This article is fairly interesting.

Only one skepticism: the author takes issue with the discharge diagnosis of his psuedopatients as "schizophrenia in remission". What other diagnosis would make sense, though, unless the psychiatrists are to disbelieve the psuedopatients' intake history claims of having heard voices?

If they act normally for the duration of their stay, then the best that can be said is that there was nothing observered, but the patient claimed schizophrenic symptoms. Which is, indeed, schizophrenia in remission - since such things are (TTBOMK) relatively likely to recur.

I think more emphasis should've been put (rightly) on the environmental factors; that in itself was damning enough.

I don't know enough about brain-stim to know how to do this exactly, but:

Take a rat. Stick two wires in its brain. One reads neural impulses, the other stimulates 'em.

Hook them up to a computer (which also has a camera monitor and a dynamic maze or the like) and figure out a protocol* where the rat's brain can ask basic questions. E.g.: is the direction I'm currently looking the way to the cheese?

Basically what I'm interested in is that *. How would one design a good brain/computer interface protocol?

Later experiments would look at e.g. using the computer as a perfect memory bank of some sort. Preferably this should be done in such a way that it's somehow distinguishable from simple motor entrainment - you want to be able to show that it's not merely making the rat move forward or reinforcing existing good memory like the usual reward-circuit experiments, but that it's supplying information that is the being acted on.

Of course the point of this overall is to figure out how we might do this in humans - so that eventually you can wire your brain directly to a hard drive, slap some clever protocol and crazy data-massage on it, and remember everything. Or for that matter, directly be able to know everything in specially made encyclopedias, take advantage of others' memories, etc etc etc superpowered future cyborgs.

Take a bunch of people and give them a physiological test for empathy.

For example, take the ratio of their motor evoked potentials when viewing vs performing moderately complex action (like grabbing and drinking from a cup); if there are measurement issues with MEPs during performance (I honestly don't know if one can), then when viewing full human performance vs tool performance or robot performance or the like, à la Rizolatti etc.

Then train these people in some complex motor task that requires a significant amount of body mimicry - for example, kneeling front rolls in aikido. (Ensure that they are total novices, of course, and that they all get the same amount of teaching and practice.)

Tape them demonstrating their rolls at the end of the session, and have their skill level evaluated based on the tape by competent teachers of that task who weren't involved in teaching those particular students. (So there's no favoritism or the like.)

Take the same MEP measurements again immediately after the taping.

See whether:
a) empathic MEP ratio correlates with achieved skill
b) eMr changes before vs after having to use motor-mimicry skill

Implications of positive result: real-world correlates of empathy; possible impact on determining who will be good at sports; possible implications for skill vs talent in learning.

Evan Thompson Between Ourselves: Second-Person Issues in the Study of Consciousness (BF311 .B484 2001); aka Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8, No. 5-7, 2001, pp 1-309

The first article is by Thompson himself, titled 'Empathy and Consciousness'. It's labelled as the "Editor's Introduction" in the table of contents, but at almost 2x longer than everything else in the book (32 pp), it's more like a full review article.

The first thing I have to say is a bit nitpicky: it needed more editing.

Thompson seems to have a mannerism of overusing repetition, like "X or X'" (where X' is just X reworded). One example (p 19):

Stein elaborates this important point in terms of 'reiterated empathy'. In reiterated empathy, I see myself from your perspective. Stated more precisely, I empathetically grasp your empathic experience of me. As a result, I acquire a view of myself not simply as a physical thing, but as a physical-thing-empathetically-grasped-by-you-as-a-living-being. In other words, I do not merely experience myself as a sentient being 'from within', nor grasp myself as also a physical thing in the world; I experience myself as recognizably sentient 'from without', that is, from your perspective, the perspective of another. ...

There are a lot of other, smaller examples of this. I suspect that it has something to do with philosophical academic style, but I find it annoying and somewhat pretentious, and it weakens his points. Yes, I can understand "succorant behavior" just fine, but does it really contrast with "care-giving", used immediately before?

Otherwise, his writing is quite good, aside from the usual unnecessarily abstruse academese. I just found this quirk to be distracting enough to bear notice.


Moving on to substance...

