28 February 2018

Correct spelling is way over-rated, a false idol (re: flauting or flouting?)

Correct spelling is over-rated

If you've done a bit of genealogy you'll find that the spelling of a surname over the generations is pretty fluid.
And then if you've ever learned a couple of other languages that relate to English (say, a germanic and a latin), it'll dawn on you that "the correct spelling" in English isn't what it seems.
Add to that the "incorrect" English grammar and pronounciation and vocab that is spoken by regional and "minority" communities ...
and you've got yourself a false idol, a wolf in sheep's clothing, an instrument of oppression.
That's what I think of the concept of "correct spelling"! :-)
If you've learned basic Cyrillic or Greek, you'll grok another thinning of the concept of "correct English".
(Last year Hannah (my then 15  y.o.) and I learned to read basic Greek, leading up to her self-funded solo month in Greece).
Do you get my drift, Sandra Norsen, Janine O'Loughlin, Belinda Walters, GD Muller, Marley Wright?
Did Shakespeare write bad English? Chaucer?
Up in ivory towers was argued the number of angels that could dance upon the head of a pin.
From upon high did they look out and see the richness of the world around them, the texture of the forested hills, the wobbly morphing of the arrow of migrating birds?

Re: flauting or flouting?

13 February 2018

cognitive science: Pattern matching & PPA: elegant explanatory models, neuroscience supporting evidence


Did you you that, whilst neuroscientists confess they barely understand how the human brain works at a systemic level, cognitive science does have some elegant explanatory models for how various subsystems of our mind work, and sometimes neuroscience can provide supporting evidence for these models.

For example, fMRI shows that both topographical scene recognition, and the paralinguistic pattern-matching that recognises sarcasm, "happen" in the tiny parahippocampal place area (PPA) , part of the limbic system. 

Given that the PPA also fires up when we're trying to recognise a social context, the "law of parsimony" leads us to conclude that the "template theories" of cognitive science are valid scientific explanations for exactly HOW our brains do pattern matching. 


(This is a little piece of science writing by me, Adam Tiller)

This little piece was posted as comment to: