THINKER'S ALMANAC - February 1

How do colorless green ideas sleep?

Subject:  Syntax and Semantics - Chomsky’s “Colorless Green Ideas”

Event:  Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures published, 1957

Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints -- the rules that run us.  Language is using us to talk -- we think we’re using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we’re its slavish agents.  --Harry Mathews 

Today is the birthday of linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky, who was born in Philadelphia in 1928.  Chomsky spent more than 50 years as a professor at MIT and has authored over 100 books. Chomsky has been called “the father of modern linguistics” and is one of the founders of the field of cognitive science.  Despite all of his accomplishments, Chomsky is perhaps best known for a single sentence:

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Published in his 1957 book Semantic Structures, Chomsky’s famous sentence illustrates the difference between two essential elements of language:  syntax and semantics.  Syntax relates to the grammar of a language or the order in which words are combined to construct sentences. Semantics, in contrast, relates to the meaning of individual words. Chomsky’s sentence illustrates the difference between syntax and semantics, showing that a grammatically or syntactically correct sentence can be constructed that is semantically nonsensical.

Of course, we can construct zany sentences all day for entertainment purposes, but to truly communicate our thoughts to an audience, we must craft sentences that synthesize both syntax and semantics to make sense.

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  What is the difference between syntax and semantics, and how does Chomsky’s famous sentence illustrate the difference?

Challenge - Strange Semantic-less Syntax Sings Soporifically:  What are some adjectives, nouns, verbs, and adverbs that all begin with the same letter of the alphabet? Try your hand at constructing a syntactically correct, yet semantically nonsensical sentence.  For an added layer of interest, use alliteration by selecting words that begin with the same letter.

Begin by brainstorming as many adjectives, nouns, verbs, and adverbs as you can.  Then, select randomly from your list, filling in words in the following order:

Adjective + adjective + noun + verb + adverb

For example:

Angry, ambivalent aardvarks argue awkwardly.

or

Zany, zymolytic zookeepers zoom zealously.

ALSO ON THIS DAY:

February 1, 1852:  On this day, Henry David Thoreau recorded a rant in his journal, enumerating the idiocy of the California Gold Rush:

The recent rush to California and the attitude of the world, even of its philosophers and prophets, in relation to it appears to me to reflect the greatest disgrace on mankind.  That so many are ready to get their living by the lottery of gold-digging without contributing any value to society, and that the great majority who stay at home justify them in this both by precept and example! . . . . The hot that roots his own living, and so makes manure, would be ashamed of such company.

Sources:  

1-”Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” Psychology Wiki.

THINKER'S ALMANAC - January 31

What is one trick that marketers use to make things appear true even though they are not necessarily valid?

Subject:  Cognitive Fluency - Easy = True 

Event:  “Easy = True” article published in The Boston Globe, 2010

Thinking is hard work, which is why so few people do it.  -Henry Ford

On this day in 2010, an article was published in The Boston Globe entitled “Easy = True.”  Written by journalist Drake Bennet, the article was about an emergent hot topic in psychology called cognitive fluency.  Cognitive fluency is a concept that relates to the ease at which we are able to think about something.  It seems obvious, but cognitive fluency reminds us that we don’t like thinking too hard and that the human species has a definite preference for things that are easy to think about.  These are the things we pay more attention to and the things that we remember better.  As a result, when we are presented with information, the easier it is for us to process, the more valid we perceive it -- for example, if it is written in a clear font, if it rhymes, or if it is repeated.

We have a clear, instinctive bias for things that are familiar to us, which makes sense when you think about the way that our brains evolved.  Familiar things presented less of a threat, while unfamiliar things required scrutiny, which could be the difference between survival and being poisoned by a plant or eaten by a predator.

One excellent illustration of cognitive fluency comes from the research of psychologist Matthew McGlone.  He presented subjects with unfamiliar aphorisms, half of which were written in rhyming form, such as “Woes unite foes.”  The other half of the aphorisms were written in non-rhyming forms, such as “Woes unite enemies.”  Not only did people find the rhyming aphorisms more pleasing to the ear, but they also rated them as more accurate than their non-rhyming equivalents.  McGlone calls his discovery “the rhyme-as-reason effect.”  Most of us would intuitively realize that a rhyming slogan was more catchy and easy to remember, but how many of us would guess that the rhyming phrases would also be perceived as more inherently true? 