Thompson posits a "core dyad", which is a fancy way to say that he tries to make two main points. First, that empathy is (by phenomenological philosophy of consciousness, which he buys into) a precondition for consciousness. Second, that it's "an evolved, biological capacity of the human species, and probably of other mammalian species, such as apes".

Since most of his argument in support of this is limited to summaries of others' work (which I'm not yet familiar with), I'll only comment on the parts that he appears to agree with (rather than merely summarize) and that I think are clear enough from reading this.

On the critical side:

1. He cites a controversy between Merleau-Ponty and Gallagher & Meltzoff about whether infants are born with an ability for empathy, or first have to learn it by seeing their own faces (thus associating their proprioception to their face, and then making the analogy of their face to others'). Gallagher & Meltzoff are cited as showing that the former is true, because infants will mirror caretakers' faces before any experience of their own reflected.

However, it seems to me that in normal situations, caretakers are reflecting the baby's face from the very beginning, which undermines this argument. I don't know the conditions of their experiment, but I suspect that they did not ensure that the baby had no access to reflecting adult faces (would this even be ethical?).

Practically speaking, I think it's not very important except perhaps in very unusual circumstances (parents who are severely autistic / repressed / uncaring perhaps?), but evidently it's an important point for the philosophers whether babies possess an "intracorporeal schema ... from the start".

2. He claims that Broca's area is the human analogue of macaques' motor cortex F5 (which is very involved in mirror neuron activity), but cites no evidence for this. The sentence is followed by what looks like speculation from Rizolatti & Arbib, 1998 p 190; I've yet to read that, so I'll just add it to my queue.

However, TTBOMK Broca's area lesions cause Broca's aphasia (a deficit in speech production but not comprehension), and is wholly unrelated to propopagnosia (where one loses the ability to recognize faces, caused mainly by fusiform gyrus lesions) or autism (some forms of which are speculatively caused by systemic mirror neuron problems). So I'm skeptical that Broca's area is involved in mirrorring or empathy. But perhaps this is something I just haven't read the evidence for yet.

3. He discusses "appresentation", a term by philosopher Husserl, and IMO a good example of philosophical muddying language.

In plain English, the argument is that if one sees an apple, one only perceives the front half of it, yet has some notion of "perceiving" (or "appresenting", as Husserl would have it) the whole. This, then, is claimed to be "open intersubjectivity" (hoy), i.e. you are necessarily having an empathic view of other people who are looking from the apple from other viewpoints (and this is how you stitch it together as a whole).

To me this is absolute nonsense. I suppose I come under his footnote - "although the co-intended absent profiles cannot be correlated with the correlates of my fictious co-present perceptions, they can nevertheless be correlated with the correlates of my perceptions were I to walk around the thing and look at it from over there". And of course, doing so "involves the open intersubjectivity of consciousness, in the form of the alterityor otherness built into consciousness, for it requires that one imagine or otherwise mentally grasp oneself as altered or othered with respect to one's current self".

Even this counterargument seems to me to be significantly misconstruing things to support a preëxisting philosophical position.

While indeed, one can picture the other side of an apple by picturing what it'd be like to stand on the other side and look at it (or yet more removed, for someone else to do so), there's no reason I know of to believe that this is happening, and it certainly isn't the simplest view. Much simpler is to simply chalk it up to precognitive visual processing - the same kind as gives us the illusions of size and color constancy. Even very young children - too young to even pass the mirror test or be able to cogently answer questions involving hypothetical worlds - will clearly have a wholisitc concept of what an apple looks like.

In any case, this is relatively easy to test empirically. Give someone a doctored apple (such that the other side is deformed somehow to be not as expected), and see if they show surprise when turning it around. If they do, and you have other evidence that they are capable neither of viewing things from others' perspectives (e.g. the 'make the doll hide a toy' test) nor even posit their own perspective in hypothetical situations (e.g. 'if you were standing over there, would you see the thing in this box?'), then this theory of "apperception" through modelling of "othered" states is disproven.


On the other side:

1. He claims that "premotor areas are activated when an individual is about to perform an action ... the premotor system sometimes will allow a brief prefix of the movement to be exhibited, and this prefix will be recognizable by [someone seeing them]", citing Rizzolatti & Arbib (ibid) again. I can't tell from the quote whether this is speculation on their part of actual research result; if the latter, it'd certainly be quite interesting. Another point in favor of reading it.

