computer is a metaphor

2011-06-25T11:01:00.011-05:00

Although in Computer Theology, we expanded at length on the role of metaphors in the parallel between the elaboration of human and computer networks, and although we also related the geometrical and emotional sensori-motor systems as the root of human metaphors, we missed mentioning by name the core geometrical sensori-motor system at the center of computer programming (we did consider the specific -motor system of a computer processing unit though).

Consider the following story:

Pick up a container;
Take the road at its beginning;
Pick up a flower you like;
At the first fork in the road, take the right if you have a flower, the left if you don't.
If you took the right:
Go to the end of the road;
Plant the flowers and stop.
If you took the left:
Keep going on the road;
You'll soon be back at the beginning of the road;
Start over.

Hopefully you'll be less picky about choosing a flower the second time. But you got the point. Here we have a physical story, which matches exactly a typical program, which I now write:

start();
x = new Container;
loop {
if (random())
x.push(new Flower);
stop();
}
}
x.pop()
stop();

I have shown with a very simple example that programming is based on the exact same geometrical concepts that underlie our behavior.

Examples multiply:

http://selficient.com/index.php5?query=computer+metaphor.

What's missing is the needed development of explicitly metaphorical programming languages. This may not be the next generation (I think the next generation will be a wave of multi-purpose parallel programming languages), but I would expect it to possibly be the next one.

Bertrand du Castel

Wake up

2011-06-21T20:10:00.004-05:00

In 2007, I was talking with Mike Sheppard, leader of the US National Petroleum Council Carbon Capture and Sequestration subgroup regarding the conclusion of his report to the US government. I was very skeptical that humanity would be capable of the effort needed to avoid the catastrophic consequences of not acting in carbon sequestration. Here is his report, and now to follow is the just issued report on the ominous danger of inaction. The only thing I can do is just to give one more bit of advertisement to the voices who want to save us all.

Rogers, A.D. & Laffoley, D.d’A. 2011. International Earth system expert workshop on ocean stresses and impacts. Summary report. IPSO Oxford, 18 pp. Conclusion:

The participants concluded that not only are we already experiencing severe declines in many species to the point of commercial extinction in some cases, and an unparalleled rate of regional extinctions of habitat types (eg mangroves and seagrass meadows), but we now face losing marine species and entire marine ecosystems, such as coral reefs, within a single generation. Unless action is taken now, the consequences of our activities are at a high risk of causing, through the combined effects of climate change, overexploitation, pollution and habitat loss, the next globally significant extinction event in the ocean. It is notable that the occurrence of multiple high intensity stressors has been a prerequisite for all the five global extinction events of the past 600 million years (Barnosky et al., 2009)

As Mike just reminded me again, climate engineering (mitigating global warming by, for example, increasing the earth's reflection) can't solve the problem of ocean acidization. It's born of CO2, not of heat. That's the problem to address, and there is no time left.

Wake up.

Bertrand du Castel

Brain model and identity

2011-06-16T11:31:00.005-05:00

I have finally figured out that we should take mirror neurons seriously. Here is a brain model, unconventional for sure, but aggressively considering the symmetry inherent to the brain's wiring.

Elementary brain modules (each line corresponds to one single module):

- See/Be seen
- Hear/Be heard
- Feel/Be felt
- Touch/Be touched
- Manipulate/Be manipulated
- Smell/Be smelled
- Taste/Be tasted
- And so on

Composite brain modules

- Relate brain modules, a few at a time
- Relate brain modules, all at once

Then all it takes to make an individual is identity, indistinguishable from consciousness.

Bertrand du Castel

Morphology as metaphor conveyance

2011-05-31T09:15:00.003-05:00

One mystery of linguistics is the actual role of morphology (in layman terms, something akin to the formation of words).

It just dawned upon me that a likely role is conveyance of the original metaphor underlying the concept.

An obvious example is "understanding."

This fits very well with the observation that gestures accompanying speech also reflect original metaphors (say "I understand" and observe your own hand movements).

Bertrand du Castel

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

2011-05-20T15:06:00.004-05:00

I saw Werner's Herzog beautiful Cave of Forgotten Dreams movie depicting the Cave of Chauvet.

Apart from Jean Clottes putting a touch of self-interpretation with his "fluidity" and "permeability," the movie is a wonderful matter-of-fact description, with no technical fault that I can see.

It makes me ask again the question: why are there only beautiful paintings of animals in pre-glacial rock art, not of plants, not of landscapes, not of people, with very very few exceptions such as the lower part of a woman in Chauvet? And in sculpture, why almost no men, only women?

I found two points in the movie that are new to me. One, the possible role of shadows of humans handling torches in the painting itself, two, the Australian rock artist saying that the spirit is holding his hand while retouching a painting.

