Would anybody like to help me with a wee experiment?
So someone phones your flat; the person they want to speak to isn’t in – what do you say?
My hypothesis is that if you say: “Sorry he/she isn’t in at the moment, can I take a message?” they’ll not bother and will hangup before they even give their name.
On the other hand if you say: “Sorry he/she isn’t in at the moment, can I ask who’s calling?” they’ll leave a message along with their name.
I have a few silly ideas I’d like to investigate but I don’t have the time. Here are five of them:
1. (One’s experience of) time flies when you’re having fun and slows down when you’re bored (or scared – David Eagleman has done a pilot experiment on this involving scaring the bejesus out of his PhD student: see the video here). Would be nice to find the time (tehe) to review the research on what kind of events affect time perception. The secret to a happy life would then involve multiplexed misery/fright: mixing in whatever unpleasantness slows things down in a carefully controlled manner so that the experience of the pleasant bits of life could be stretched out a bit. I’d hope the curve of time-stretchedness would impinge a bit on the good bits when the bad bit had ended.
Not sure what form this would take. A self-help guide? A very quantitative one. “Just after you kiss it’s important that you scare the shit out of your partner. Chapter 3 has a selection of ideas, and a random number table using which you can ensure your partner doesn’t become habituated.”
2. A (logicist and connectionist?) cognitive model of the bladder and connected systems. An existential proof that there’s more to cognition than stuff philosophers care about and that it’s not only about stuff we’re conscious of. The model would have to take into consideration the likes of paruresis, the interaction between the internal sphincter muscle and conscious awareness of the need to urinate, and so on. The distinction between the personal and sub-personal levels of analysis would be important.
3. An empirical investigation of the effect of table and chair arrangement on meeting randomites in cafes, pubs, and other public spaces. I’m running a pilot of this at the moment somewhere in Edinburgh… 
Data collection only possible when I’m having a cup of tea and since I haven’t got ethical clearance I can’t actually record anything, so it’s not a particularly good pilot. It’s really just moving tables around and drinking tea.
4. An alternative to relationship counselling: ex-committee counselling. This is pretty easy. You just get together a load of your exes (only those who are now in a healthy relationship) and they answer your questions and give you advice. Exes are likely to know you better than anyone else so would be full of deep insight. They may also want to make you cry which could be a problem. Anyway, a questionnaire would be handy and would feature standard questions such as “What would you tell future partners to help them to understand me and why?”
5. Much communication is nonverbal but yet we’re scared to death of awkward silence. So let’s embrace the silence. Get a load of people together in a cafe or whatever and don’t speak. See what would happen. Communication is still allowed, but not explicit communication. For instance you wouldn’t be allowed look at someone and blink a message in morse code or sign in BSL, but you could look at someone, think something, and as a side-effect of that thought blush, or, say, have dilated pupils. Perhaps given enough practice we’d all become better at guessing what such signs mean.
Be especially nice to the servitors. I’m a bit hazy on the details, but apparently the concept of overtime has been removed and they have all been put on flexitime. (Maybe just one department – I’m not sure.) Many relied on overtime to get a decent wage so I suspect there are some less than happy campers around.
To support the view that cognition (and any study of cognition) is just a point of view on all activities and not limited to high level philosophically respectable thought and reasoning, I found a paper which involved inserting an inflatable polyethylene bag into people’s rectums as they were being scanned in an MR scanner (Adeyemi et al, 2005). The BOLD signal was recorded as the device was inflated, first without scanning to determine for each person when they could “feel something” and before they reported any pain. Participants were asked to squeeze their sphincter too.
Interesting result: there was more activation in the anterior cingulate of females than of males during the inflation, “suggesting cognition-related recruitment” (a phrase that isn’t quite consistent with my viewpoints view, but never mind). However, the authors note that “the gender differences seen during nonnoxious rectal distension may be due to additional stimulation that can potentially arise from contiguous structures such as the posterior vaginal wall.”
Adeyemi Lawal, Mark Kern, Arthi Sanjeevi, Candy Hofmann, and Reza Shaker (2005) Cingulate cortex: a closer look at its gut-related functional topography. Am J Physiol Gastrointest Liver Physiol 289(4): G722-G730.
According to the Guardian today, lecturers and other staff are being encouraged by the Department for Education to keep an eye on what they describe as “Asian-looking” and Muslim students. Apparently Muslims are getting too political these days and are being “groomed” for terrorism at university. It sounds like a jolly bad idea to get universities to spy on their students, but if you’re Muslim and a student then I expect Her Majesty’s Government will soon be grooming you to spy on your mates – could help with top up fees but likely to make you unpopular down the pub.
Meanwhile former Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officer Richard Tomlinson has been hauled into a French court for writing a work of fiction based loosely on his experience. He has had rather a bad time of it: thrown out of SIS, a job he loved, without explanation, and offered a boring financial job in London as compensation; arrested (repeatedly and in multiple countries) for writing a book on his training and experience (which is now available for free) ; accused of releasing a list of officers (which it seems likely was just made up by someone who had looked at publicly available lists of diplomatic postings abroad); he has had his belongs confiscated multiple times – most recently after he wrote to SIS to ask for permission to write a novel. Now he is threatening to (really this time) publish names of officers he remembers from his time in the service unless the authorities give him his stuff back.
Crazy stuff. All he wants is an explanation for why he was kicked out of the service. I suspect he also wants to make a bit of cash – which seems reasonable enough given that Stella Rimington, former head of the Security Service, has to date published an autobiography and two works of fiction (see her wikipedia entry). It worries me when I think how many resources are being wasted on issues such as these which would be better used trying to work out how to stop us all from blowing each other up!
Richard Dawkins’ foundation to fund psychology of reasoning research:
“We intend to sponsor research into the psychological basis of unreason. What is it about human psychology that predisposes people to find astrology more appealing than astronomy? At what age are young people most vulnerable to unreason? What are the correlations between religiosity and superstition on the one hand, and intelligence, educational level, type of education etc. on the other? Research of this kind would be supported in the form of grants to universities in America and Britain or wherever the best research can be done.”
Maybe he’s not so bad after all
Had a look at the Northern Ireland section of the BBC news today – always guaranteed to spoil your day.