2. There's a big debate amongst philosophers about "theory theory" (TT, the idea that we understand others by forming an active, quasi-scientific theory of how their behaviors correlate to inner states) and "simulation theory" (ST, where we do so using an unconsciously embodied physical model of the other person, from which we then infer states automatically).

Clearly Thompson favors ST (probably correlated with his favoring of phenomenology, for which ST is much better). I think that it has to be a combination of the two.

ST is not capable of easily explaining empathy or modelling of people whom we can't see - e.g. the mental state of someone met and conversed with only over IM / IRC. It'd posit (AFAICT) that we'd have to create an entire physical model of the person, map words to a voice with intonation and so forth, model the muscle movements involved in that production, and thence get their emotional state. This seems implausibly complex to me.

TT is not capable of explaining 'emote-then-think' phenomena (e.g. the weird visual-amygdala pathway that seems to literally preëmpt conscious processing of a fear-inducing stimulus), and is needlessly complex for situations where we *do* have ready access to someone's facial expressions (which are richly expressive of their mental state in ways that relatively few people are consciously able to point out the workings of).

So both have their place. Why is this even still an issue to be argued over as if they were dualistic? It seems to me that a more useful question is how (and in what situations) each works, not which one exists better than the other. :-P

(And of course I, as someone interested in the neural side of empathy and thus unconscious modelling à la mirror neurons, would primarily be dealing with ST based approaches. Hopefully I'm not shooting myself in the foot here by lambasting a theory I might someday be espousing...)

3. He quotes (and apparently agrees with) Edith Stein's 1916 dissertation: "Should I perhaps consider a dog's paw in comparison with my hand, I do not have a mere physical body, either, but a sensitive limb of a living body... I may sense-in pain when the animal is injured. ... [Nevertheless,] the further I deviate from the type 'man', the the smaller does the number of possibilities of fulfillment become."

I've argued before for essentially this position, and considering it as a descriptive (if not prescriptive) source of "morality" behaviors.

Clearly, our empathy for others (including other species) is tied to how similar they are to us - or rather, how similar we perceive them to be. (This perception can be altered e.g. by hallucinogens or cultural indoctrination; the latter being an important component of making killing easier. See Lt.Col. Dave Grossman, On Killing for elaboration on the latter.)

This also seems to me to be a viable venue for experimentation:

a) does vegetarianism correlate to how much someone physically reacts (e.g. under TMS probing) to seeing animal vs human hand injury?
b) does pet ownership (and thus increased exposure to form a good map)?
c) do people mirror differently when seeing a human's hand injury depending on whether they are of ingroup, outgroup (e.g. same nation, different race), or hated group (e.g. ethnically identifiable group with whom one is at war [a war one supports, that is])?
d) how do people empathize with physically unmodellable things - e.g. if I told you "a forgle was making food, when suddenly it cut its platch with a knife", do you still have hand TMS activation as you would for hearing "a [anthropomorphic] dog was making food, when suddenly it cut its paw with a knife"? Do you have to visualize florgles as mammalian? (If yes, we could probably break that by further description beforehand making clearl that florgles are very alien physiologically.) Could we even tell in a substantive way?


I'll not reiterate all the rest of his article - most of it was a fairly straightforward summary of various philosophical and neurological issues, primarily the former. This is just the parts that I had a reaction to.

I'm restarting inhalation of a whole bunch of publications about empathy and mirror neurons (and related subjects).

I'll be posting reviews of them under the tag 'cogsci', one post per paper plus one post per collection (e.g. a book or researcher). My hope is that by mid October I'll be ready to write a cogent research review essay (similar but larger in scope than my last one).

First up: Evan Thompson Between Ourselves: Second-Person Issues in the Study of Consciousness (BF311 .B484 2001).

(And thanks to Alex for helping me get the books!)

This was written in response to a thread on CONLANG-L about semantic primes, in which the OP was asking how one might go about getting to the atomic roots of meanings. (In a long tradition of hilariously failed attempts, including such company as Leibniz...)


It seems to me that words *cannot* ever be fully defined concepts. For this reason, they cannot ever be atomic; there is always some further division of meaning that can be made, as there is always further definition that has not yet been elaborated and excised in previous cuttings.