Interpreting plants may have been not so important then (more on that later on in this discussion), interpreting landscapes neither, but interpreting animals certainly was paramount. Women were important then as they are now; if it was men who were making the paintings and sculptures, then women would be represented; and if it was women who were gathering, perhaps that would be a subject of lesser interest to men.

The hard question is why other men would not be represented in pictures: the only explanation would be that they were not nearly as predatory then (due to paucity) for these populations as animals. (Of course, men were represented in hand imprints, but that seems to be a different subject).

So, if all these hypotheses hold (but that's a lot of them), animals strategies would occupy much of the thinking of men, which would naturally lead to representation, for those having that capability; the rest, then, would be history ... in the proper sense of the term.

Bertrand du Castel

2011-05-19T17:46:00.004-05:00

In Autism from the gut? I hypothesized that a source for autism should be looked at in the gut.

Jurgensen sent me a reference to Gut Bacteria Linked to Behavior: That Anxiety May Be in Your Gut, Not in Your Head (ScienceDaily, May 17, 2011) that in turns points out to The Intestinal Microbiota Determines Mouse Behavior and Brain BDNF Levels, by Emmanuel Denou, Wendy Jackson, Jun Lu, Patricia Blennerhassett, Kathy McCoy, Elena F. Verdu, Stephen M. Collins, and Premysl Bercik (Gastroenterology, Vol. 140, Issue 5, Supplement 1, Page S-57).

ScienceDaily mentions a possible relation to autism, but the article itself doesn't. What the article points to in terms of the influence of gut bacteria is:

Exploratory behaviour was reduced in GF NIH Swiss mice colonized with BALB/c microbiota, and increased in GF BALB/c mice colonized with NIH Swiss microbiota compared to mice colonized with their respective SPF microbiota

and

At 1 week post-transfer, mice colonized with BALB/c microbiota showed 44% reduction in hippocampal BDNF compared to mice with NIH Swiss microbiota, however at 3 weeks post-transfer, their hippocampal BDNF levels were similar

Regarding the first finding, my observation is that autistic subjects are both less exploratory (routines) and more (specific subjects). That would indeed fit .

Regarding the second finding, which has to do with learning and recall, I don't know. Cf. Hippocampal BDNF mediates the efficacy of exercise on synaptic plasticity and cognition, by Vaynman S, Ying Z, Gomez-Pinilla F. (Eur J Neurosci. 2004 Nov;20(10):2580-90).

Bertrand du Castel

Zimmerman`s theory and phonemes

2011-05-19T12:29:00.003-05:00

Another one for Zimmerman's theory.

In Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa by Quentin D. Atkinson (Science 15 April 2011: Vol. 332 no. 6027 pp. 346-349), the author shows that language may have a common origin in the south of Africa.

Now, did that require a mutation, in which case Zimmerman's theory would be invalidated, or was that just a discovery, which would be compatible with Zimmerman's theory but would beg the question of whether that also means a single source for language-able humans (is there another kind?); otherwise it would be difficult to explain why it`s been invented only once.

Bertrand du Castel

Birds feeding chicks - again

2011-05-19T12:21:00.003-05:00

I previously talked about birds feeding chicks in Programming a bird. One explanation of why birds have the same behavior when feeding themselves and feeding their chicks would be that they may consider chicks as parts of themselves. Then both activities would involve exactly the same neuronal circuits, with a minimalist change on where the mouth is.

When the chicks go away, they are not part of the parents anymore, and the feeding ceases.

Bertrand du Castel

Mirror neurons and reproduction

2011-05-19T09:33:00.002-05:00

There is an exact parallel between the act of procreation and interaction of spermatozoids with the ovocyte. Which provides a natural evolutionary path, with a single neural mechanism at its root.

Bertrand du Castel

Where have you been?

2011-05-05T17:07:00.001-05:00

Just a nifty application:

visited 58 states (25.7%)
Create your own visited map of The World

Bertrand du Castel

From Austin to Ushuaia

2011-03-25T07:44:00.003-05:00

An article in the New York Time, Arrowheads Found in Texas Dial Back Arrival of Humans in America by John Noble Wilford today, finally provides a possible explanation to a puzzle. I was very surprised, going to Ushuaia, to see how close the indigenous culture (that died as recently as the 20th century) was to that of North America, although the distance is enormous. Coastal migrations discussed in the article to explain the presence of pre-Clovis artifacts in the hills of Austin (the migrations had to be coastal because of the ice barriers 15,000 years ago) can also explain, as the article mentions, the speedy population of Peru and Chile. While Argentina is on the other side, it's not that far away in the south and waterways are aplenty.