Whether we are delivering or receiving persuasive messages, cognitive fluency has important implications.  As stated by psychologist Adam Alter, 

Every purchase you make, every interaction you have, every judgment you make can be put along a continuum from fluent to disfluent. If you can understand how fluency influences judgment, you can understand many, many, many different kinds of judgments better than we do at the moment. (1)

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  What is cognitive fluency, and how can knowing about it make you more persuasive?

Challenge - Parallel Proverbs:  The key ingredients for cooking up a more persuasive, more digestible message are repetition, clarity, and simplicity.  Rhyme and alliteration -- which involve repetition of sounds -- are two of the most common methods of repetition, but a more sophisticated method of repetition is parallelism, which involves the repetition of structure, such as Caesar's famous declaration, “I came, I saw, I conquered,” which follows the repeated pattern pronoun verb, pronoun verb, pronoun verb.  Identify a proverb or aphorism that contains both wisdom parallelism.  Explain why you think the proverb is both well written and well reasoned.

Sources:

1-Bennett, Drake.  “Easy = True”  The Boston Globe  31 January 2010.

THINKER'S ALMANAC - January 30

How can guessing the age of Mahatma Gandhi help us to better understand how our mind works? 

Subject:  Anchoring - Death of Gandhi Study Question 

Event:  Death of Mahatma Gandhi, 1948

On the evening of January 30, 1948, Mahatma Gandhi was killed when an assassin fired three bullets into his chest at close range.  You have probably heard of Gandhi, and you might even have known that he was assassinated.  But, do you know how old he was when he died? 

  

This question was the subject of an ingenious psychological study conducted in 1997. It’s a study that helps us to better understand human thinking and the connection between our rational thinking and our intuitive thinking. It’s also a study that reveals that our thinking and our decisions are not as independent as we think they are; instead, they can be influenced by outside forces that we often are not aware of.  

One of those forces is numbers.  For example, when you are shopping for a new refrigerator, do you pay attention to the “recommended retail price”?  Similarly, when a teacher is grading a student’s essay, do you think she is influenced by the student’s previous grades on essays or by the essay she graded previously?  Psychologists call this anchoring: the mental process by which we make estimates by latching on to reference points for comparison.

In the Gandhi study, 60 German university students were asked how old the 

Indian leader was when he died.  For 30 of the students, the question was preceded by the question “Was Gandhi older or younger than 9 years old when he died.”  The other 30 were first asked, “Was Gandhi older or younger than 140 years old.”  Logically speaking, neither number -- 9 or 140 -- seemed a likely hint to his actual age, yet the results of the study showed that in both cases they influenced the students’ estimates:  the students who were asked “Was Gandhi older or younger than 9 years old,” guessed an average age of 50 years old; the other group which was asked “Was Gandhi older or younger than 140 years old,” guessed an average of 67 years old (1).

At this point, you probably want to know how old Gandhi actually was:  he was 78 years old.

The message of anchoring is that our mind works by making comparisons, whether or not we are aware of those comparisons.  To avoid this cognitive bias, be alert to how you’re comparing things, and be especially alert to how an initial piece of information, such as a number can influence your thinking.  For example, if you are negotiating a salary or buying a new car, pay attention to the first offers presented; also, realize the advantage of being the one who offers the first number.

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  What is anchoring, and how does it influence us?

Challenge - Buyer Beware:  You can bet that companies know how to employ anchoring to manipulate consumers into paying more for products.  Do some research on how marketers use anchoring to prey on the weak minds of consumers.  Write a brief PSA that explains the trickery of anchors and helps people avoid it to save money.

ALSO ON THIS DAY: 

-January 30, 1929:  Today is the birthday of cognitive psychologist Roger Newland Shepard, born in 1929.  He invented the famous optical illusion called the Shepherds Tables. 

Sources:  

1-IB Psychology. Key Study: Gandhi and the Anchoring Effect

Strack & Mussweiler, 1997.  https://www.themantic-education.com/ibpsych/2020/03/10/key-study-ghandi-and-the-anchoring-effect/

THINKER'S ALMANAC - January 29

What one piece of writing advice did the Russian writer Anton Chekhov give to aspiring writers?

  

Subject:  Vivid Imagery - Chekhov’s “Broken Glass”

Event:  Birthday of Anton Chekhov, 1860

Today is the birthday of Russian playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov (1860-1904).  Chekhov began writing as a way to support his family when he was a teenager, selling stories to newspapers.  Although he is today recognized as one of the greatest fiction writers of all time, Chekhov’s first love was medicine.  He described his relationship with medicine and writing with an apt metaphor:  “Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress.”  