The reason is that all concepts, indeed all communication, depend on a shared experience between the people talking.

Gödel, for example, proved that any (mathematical) system necessarily has certain axioms that cannot be proved within that system. They must simply be accepted, or not; if one does not accept them, then no fruitful discussion can be had - they're not things one can argue to be correct without going into a homunculus fallacy.

This is true of languages as well. Any "atomic" idea that one might want are necessarily not truly atomic; calling them so is, at best, an axiom that one may or may not share with others.

For this reason, any ontology of language - any list of semantic primes - is at best a list of axioms. Someone else can always come to that list and say, "I view this as actually a combination of things".

If this were not true, it wouldn't be easily possible to define the word. Definitions are, as it were, a tweezing apart of the meaning in the word.

So, IMHO, any ontology is doomed that does not acknowledge this, and does not acknowledge that:
a) choices of how to divide or define a concept are necessarily arbitrary; and
b) choices of what concepts to adopt as 'atomic' are equally arbitrary.

Being arbitrary is OK. Conlangers do that all the time; eventually one decides what goals one has, what one considers to be aesthetically pleasing, how to balance choices that require tradeoffs. These things cannot be really justified more than, at root, they feel right.

So yes, you can create a language based on semantic "primes". Indeed, I think it's a useful idea; it gives rise to elegance like Arabic's triconsontal semantic roots.

It simply will not ever be universal, and chasing universality - chasing some sort of Truth of semantic primacy - will only lead one into yet another form of qabbalah or OTO.

The world has enough of those, IMO.

Written to David Colquhoun, in response to Most Alternative Medicine is Illegal:


I'd like to first mention a large loophole you quoted and missed in your Jan 15 writeup about the Unfair Trading Law:

> (ii) reliance on information supplied to him by another person;

This lets everyone out. There have been plenty of studies done - of questionable soundness perhaps, but published nevertheless - which testify to the effectiveness of anything you care to sell, be it magic water or magnets.

Given that there is no requirement for reliance upon studies meeting any particular standard - no requirement for someone to actually know that it is effective because there is something valid demonstrating it, rather than merely any other person's say-so - this defense is total. One needs only come up with someone somewhere who said it's effective, say "I heard it from that guy!", and voilà, you're perfectly innocent.


Second, I'd like your opinion - in blog or email, as you prefer.

Suppose that an 'alternative' technique is made available, exclusively under the condition that it be used in conjunction with evidence-based medicine. Let's call this 'suppletive alternative treatment'.

It is relatively well accepted that even water and sugar will produce *an* effect; when you say that homeopathy, for example, is "ineffective" what you really mean is that it is no more detectably effective than placebo. That is not the same as comparing it to no treatment at all.

One problem modern medicine has is that it kinda sucks at placebo effect creation. We no longer have (ethical) doctors who convince their patients that everything will be cured; who conduct nice rituals; who make patients really *feel* it as well as doing what happens to actually work better than placebo.

"Alternative medicine" practitioners, however, have this down pat. It is, after all, the entire crux of their services.

If suppletive alternative treatment were given, then, could it not be ethically, economically, and medically beneficial - simply in remedying this gap in addressing the human qualities?

The one ethical problem I can see with it is that, because it feels better than the "real" stuff, people may overattribute their recovery to it, and thus be tempted to abandon the evidence-backed medicine, to their medical detriment.

Your opinion?

I remember wanting to have this earlier, so here's the breakdown. If you don't know what the Milgram experiment is, go look up Wikipedia and Google Video for excellent explanation.

This is just the details. (Ha.)

Shock generator: 15-450V, 15V increments.
15V "Slight shock"
45V - Actual shock given to teacher as part of setup procedure (to demonstate pain level involved)
75V "Moderate shock" - Learner grunts
120V - Learner complains loudly
135V "Strong shock"
150V - Learner loudly yells "get me out of here! I don't want to be in this experiment anymore!"
195V "Very strong shock" - Learner screams
245V "Intense shock"
300V - Learner screams worse. Shouts that he will no longer provide answers, and does not.
315V "Extreme intensity shock"
330V - In contact variant, learner refuses to touch shock plate or respond to answers; teacher must forcibly get learer's hand on plate.
375V "Danger severe shock"
400V - Learner is silent
450V "X X X"

Experimenter response to teacher objection:
1. The learner is fine. Go on.
2. The experiment requires you to go on.
3. It's absolutely essential to go on.
4. You have no choice. You must go on.
5. [terminate experiment]

To specific questions / probes:
Is he okay? - The shocks may be painful, but are not harmful
Who takes responsibility? - I'm responsible for anything that happens to him.
Can you go look at him? - Once the experiment is started, no.
What if he doesn't answer? - Give him 4-5 seconds, then treat it as wrong.
I've run out of word pair questions... - Start again from the beginning until they're all correct.