Bertrand du Castel

Zimmerman's theory revisited

2011-02-28T06:58:00.002-06:00

It looks like Zimmerman's theory, that there was not need for a genetic event to explain the great leap forward of humanity in the past 70,000 years, but that just the convergence of two cultural events could do, just received some boost. In Classic Selective Sweeps Were Rare in Recent Human Evolution, by Ryan D. Hernandez, Joanna L. Kelley, Eyal Elyashiv, S. Cord Melton, Adam Auton, Gilean McVean, Guy Sella, and Molly Przeworski (Science 18 February 2011: Vol. 331 no. 6019 pp. 920-924), the authors present that no general genetic event may have occurred in humans in the past 250,000 years.

Bertrand du Castel

More discussion regarding Daryl J. Bem on precognition

2011-02-01T17:22:00.005-06:00

Following are the emails I sent to Daryl J. Bem, and his response to the first of these, regarding his article Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, DOI: 10.1037/a0021524). Actually, I realized afterward that my explanation for his "precognition" experiment would also apply if it was a human presenting the screens instead of a computer. It seems likely that in the same way a computer primes its response to user input, as explained in my emails, a human would prime her/his response when presenting a question, in order to react more rapidly to the anticipated answer. If that's indeed the case, we should see other examples of "precognition" if the person asked is capable of perceiving the priming by the person asking the question.

--------------------------------------- emails
From: Bertrand du Castel
Sent: Monday, January 31, 2011 9:50 AM
To: Daryl J. Bem
Subject: RE: Your experiment vs. electronic forensics

I had read your article thoroughly and I have indeed appreciated the double random algorithm. This is because you've been so thorough that I undertook to write you (I am very familiar with randomization which is a key element of computer security).

I need to explain to you that contrarily to what you think, there is something telling happening inside the computer before the participant indicates her/his response. Let me explain to you why:

(1) When the user clicks on the answer, the computer goes into a series of instructions that then triggers the appearance of the screen of choice. It is perfectly true that this happens after the user has clicked, and therefore, this sequence of instructions has nothing to do with the appearance of precognition.

(2) However, what's important here is what happens before the user is presented with the choice. In order for the proper screen to be later shown by instructions (1) after the user clicked, the computer has to prime its program. The way it does it is by associating, before presenting the choice to the user, what is called in programming the "click event" to the proper screen, so that when the user clicks, the right set of instructions is triggered. The very fact that this priming occurs is source of a set pattern of radiations that could be detected by the user.

If you show me the program code, I'll be able to pinpoint you exactly to where in the code the priming is done before presenting the choice to the user. But you can do that by yourself: you just have to look in the program at what's called the "click event handler". What you'll see is that the event handler is initially set to be ready to go to the right screen according to the answer, and only after that is the choice presented to the user. The way it subsequently works is that when the user clicks on the answer, a "click event" occurs, and the preset "click event handler" triggers the right set of instructions. But again, for this to work, the "click event handler" had to be set properly before the choice is presented to the user.

Please let me assure you that I have no pre-conception here; I just want to inform you of a possible source of bias.

Thanks. Bertrand.

From: Daryl J. Bem
Sent: Monday, January 31, 2011 9:06 AM
To: Bertrand du Castel
Subject: Re: Your experiment vs. electronic forensics

Thank you for your informative comments. Your concerns would be particularly relevant if my experiments were testing real-time clairvoyance; they are less relevant because the design is set up to test precognition. Accordingly, nothing happens inside the computer until after the participant has already indicated his/her response. Moreover, as I discuss on pp. 11-15 of my article (attached) , I used both an algorithmic random number generator (RNG) and a true hardware-based RNG to rule out a number of possible alternative interpretations, such as real-time clairvoyance.

From: Bertrand du Castel

Sent: Monday, January 31, 2011 8:31 AM
To: Daryl J. Bem
Subject: Your experiment vs. electronic forensics

Executive summary: Computer programming such as that used for priming screen display creates radiations that may be detected by a subject.

Dear professor Bem,

In examining possible biases for your screen experiment, you may have forgotten one which is familiar to security programmers such as smart card operating system programmers. As a reminder, smart cards are security token subject to attacks because they contain money, or means to access power, for example, military or other places. One common attack thieves may use on smart cards is sensing the patterns of activation of the electronic circuits via equipment such as thermal sensors or electron beam probes. The most obvious example of defense actually used in smart cards, the first one taught to programmers, is that when writing in a program a "if" statement, the two sides of the statement should be of equal length, otherwise it is easy to detect which side of the statement has been taken by measuring timing of electronic activation. Equal length is obtained by padding with bogus statements the side which would otherwise be smaller.

Typically, a non security-aware programmer doesn't know this, and would program your experiment without regard to patterns of electronic activation. The computer takes a different path when priming for one kind of screen or the other, because it associates the click instructions to one part of the computer circuitry or the other, which affects the internal pattern of the electronics in subtle ways, for example via caching algorithms of the operating system of the computer. It is entirely conceivable that a body primed for perception of erotic pictures via documented extra sensitization of the insula (cf. How do you feel — now? The anterior insula and human awareness (A. D. (Bud) Craig, Nature Reviews Neuroscience 10, 59-70, January 2009)) would be capable of detecting the differential radiations, and therefore make accurate predictions; since the signal is very weak, it is also very understandable that the deviation from the norm would be small, as it is in the experiment.

