h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

So is that a yes, then?

'silly things the alleged
experts on TV say, like: "all these lemurs look the same to you whereas a baby can tell them apart"'

I'm going off on a tangent here, but I find this most intriguing, since it's the opposite of everything I've ever read about how we learn to categorise things. Do you, by any chance, know where I might look for further information?

I did an 'A' level in psychology about ten years ago, and Piaget's ideas on child development seemed to be the big thing then. He was of the view that the first thing babies recognise is eyes, then faces consisting of eyes and a mouth. He devised experiments that seemed to show that a baby will respond to three dots on a piece of paper, in the same way that they'd respond to a human face. It's also well-documented that babies' eyesight is very poor for some time after they are born. So the first question that springs to mind about babies differentiating between lemurs is, how do the scientists know this?

Going back to your ability to program yourself: do you mean that there is a conscious process going on whenever you need to remember something? Do you use mnemonics of some sort for this?

"it's the opposite of everything I've ever read"

I doubt it since you seem to be quite a well read person. You may have forgotten some of it of course. It's about the difference between hard-wiring and imprinting.

Babies seem to be hard-wired to look for face-like configurations (something which persists into adulthood when trying to see things on Mars!) and seek grammar in communication and obviously to cling and suck. However, there is also an early stage of environmental software configuration - to the sounds of the local language, the distinctions of the local faces, the tastes of the local food. People raised outside one culture have been shown to have trouble distinguishing between things which are obvious to those raised within it.

A well-known linguistic example is R and L. The English versions are more similar than English people think which is why speakers of oriental languages which don't have both can't tell them apart and often get them wrong (sometimes in a systematic manner of their own). The most well-known reverse form is in looking for western facial clues which don't exist in eastern faces.

The lemur test was rather sloppy. It involved trying to detect by observation whether a baby (toddler) was interested in new lemurs after the first. Much better tests involving sucking frequency as a measure of interest in something new have been done on linguistic sound acquisition.

Back to the self-programming: yes, it is very conscious. Some is pictorial. Much is organisational or analytical - making connections and forming an internal model when comprehending something which is then verified by making predictions and looking for them. I'm basically a natural scientist among other things. For short term memory (my recall being bad by my standards) and non-sensical human things, I do use mnemonics (or keep reference notes of course!).

"It's about the difference between hard-wiring and imprinting."

Ah! Now, I know about those. But I don't remember anything about an imprinting stage in humans. (As we can't walk when we're born, I see no selection pressure there.)

"there is also an early stage of environmental software configuration - to the sounds of the local language, the distinctions of the local faces, the tastes of the local food."

Is this what you mean by imprinting? Do scientists say that this only happens at a particular stage of childhood? Then I infer that a baby exposed to lemurs at a young age will be able to distinguish them easily in later life, even if it sees no lemurs in the interim. Can it, I wonder? What about dogs and cats? And how do adults develop tastes for foreign foods and lifestyles?

As I'm seldom on the computer for very long at a time these days, and since you haven't actually turned down my request, I shall begin with exercise 1 of my experiment:

1) Imagine a dog. Are you imagining it now? (Yes or no will suffice.)

Erm, yes but it may be rather intermittent imagining and rather a variable dog.

Ah. That's why it's best done in real time, but never mind. Think back to the dog you imagined for me, and tell me which way it's facing, if any.

Once you've done that, tell me what colour(s) it is, if any.

The main images I had constructed were of dogs looking straight at me. One was a realistic brown/grey terrier type (don't think I really know one) and the other was a large supernatural black one with glowing red eyes from a fantasy game. My mind also flitted over images of a dalmatian and a fluffy collie. I think these were side on but I can't now remember which way (probably facing left slightly front for the collie and right for the dalmatian). Oddly I wasn't thinking of the dog my parents once had (or my grandparents' ones) until just now thinking that it was odd I hadn't chosen them!

So you can think in pictures, then. The thing that started me along this thought track was the discovery that my partner and my brother don't think in pictures at all, but in abstract 'pointers'. That is, so far as I can tell from talking to them, when they imagine a dog (or whatever), they have just labelled an idea in their head as 'dog', so it has no colour and no spatial orientation, unless they label it as having them. Their imaginary dogs can't morph and switch between breeds.

The second exercise is something which they both find pifflingly easy and I find more or less impossible to do. I'm interested to find out whether these two ways of thinking are mutually exclusive. Finding someone who can do both just as well would save me a lot of time.

Please could you let me know approximately how long the following exercise takes you (without using pen and paper, plasticene, or anything to help you)?

2) Imagine a pyramid made up of four equilateral triangles. So there are three edges around the base, and three up to the apex. Now imagine the pyramid bisected by a plane that goes through the centre of the base and is parallel to one of the edges leading to the apex. It cuts through the centres of the other three triangles in the process.

Describe the resulting two shapes.



In case I haven't described that exercise sufficiently clearly, here's an alternative.

2) Imagine a cube, balanced on one of its corners so that you have a corner facing you. If this cube were in silhouette, how many straight edges should you be able to see around the outside?

You have numbered them both "2)"!