Standard setup: Teacher in same room as experimenter. Learner in separate room, strapped down by teacher during setup. Responses heard through the wall. Teacher directed to increase shock 15V for each wrong answer. Learner mentions during setup that he has a heart condition; experimenter reassures him that shock is not harmful, just painful (while teacher watches). Teachers (the only actual subjects) are all males.

Results (%age of people who went all the way to 450V x3):
92.5% - Shock administered by a separate "subject". Teacher only administers test.
92% - Standard. Holland.
90% - First see another teacher go all the way.
85% - Standard. Munich.
70% - Participant is bystander, not teacher.
65% - Teacher can see learner through silvered glass, but cannot hear them.
64% - Standard. Yale. Female subjects.
63% - Standard. Yale public.
60% - Standard. Yale undergrads. 100% through 135V; 80% through 285V; 70% through 315; 60% to 450Vx3.
50% - Standard. UK.
48% - Experiment takes place in off-campus run-down office, not on-campus lab
40% - Standard. Australia.
40% - Teacher and learner in same room
30% - Teacher has to press learner's hand to shock plate
22% - Experimenter in separate room from teacher, instructions given via phone.
20% - Experimenter is non-professor
10% - Two other 'teachers' rebel. 90% of disobedience happens together w/ others' rebellion.
5% - Teacher told they are free to select any shock level for each response. Avg shock used, <60V. 7.5% stayed under 15V; 95% under 150V; 5% >325V.
3% - Learner demands to be shocked
<3% - Authority not present. Ordinary person gives orders. (?)
0% - Two experimenters present. They disagree about whether to continue the shocks.



The lesson: Context matters. A lot. Especially if you can blame it on someone else, only contribute a small amount, and you see other people doing it too.

I'm not familiar with any experimental evidence about the effect of any kind of innoculation or other background (e.g. awareness of this study, empathy training, military training, medical training, etc) on resistance. (If you are, please send me links / pdfs).

However, I hope that some of you will remember and say "fuck you, let him go" the next time this kind of situation arises.

Mind that these are %ages of people who went all the way. Most of them did so "under protest" - they complained, made the experimenter "take responsibility" for it, asked to have it stop, etc. They were simply denied and told to continue, and most did despite knowing it was wrong.

Disobedience is rude and dangerous - be prepared to be ruder and more dangerous than others and you might get to have a say in things.

Mostly for my own reference, but some of you may be interested in where I'll be applying.

University College London, Institute of cognitive nueroscience app
10 April - MSc, CognitiveNeuropsychology and Cognitive Neuroscience - £16,870
14 January - MSc, Neuroscience - £17,995
MSc, Cognitive and Decision Sciences
Blakemore lab on social neurocognition

(Interestingly, they also have a MSc in Psychodynamic Neuroscience - aka Freudian fMRI ^^)

University of Groningen
1 February (or April 15?) - MSc (research), Behavioural & Cognitive Neurosciences (brochure, app)

Duke University
December 1 (or 15?) - PhD, Cognitive Neuroscience (website, app)
December 1 (15?) - PhD, Psychology & Neuroscience (website)

Caltech University
January 15 - PhD, Computation & Neural Systems (app)

Emotion & Social Cognition Lab

University of Pennsylvania
Cognitive Neuroscience (website, app)

University of Cambridge
MSc or PhD, Experimental Psychology

University of Zürich
MSc, Neural Systems & Computation

Someone should make it for the cogsci geeks out there.

Might go. Any of the rest of you interested?

