Your brain works like a dictionary

Why your brain may work like a dictionary:

Why your brain may work like a dictionary

DOES your brain work like a dictionary? A mathematical analysis of the connections between definitions of English words has uncovered hidden structures that may resemble the way words and their meanings are represented in our heads.

“We want to know how the mental lexicon is represented in the brain,” says Stevan Harnad of the University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada.

As every word in a dictionary is defined in terms of others, the knowledge needed to understand the entire lexicon is there, as long as you first know the meanings of an initial set of starter, or “grounding”, words. Harnad’s team reasoned that finding this minimal set of words and pinning down its structure might shed light on how human brains put language together.

The team converted each of four different English dictionaries into a mathematical structure of linked nodes known as a graph. Each node in this graph represents a word, which is linked to the other words used to define it – so “banana” might be connected to “long”, “bendy”, “yellow” and “fruit”. These words then link to others that define them.

This enabled the team to remove all the words that don’t define any others, leaving what they call a kernel. The kernel formed roughly 10 per cent of the full dictionary – though the exact percentages depended on the particular dictionary. In other words, 90 per cent of the dictionary can be defined using just the other 10 per cent.

But even this tiny set is not the smallest number of words you need to produce the whole dictionary, as many of these words can in turn be fully defined by others in the kernel. This is known as the minimal grounding set (MGS), which Harnad explores in his most recent work. Unlike the kernel, which forms a unique set of words for each dictionary, there are many possible word combinations that can be used to create an MGS – though it is always about half the size of the kernel.

What’s more, the kernel has a deeper structure. The team found that half of its words made up a core group in which every word connects to every other via a chain of definitions. The other half was divided into satellite groups that didn’t link to each other, but did connect with the core (see diagram).

And this structure seems to relate to meaning: words in the satellites tend to be more abstract than those in the core, and an MGS is always made up of words from both the core and satellites, suggesting both abstract and concrete words are needed to capture the full range of meaning.

So what, if anything, can this tell us about how our brains represent words and concepts? To find out, Harnad’s team looked at data on how children acquire words and found a pattern: as you move in from the full dictionary towards the kernel and finally the MGS, words tend to have been acquired at a younger age, be used more frequently, and refer to more concrete concepts (arxiv.org/abs/1308.2428). “The effect gets stronger as you go deeper into the kernel,” Harnad says.

That doesn’t mean children learn language in this way, at least not exactly. “I don’t really believe you just have to ground a certain number of things and from then on close the book on the world and do the rest by words alone,” says Harnad. But the correlation does suggest that our brains may structure language somewhat similarly to a dictionary. To learn more, the team has created an online game that asks players to define an initial word, then define the words in those definitions. The team then compares whether their mental dictionaries are similar in structure to actual ones.

Phil Blunsom at the University of Oxford isn’t convinced word meanings can be reduced to a chain of definitions. “It’s treating words in quite a symbolic fashion that is going to lose a lot of the meaning.” But Mark Pagel of the University of Reading, UK, expects the approach to lead to new insights – at least for adult brains. “This will be most useful in giving us a sense of how our minds structure meaning,” he says. For example, one question raised by the relatively small size of the MGS is why we burden ourselves with so much extraneous vocabulary.

Speech patterns give away psychopaths

Psychopaths prone to using the past tense, making cause and effect statements and using ‘uh’ and ‘um.’

Speech pattern gives away psychopaths

 

 

