It’s hard to understand how anyone could really be passionate about cognitive science. Think about it. You have like, seven or eight related fields, any of which is alone enough to consume an entire lifetime of work. How could anyone possibly be passionate about all of them at once?!
I’m not. I’m not particularly passionate about linguistics. I’m not particularly passionate about visual cognition. I’m not particularly passionate about neuroscience or artificial intelligence or music cognition.
Okay, maybe I am.
But what I really live for – is discovering any thread that ties them all together. I live for the times when I stumble across some abstract concept that has meaning in every discipline. Those are the times where I feel like I am intimately acquainted with the human mind. Social cognition, music cognition, linguistics, neuroscience, learning, visual cognition – in that moment, they are all the same. They all fit perfectly into this all-encompassing, big-picture framework.
So, what’s tonight’s all-encompassing big-picture concept?
Expectations.
Our thoughts are centered around them. We live to predict. Or we predict to live, really. Every subfield of cognitive science runs into this concept. Linguistics, music cognition, visual cognition, and social cognition alike.
Let me talk about linguistics for a second. I promise to keep it accessible.
The basics: Say the consonant /n/. It’s articulated by your tongue touching that hard ridge behind your teeth, the alveolar ridge. Now say the consonants /b/ and /p/. They’re articulated with both lips.
I say the words “green boat.” The sounds change a little from what you’d expect. The /n/ becomes more like an /m/ – as if I’m saying “greem boat.” Why? Because there’s a /b/ after the /n/ – greeN Boat. Our articulators are lazy and sloppy and like to make everything as easy as possible to say.
Greem boat. Greeng car. Greem bear. Greeng cat. Yes?
Now here’s where expectations come into play: when I say “greem” – BEFORE I even say “boat” or “pear” – you’ve already predicted it. You know greem isn’t a word. So in that instant – that ten millisecond period of /m/ – you’ve decided that the /m/ you hear is really an /n/ AND that there’s some consonant articulated with the lips – probably /b/ or /p/ – looming in the near future.
Just a few milliseconds down the road, actually.
Why can’t you just wait? It’s only a few milliseconds away. Sure, you could wait until you actually heard the upcoming /p/ or /b/ before making any assumptions. But here’s the problem: there are zillions more consonants and vowels that’ll be zooming past you at the speed of light. You can’t afford to waste any time. You have to be efficient. Predict, predict, predict.
Speech perception is all about prediction. Moment by moment, millisecond by millisecond.
Guess what? So is physical motion perception. Social perception. Music perception. They’re all rooted in moment by moment fluctuations of expectations, far below the surface of conscious awareness.
I love this. So much.
And I love that it’s all the same, even across such different domains.
Cognitive scientists are the polyamorists of academia. We’ve all got about seven love affairs going on. But we’re not that interested in any of our lovers. We’re just fascinated by their similarities.
Beautiful. So when we insist on clean articulation in singing, part of what we’re doing is keeping control of the narrative and not allowing the audience to anticipate us. (Unless the audience is Sweet Adelines and they have already heard this song 5000 times, 50 of them in this contest. But that’s just abnormal and we cheerfully accept that.) I bet, if someone ever paid attention to something that trivial, this phenomenon would turn out to lead to mondegreens. The singer distorts a phoneme and the listener then hears something other than the words that actually come next.
Haha. Riiiight. The thing is, these differences are so slight that even though we think we’re singing cleanly… we’re not. But besides, we do tons of weird stuff to vowels and consonants that we’d never do in speech. For example… you know how we always think of the diphthong in “eye” as ah-ee? Turns out in speech, the normal “ah” in hot and cot is a different vowel than the one in the eye diphthong. We simplify a lot of stuff because it’s just not worth maintaining it. But you know this.
Love Queries of a Linguist
by John Miaou
If I were a stop, would you be my explosion?
If I were a nasal, would you be my syllabification?
If I were an utterance, would you be my intonation?
And if I were a sound wave, would you be my perception?
If I were a noun, would you be my qualification?
If I were a verb, would you be my inflection?
If I were a sentence, would you be my topicalization?
And if I were a passive, would you be my activation?
If I were a statement, would you be my proposition?
If I were a premise, would you be my conclusion?
If I were an argument, would you be my confirmation?
And if I were the truth, would you be my contradiction?
I’d be your syllabification any day, Ania.
LOVE THIS.