---

Thursday, March 6
10:10am-11:45am
714C University Hall, UCB Campus

So Help Me God: A Social Cognitive Approach to God-Mediated Control
Doug Oman, School of Public Health, UCB

Experiences of divine assistance are one of the primary phenomena of religious and spiritual life. Most early social scientists tended to question or dismiss the truth-value of perceptions of divine assistance. But applying major well-established social scientific theories allows non-reductive approaches to clarifying the functions of perceived assistance from a divinity or other spiritual being. In this paper, we systematically compare and analyze several facets of how assistance from human and divine/spiritual agents is experienced. The approach is concretized using the concept of proxy agency from Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy, resulting in a recommended spiritually integral theory of efficacy (SITE) perspective. Implications are discussed for measuring self-efficacy for religious and spiritual activities, for interventions, and for the broader scientific study of religious phenomena.

David Gortner from Church Divinity School of the Pacific (GTU) will respond and present some of his own work.

Directions:

University Hall is on the south-west corner of University and Oxford. To get to 714C you ride the main (north) elevators up to the top (7th) floor and then head to room in the north-east corner of the building by (after stepping off the elevator) turning right, walking about 10 feet, then turning left and walking about 50 feet down the hall.

Map:

http://www.berkeley.edu/map/maps/BC12.html

Hope to see you there.

Mark
--
Mark Graves
Scholar in Residence, Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley
Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA 94709
mgraves@jstb.edu

Via 4pq1injbok, neat-but-weird:

http://people.csail.mit.edu/torralba/tinyimages/

http://icbs.berkeley.edu/news/story.php?rid=26&fh=1

Wed 1-5, Thur 9-5, Fri 9-1. Free, but TANSTAAFL.

Alex and I will be there.

I'll translate whatever cogscily references are made if you want, but I expect it to be fairly accessible and interesting.

So come.

Went pretty well.

Expected to be 3:30-4:30, but actually ran 3-5:50. Good sign. (I got there early, since I wasn't sure how much time to allocate for driving & parking and erred on the cautious side. Planned to arrive at 3, left at 2, almost got lost but didn't quite.)

Took a while to find parking; I succumbed to using the public garage. Grr expensive, blah. But IIRC UCSF has transportation reimbursement or somesuch as a benefit, and if I start working there there'd be workarounds anyway.

Went up to the office, Dr Rosen was right in; waited a short bit for him to finish up something and we started talking.

The conversation took quite a while and covered a lot of ground, in large part due to my asking a very large number of questions (per my usual) and him actually answering them all, cogently and interestingly (per unusual, and which scores him ultra bonus points [aka "mad props"] in my book).

Started covering the program in general (memory.ucsf.edu); it's an NIH "program project" (metaproject of interrelated components, 5 year renewal cycle, long term, large scale, multi site) geared broadly toward investigating memory & aging. Then Rosen's component thereof - on frontotemporal dementia (FTD) in various ways - emotional 'issues' in self and recognition of others', frontal lobe and anterior cingulate gyrus degeneration / shrinkage, awareness of own dementia or the scale thereof (a la prosopagnosia), memory loss, etc.

I'm here glossing over a lot of tangential discussion - etiology, treatment, diagnosis, & effects of FTD vs Alzheimer's; pragmatics of running a couple-hundred-subject trial with only 10 subjects per location; interrelationship between clinical and research aspects of Rosen's job as well as UCSF & its neurology division(s); social vs neurological possible reasons for symptom denial; subject disposition across trials; details of various testing methods (fMRI, sMRI, galvanic skin response [GSR], psychometric surveys); function and use of the software they use (brains2); possible automation thereof; typical and atypical subjects; semantic aphasias (eg subject forgets what a notepad is for, or what the word for "eating" is); episodic vs other memory preservation;...... and so on.

So, circling regions of interest on sMRI scans... He estimated it'd be not more than 40% of my time. Involves opening up scans in brains2, finding the anatomical chunk in question (e.g. anterior cingulate gyrus) using the 3 orthogonal views plus rotatable 3d model, picking one view to be the baseline (typically coronal), and literally outlining it with a mouse or stylus. Repeat for every slice. Takes a few hours per brain. Plus finding various baseline stuff for each brain (e.g. samples of white matter, gray matter, and cerebrospinal fluid [CSF] so it knows what's what), which takes an hourish. Seems like a straightforward, if tedious, process. Will keep eye for ways to make faster, automated, semiautomated, and non-RSI-prone... but enh it's not too bad, and it's brain-multitasking compatible once learned.