Psychopaths are known to be wily and manipulative, but even so, they unconsciously betray themselves, according to scientists who have looked for patterns in convicted murderers’ speech as they described their crimes. The researchers interviewed 52 convicted murderers, 14 of them ranked as psychopaths according to the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised, a 20-item assessment, and asked them to describe their crimes in detail. Using computer programs to analyze what the men said, the researchers found that those with psychopathic scores showed a lack of emotion, spoke in terms of cause-and-effect when describing their crimes, and focused their attention on basic needs, such as food, drink and money. While we all have conscious control over some words we use, particularly nouns and verbs, this is not the case for the majority of the words we use, including little, functional words like “to” and “the” or the tense we use for our verbs, according to Jeffrey Hancock, the lead researcher and an associate professor in communications at Cornell University, who discussed the work on Oct. 17 in Midtown Manhattan at Cornell’s ILR Conference Center. “The beautiful thing about them is they are unconsciously produced,” Hancock said. These unconscious actions can reveal the psychological dynamics in a speaker’s mind even though he or she is unaware of it, Hancock said. Psychopaths make up about 1 percent of the general population and as much as 25 percent of male offenders in federal correctional settings, according to the researchers. Psychopaths are typically profoundly selfish and lack emotion. “In lay terms, psychopaths seem to have little or no ‘conscience,'” write the researchers in a study published online in the journal Legal and Criminological Psychology. Psychopaths are also known for being cunning and manipulative, and they make for perilous interview subjects, according to Michael Woodworth, one of the authors and a psychologist who studies psychopathy at the University of British Columbia, who joined the discussion by phone. Criminal Minds Are Different From Yours, “It is unbelievable,” Woodworth said. “You can spend two or three hours and come out feeling like you are hypnotized.” While there are reasons to suspect that psychopaths’ speech patterns might have distinctive characteristics, there has been little study of it, the team writes. To examine the emotional content of the murderers’ speech, Hancock and his colleagues looked at a number of factors, including how frequently they described their crimes using the past tense. The use of the past tense can be an indicator of psychological detachment, and the researchers found that the psychopaths used it more than the present tense when compared with the nonpsychopaths. They also found more dysfluencies — the “uhs” and “ums” that interrupt speech — among psychopaths. Nearly universal in speech, dysfluencies indicate that the speaker needs some time to think about what they are saying. With regard to psychopaths, “We think the ‘uhs’ and ‘ums’ are about putting the mask of sanity on,” Hancock told LiveScience.

 

 

Freedom-killing bill become law – ‘No Speech Zones’

Freedom-killing bill has just become law in USA – say hello to ‘No Speech Zones’:

Freedom-killing bill has just become law in USA – say hello to ‘No Speech Zones

Those of you who still believe the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, your faith is about to be shattered by a new law that likely will lead to, in essence, “no speech zones.” And, as is the case with most freedom-robbing legislation, this law is being justified in the name of security or, more appropriately, security for a select few. The measure, called the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act, was signed into law by President Obama March 8 after it passed in the Senate following minor modifications made in the House. Critics are knocking the measure because, essentially, it restricts protests near the president. According to a “fact check” of the legislation, the current measure actually updates an original law passed in 1971 that “already restricted access to areas around the president, vice president and any other governmental official protected by the Secret Service, according to Thomas.gov,” the Florida Times-Union reported. The old version made it a federal crime to “willfully and knowingly” violate certain restricted areas, such as the White House grounds and the vice president’s residence and grounds. The updated law changes it to just “knowingly,” and there is where legal analysts differ on the law’s actual meaning and application. A spokesman for U.S. Rep. Thomas J. Rooney, R-Fla., who introduced House Resolution 347, the law’s congressional designation, the Secret Service requested legislation that would clarify some jurisdictional issues for agents assigned to protect the president. For instance, the spokesman said, “[I]f someone were to jump the fence at the White House, the Secret Service would not have jurisdiction over the trespasser.” Critics say that by dropping the term “willfully,” the updated law gives the Secret Service unprecedented power to define what constitutes “restricted areas.” They say the law could chill the free speech rights of Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street protesters who are demonstrating in places where the president is present. “This is the state of mind the government has to prove you had to establish your guilt [the ‘intent standard’]. ‘Willfully and knowingly’ means that you need to know you’re committing a crime. ‘Knowingly’ just means you need to be aware you’re in a restricted zone, but not necessarily that it’s unlawful,” writes Gabe Rottman of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “H.R. 347 doesn’t create any new crimes, or directly apply to the Occupy protests. […]” he said. Not so fast, say the critics. Former New Jersey Superior Court Judge Andrew Napolitano, who is a current legal analyst for Fox News, disagrees. He says he believes the law will directly affect the first amendment rights of Americans who want to peacefully assemble and present their point of view. “Permitting people to express publicly their opinions to the president only at a time and in a place and manner such that he cannot hear them violates the First Amendment because it guarantees the right to useful speech; and unheard political speech is politically useless,” Napolitano said during a recent Fox News segment. Adds Russell Smith, a blogger for the New York Law School‘s Program in Law and Journalism, “[…] Since police can arrest and remove anyone in violation of [someone jumping the White House fence], the government doesn’t need H.R. 347 in order to protect its property from damage and its officials from intruders.” Rottman says that, on the surface, there may not be much to worry about. But the devil, as usual, is in the details. “Any time the government lowers the intent requirement, it makes it easier for a prosecutor to prove her case, and it gives law enforcement more discretion when enforcing the law. To be sure, this is of concern to the ACLU. We will monitor the implementation of H.R. 347 for any abuse or misuse,” he said.