Unfortunately, Chekhov had barely started his career as a doctor when he contracted tuberculosis, which took his life when he was just 44 years old.

We look to great writers like Chekhov to find the secret of transforming our 

thoughts into words -- words that in turn will allow our ideas to come to life in the minds of our audience.  One of the most common pieces of writing advice is to “show, don’t tell.”  This is great advice, and the three-word maxim is an excellent example of concise writing; however, the irony of “show, don’t tell” is that the statement itself does more telling than showing. For a better, more illustrative version of this advice, we can turn to a quotation that’s often attributed to Chekhov:

Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

Here we have an example of the kind of concrete language that creates a vivid image in the reader’s mind.  Concrete language engages the reader’s senses, allowing the reader to see, hear, feel, smell, and/or taste vicariously.

Although the “glint of light” quotation is consistently attributed to Chekhov, an investigation by Garson O’Toole has determined that it’s more of a paraphrase than a direct quotation.  

At his website www.quoteinvestigator.com, O’Toole reports that the source of the quotation is a letter that Chekhov wrote to his brother Alexander in May 1886.  As we can see by Chekhov’s advice to his brother, sensory imagery is a must:

In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you’ll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball (1).

Too often writers don’t follow Chekhov’s advice.  It’s okay to talk about abstract ideas like love, war, freedom, or failure, but to truly show and to truly evoke images, the writer must use concrete language that engages the reader’s five senses.  This is the type of language that creates a dominant impression in the mind of the reader.  

In his essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell describes in detail the thinking process that happens when we write.  In this description, he shows how our thinking can go wrong, but more importantly, he also provides an antidote:

In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising, you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meanings as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose – not simply accept – the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impression one’s words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. 

As an example of a passage that both Chekov and Orwell would approve of, here is an excerpt from Wilfred Owen’s poem about World War I, “Dulce Et Decorum Est.”  Notice how instead of telling us that “War is hell,” it show us:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  What does it mean to “show, not tell” when writing, and what kind of thinking must a person do to apply this principle to their writing? 

Challenge - Show Me the Details:  How can you support a generalization with strong imagery and sensory details that create a showing picture for your reader? Support a telling generalization with specific showing details that make a dominant impression on the reader.  Select one of the generalizations listed below or generate your own.  Then, use sensory language that engages your reader’s senses, by including details that the reader can see, hear, feel, taste, and/or smell.

-Learning a new skill can be difficult.

-Persistence is an essential trait for successful people.

-Failure is often a springboard for success.

-Procrastination is a major problem for students.

-Summer is the best time of the year.

ALSO ON THIS DAY:  

January 29, 1839:  Charles Darwin married Emma Wedgwood after taking the time to create a list contrasting the pros and cons of marriage.  See THINKER’S ALMANAC - February 12.

Sources:

1-Quote Investigator.com Anton Chekhov. 30 July 2013. 

THINKER'S ALMANAC - January 28

What can the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster in 1986 teach us to understand how memory works?

Subject:  Flashbulb Memory - Challenger Study

Event:  Challenger Disaster, 1986

On Tuesday, January 28, 1986, at precisely 11:30 EST, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart shortly after takeoff from Cape Canaveral, Florida.  The explosion killed everyone aboard. 

Not only was the Challenger disaster a major tragedy of the United States space program but it was also an unprecedented public tragedy:  it is estimated that 17% of the U.S. population witnessed the launch on live television.  This audience included thousands of students who watched from their school classrooms to see Christa McAulliffe, a high school teacher, who was attempting to become the first teacher in space.  

At the time of the tragedy, psychological researcher Ulric Neisser was in the midst of research on human memory, attempting to better understand how memories are stored and retrieved.  He saw an opportunity to test the accuracy of what is known as flashbulb memory, a supposedly vivid and detailed memory of a dramatic moment, such as the memories that people have of remembering where they were and what they were doing when JFK was assassinated in 1963.  Based on his own flashbulb memory of December 7, 1941, Neisser was having doubts about just how accurate these memories are; he initially remembered hearing the news of the Pearl Harbor attack when the broadcast of a baseball game he was listening to was interrupted.  He later realized that although this was a vivid memory, it could not be true.  There were no baseball games in December.