The other 60% of my job would involve scheduling, psych testing subjects, etc etc.

Interview went very well AFAICT; went happily over time, good rapport, body language positive, engaged, & synchronized, etc.

Then (eventually) on to interview with the RAs. Seemed like a pretty typical lab - lots of nice monitors and keyboards with desks side-by-side on the perimeter of the room (dubbed "the fishbowl", ha). A couple people working, and six of 'em taking time out to interview me. (Notable point of amusement: everyone I met there is female, except for one token male who showed up at the end.)

Q&A here was much more stereotypical-interview-y. They talked about what they do day-to-day (several scheduling subjects & researchers; one person budgeting; various occasional psychometric interviews; brainscan frobbing; various miscellany as assigned), how they're assigned (each works for a specific project, which typically equals the PI but not always, and a fair amount of cross sharing). Was asked what I wanted out of it, opinion on my own strengths/weaknesses (geh, I can't answer that well), why switching from CS, what "asl music interpretations" meant, what I'd hate in a workplace, how I deal with anger, plans for future, why/whence language background, research interests, etc. etc.

Again, I think it went fairly well though not to the same degree; had everyone laughing and smiling by the end, and no obvious fumbles, so yar.

Returned to Rosen to get my bag & talk a few more minutes to wrap up. He suggested I email him my interest; I responded by saying "yes I'm very interested, when can I start?".

Answer is that he'll need to figure out other interviewdees etc per usual, please send him a list of references, I'll know within 1-2 weeks, and if yes then I start early January.

Oh and random, he's from the Bronx, looks like a (very kind) doctor I had a long time ago, and sounds just like ambyr's dad, with the classic Jewish accent. (I happen to find this rather pleasant for whatever reason; it feels like cookies and books. Don't think I have any actual memory associations on this point, but enh, there's phonaesthetics for ya. Plus with ambyr's parents that's really a very plausible association...)


Soooooo.... my feeling is that I scored it. Hopefully my references reinforce that. It'll be a nervous couple weeks 'till I find out. I should continue looking for other stuff in the meantime just in case, since... well, I really like-no-srsly-I'm-broke need money. I would drastically prefer that it be in something like this, where I can learn neuro on the job, have it be a stepping stone to graduate school, all that good longterm plan stuff.

But gah, no matter how well I feel I did with something like this, I don't like the feeling of being so dependent on stuff I can't control.

Ohwell. Hopefully it works out and come my birthday I'll have a new job, and be back on track to fulfilling all those grand goals of mine.

A skeleton website is now up and functional (huzzah!): http://motostudy.com. (Add www. if it makes you feel better.)

Right now all that's there is the main page, a minimal home page, pretty URLs, and the user system - you can sign up, log in, reset passwords, etc and get all the notification emails as appropriate. It'll get expanded though; in the meantime it's functional enough to start.

Whee research and late night bug fixing (oy, at least I'll be able to reuse that effort *tags the svn branch*)...

Research:
w/ Ben? - 'who' vs 'that' as markers for empathy/agentivity; vary animal, plants, verb, vegetarianism, professions, etc - round 1 = who vs that vary by whether they target is a food organism? (psycholinguistics study)
www.prayermatch.net  - double-blind vs non-blind intercessory prayer study; possibly branch off into ad-funded matching service
poly psycholinguistics survey (another psyling)
motor(cycl)ist behavior vs outcomes longitudinal study (need a catchy name & website) (not actually been done before - wtf?)

Other:
Conlang Books project - write an intro linguistics via conlanging textbook
NLF2DWS monograph
Language Creation Conference


Hmm. I probably get extra geek points for doing serious research in my spare time. I was thinking this is pretty normal but now that I think of it.... who the hell does this unless it's their job (or it's getting them job-type perks, e.g. tenure or a degree)? O.o

Sometimes I feel weirder than usual.

"My dog just snerdled under the fence."

What does "snerdled" mean here / what does it make you think of?

(No, it's not a real word that I know of; it's come up on a potential LCC talk and I'm curious what y'all think it means without having had the context in which the example was brought up and the definition that was supplied.)