The way to avoid this bias is to have the computer itself connected remotely enough from the screen, while taking extra precautions in the insulation of the cable joining the computer and the screen. Your write-up doesn't say whether that was the case.

Regards. Bertrand du Castel.

Daryl J. Bem and computer security

2011-01-30T16:05:00.003-06:00

In Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, DOI: 10.1037/a0021524), Daryl J. Bem presents his famous experiment:

This is an experiment that tests for ESP. It takes about 20 minutes and is run completely by computer. First you will answer a couple of brief questions. Then, on each trial of the experiment, pictures of two curtains will appear on the screen side by side. One of them has a picture behind it; the other has a blank wall behind it. Your task is to click on the curtain that you feel has the picture behind it. The curtain will then open, permitting you to see if you selected the correct curtain. There will be 36 trials in all. Several of the pictures contain explicit erotic images (e.g., couples engaged in nonviolent but explicit consensual sexual acts). If you object to seeing such images, you should not participate in this experiment.

In examining possible biases, he forgot one which is obvious to smart card operating system programmers. As a reminder, smart cards are security token subject to attacks because they contain money, or means to access power, for example, military or other places. One common attack thieves may use on smart cards is sensing the patterns of activation of the electronic circuits via equipment such as thermal sensors or electron beam probes. The most obvious example of defense, the first one taught to programmers, is that when writing in a program a "if" statement, the two sides of the statement should be of equal length, otherwise it is easy to know which side has been taken by measuring timing of electronic activation. Equal length is obtained by padding with bogus statements the side which would otherwise be smaller.

Typically, a non security-aware programmer doesn't know this, and would program Bem's experiment without regard to patterns of electronic activation. The computer would take a different path when priming for one kind of screen or the other, because it would associate the click instructions to one part of the computer circuitry or the other, which affects the internal pattern of the electronics in subtle ways, for example via caching algorithms of the operating system of the computer. It is entirely conceivable that a body primed for perception of erotic pictures via documented extra sensitization of the insula (How do you feel — now? The anterior insula and human awareness (A. D. (Bud) Craig, Nature Reviews Neuroscience 10, 59-70, January 2009)) would be capable of detecting the differential radiations, and therefore make accurate predictions; since the signal is very weak, it is also very understandable that the deviation from the norm would be small, as it is in the experiment.

Bertrand du Castel

Fantastic hypothesis

2010-12-12T23:08:00.012-06:00

In my 40 years of studying grammar, from my PhD to my articles to my recent patent filings in the field, I have dreamed that somebody comes up with the hypothesis that explains it all.

Friedemann Pulvermüller and Luciano Fadiga have just done that in Active perception: sensorimotor circuits as a cortical basis for language (Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11, 351-360 (May 2010)).

Page 357:
The mechanisms underlying grammar and syntax may be domain general, applying to every kind of action. Indeed, similar to phrases in sentences, basic body acts are joined in action chains to form a meaningful goal-directed action sequence (drinking from a cup requires grasping, lifting, turning and so on). Importantly, even very complex types of syntactic structures have an equivalent in other action domains. The hierarchical structure of embedded or ‘nested’ sentences is paralleled, for example, in music and bodily interaction^111,126, as the following examples illustrate: a centre-embedded sentence (“The man {whom the dog chased} ran away”) has the same nested structure as a standard jazz piece (theme {solos} modified theme) and complex everyday action sequences (open door {switch on light} close door). In each case, a superordinate sequence surrounds a nested action or sequence (in the inner parentheses). Because language, music and body action have similar hierarchical syntactic structures, the principal underlying brain mechanisms might be the same⁵⁸. The domain-general role of Broca’s area, especially Brodmann area ⁴⁴, in the hierarchical structuring of actions (see the main text) could be derived from its evolutionarily earlier premotor functions in action control and action recognition. It will be a fruitful target of future research to clarify how syntactic processes and representations emerge from action–perception circuits and which properties of the human brain are important for building syntactic circuits¹²⁷.

In one sweep, the authors change the very nature of linguistic theory, which suddenly is thrown into considering metaphors not only in the build up of elements of language, but also in the build up of the structure of language itself. Grammaticality in this view reflects motor plausibility, and semantics is just a reflection of our everyday actions.

I think it will take some time for this to be both known and accepted (the earth goes around the sun, after all), but in my book, the authors got the prize.

In nominating for the price, I''ll add Robin Dunbar to Friedemann Pulvermüller and Luciano Fadiga; he anticipated this in his theory that language is an extension of grooming (Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, 1996, Faber and Faber, London).

Bertrand du Castel