Your first one is a tetrahedron rather than a pyramid. A plane through the centre of the base (ie a point) and parallel to one side not in the base can have more than one orientation. It also won't cut through the centres of the other 3 triangles. There is only one plane cutting through the centres of any three triangles in a tetrahedron and, for a regular one, that will be parallel to the remaining face. I'm not sure what you might have intended instead of this but I would guess you wanted the 2 identical shapes which have 1 square face, 2 triangular faces and 2 trapezium faces. It took me only a second or two to see that your instructions were wrong and a couple of minutes to think of alternatives and type this.

The silhouetted cube is a hexagon with 6 edges around and 3 coming to the vertex pointing at you. So the total is 9 (with the reverse side looking like the upside down). That took me much longer to type than the few seconds it took to see but isn't really a fair test because I play with shapes a lot (as you should remember from my website).

NB I play with shapes so much that for the cube one I had to very carefully avoid looking at the page sitting on the floor to my right on which I had drawn just that thing (yet again) some weeks before xmas when considering polyhedron dice smileys. I specially visualised it all over again just for you.

Thank you for that: it was fun.

'You have numbered them both "2)"!'

Of course I have: that's what they are. But perhaps I'd have been better off calling them 2.0 and 2.1.

'It also won't cut through the centres of the other 3 triangles.'

I just knew I'd mis-remember it! It should cut through the centres of the edges, not the the centres of the faces.

'I would guess you wanted the 2 identical shapes
which have 1 square face, 2 triangular faces and 2 trapezium faces.'

Correct. Well deduced, there!

'The silhouetted cube is a hexagon with 6 edges around'

And correct again, of course.

So you can visualise, and you can manipulate shapes in your head. They're not mutually exclusive after all: just a case of practice, perhaps. When you did the cube thing, did you see it as having texture and solidity, or were you thinking in a more abstract way?

Did you come up with a suitable polyhedron dice smiley in the end?

"They're not mutually exclusive after all"

Well I am extremely abnormal. So it might not be true of many/any humans.

I was mostly thinking of the cube (and tetrahedron) as vertices, lines and planes in a virtual space in my head and of transparent material (and as that 2-D drawing of course). But I also experimented with making it jet black with just a few reflective highlights off the 3 edges coming towards me since you had asked for a silhouette. My polyhedrons morph as much as my pictures - possibly more so since there are fewer constraints on colour/texture and which way up they ought to be - and you hadn't asked me to bisect the dog!

I wasn't planning to stop at just one "smiley". I had drawn out several to choose orientation and work out scaling and positioning. I've been doing other stuff in between though and might come back to that later.

I did the dice thing on a friend we had lunch with in the pub yesterday. Like you, he's an arty-sciency type. He got it straight away, and he told me his cube was of black wood, with the light coming from above and slightly to the left. He didn't even pause to think about it.

He also told us about a wonderful visual language called 'Bliss Symbols' or 'Blissymbolics'. Have you come across it? http://www.iicm.edu/thesis/ahollosi_html/node9.html

A light source above and to the the left is very common. It's the way Windows is supposed to look for a start.

That wasn't the Bliss which was hovering in my memory and I don't recall those particular symbols. Which could (but not definitely) mean I haven't seen those ones before (or wasn't paying attention). The symbolic languages I've been more interested in were historical (and science fiction/fantasy) and for use with other animals, eg chimpanzees (who do apparently have a natural grasp of grammar!).

I was impressed by the symbols' simplicity, and by how much can be expressed by so few lines. It's the kind of language one can learn more-or-less straight away. The friend who told us about it used to work with severely mentally impaired children, and he tells us that it didn't matter how big the children's learning difficulties were, nor what language they spoke: they all picked it up and used it effectively, even though it runs to thousands of symbols.

I thought the chimp experiments had been found to be no more than a lot of inference and wishful thinking on the part of the scientists working with them. That's if I'm thinking of the same chimps. I could be thinking of Coco the gorilla and chums.

Anyway, I had heard that a bunch of deaf people had been put together with a group of apes who had supposedly been taught sign language: some kind of media gimmick. These deaf people used the same sign language as their usual mode of speech. They were adamant that the apes were just waving their hands about randomly as a way of getting food treats, and that they had nothing at all to say.

You would have to rule out the possibility that the apes weren't thinking: "What a stupid looking bunch of people. We don't have anything worthwhile to say to them. Hey, I bet if we just wave our arms about a bit they'll fall for it and give us some food.".

Good point.

The visual language you mentioned having been used with chimps: was it sign language, or pictorial symbols?

Both. Washoe was one of the sign-language chimps. Another lot used pictorial symbols. They had them on a computer keypad which lit up. There was also a set of pictorial symbol cards where the chimp invented grammar by changing direction of card placement in acrostic form (yet another lot of chimps?) to make clauses like "I have banana" + "banana belong man" to represent "I have banana which belong man".

Washoe! I have a video casette with that experiment on. It was in a documentary in which Marian Stamp Dawkins got to do a lot of talking. She's a behavioural Scientist for whom I have a lot of respect.

I saw a thread on the MB's that inspired me to write an entry on the guide. As it answers a question asked by someone in the thread, I'd like to show it to them. Unfortunately, I'd give away my identity if I did that.

Is there a way I can change my MB name to Snailrind in order to talk to them? Gothly told me I need to change my cookie, but we've only got crisps.