Seizing on the recency and the public nature of the Challenger tragedy, Neisser saw an opportunity to gather more data on flashbulb memories.   The day after the tragedy, Neisser asked students to write down detailed accounts of where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news of the Challenger explosion.

The next step in Neisser’s research required patience; after waiting nearly three years, he then asked the same students to recount their memories of the fateful 

day.  Although all the students were confident that their memories of the day were accurate, the results of the study revealed something different: one fourth of the students had memories that were completely different, while half had memories that were somewhat different.  Less than ten percent of the students got all the details correct. 

Neisser’s work gives us all a better, more realistic picture of human memory.  It shows that even those memories that seem most vivid and distinct to us may not be completely accurate.  Each time we access a memory, we reconstruct it and potentially conflate some details, such as how Neisser remembered listening to a baseball game when it was more likely a December football game (1).

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  What is a flashbulb memory, and what does the research show us about how accurate these memories are?

Challenge - Memory On Trial:  What are the implications of research on flashbulb memories when it comes to eyewitness testimony in a trial?  Do a little research on this topic, and write a paragraph that provides instructions for jury members that tells them what they need to know about the fallibility of human memory.

ALSO ON THIS DAY:

January 28, 1986:  Credulous believers in the 16th-century prophecies of Nostradamus look to the following passage as a prediction of the Challenger disaster.  Most, however, realize that it is an example of hindsight bias at work, the erroneous habit of thinking that something that an event from the past was more predictable than it actually was:

From the human flock nine will be sent away,

Separated from judgment and counsel:

Their fate will be sealed on departure

Kappa, Thita, Lambda the banished dead err (I.81).

Sources:

1-Martin, Douglas. Ulric Neisser Is Dead at 83; Reshaped Study of the Mind. New York Times 25 Feb. 2012.

THINKER'S ALMANAC - January 27

What one word will go with each of the following words to form a compound word: “flower,”  “friend,” “scout”?

Subject: Creativity - Remote Associates Test

Event:  Birthday of Sarnoff Andrei Mednick, 1928

 

Look at these three words:  DREAM, BREAK, LIGHT.

Does a fourth word come to your mind automatically, a word that is associated with each of the other three?

Psychologist Sarnoff A. Mednick, who was born on this day in 1928, sought to better understand creative thinking.  After interviewing scientists, architects, and mathematicians to identify their creative process, he noted that one key element of creativity is associations from memory. Being creative means being able to make associations and to connect ideas, especially ideas that aren't immediately obvious. 

Based on what he learned about creativity, Mednick created the Remote Associates Test (RAT) in the 1960s as a method of assessing creative thinking.  The test is made up of word puzzles where the solver must examine three words -- such as DREAM, BREAK, LIGHT -- and identify the single word that links all three: DAY -- as in “daydream,” “daybreak,” and “daylight.”

Some psychologists argue that the RAT is more a test of linguistic ability or problem solving than creativity; nevertheless, Mednick’s invention remains a popular instrument.  The RAT not only helps us ponder the relationship between memory and imagination, but it also meets the criteria of Albert Einstein’s definition of creativity:  “Creativity is intelligence having fun” (1).

Try the following examples, which range from very easy to very hard:

1. dew, comb, bee 

2. preserve, ranger, tropical 

3. sense, courtesy, place 

4. flower, friend, scout 

5. sticker, maker, point 

6. right, cat, carbon 

7. home, sea, bed 

8. fence, card, master 

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  What is the RAT, and what insights does it give us about creativity? 

 

Challenge - Mother Tongue Lashing:  What one word fits between the words ‘Jelly’ and ‘Bag’ to form two separate compound words? Jelly __________ Bag  The answer is the word “bean” as in jelly bean and beanbag.  This is a variation of the RAT called Mother Tongue Lashing. It takes advantage of the wealth of compound words and expressions in English. For each pair of words below, name a word that can follow the first word and precede the second one to complete a compound word or a familiar two-word phrase.

1. Life __________ Travel

2. Punk __________ Candy

3. Green _________ Space

4. Rest __________ Work

5. Word  __________ Book

6. Rock __________ Dust

7. Spelling __________ Sting

8. Night __________ House

Sources:  

1-Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

Answers to the RAT:  1 honey, 2 forest, 3 common, 4 girl, 5 match, 6 copy, 7 sick, 8 post

Answers to Mother Tongue Lashing:  Answers:  1 time, 2 rock, 3 back, 4 home, 5 play, 6 star, 7 bee, 8 light