Author Archives: Nathan James Kistler

Descartes, Quantum Mechanics, and Peek-a-boo

My daughter, Mila, thinks peek-a-boo is absolutely hilarious, and she may be right. Based on certain illusions, hallucinations, and misconceptions, Descartes surmised that our senses could be deceiving us. He concluded that if our senses are indeed deceptive, that sensory knowledge must be discarded. In order to gain insight into the true nature of reality, he therefore began his investigation with the only premise he could rely on with certainty: “cogito ergo sum,” I think therefore I am, his unquestionable axiom. Goldstein defines the mind as “a system that creates representations of the world” (p. 5), and goes on to say that “a tree, and everything else we perceive, is ‘represented’ in the brain” (p. 38). We experience mental representations, not actually what exists. He elucidated further: “our perception of the tree is therefore based not on direct contact with the tree, but on the way the tree is represented by action potentials within the brain” (p. 38). The imagery the brain processes may not actually be representative of what exists in objective reality.

Dr. Joseph Rudnick, former chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UCLA, insists that quantum mechanics confirms this very idea, namely that Descartes’ skepticism may have been entirely justified. He discusses how newborns have the idea that when they can’t see something, it isn’t there, and that is why peek-a-boo and hide-and-seek games are so thrilling to young children. To the infant mind, it is as if you vanish into nothingness and reappear into nothing. Rudnick tells us that quantum mechanics verifies this way of thinking. When you are not looking at something, it is not safe to assume that it is what you saw before, but that it is in fact waiting for you to look at it again. He has verified this on a quantum level; essentially that perceived reality is based in part on the observer.

I find it fascinating that on a small enough scale, quantum mechanics confirms what my daughter knows and delights, specifically that our cognitive images are true, but they are not the whole truth. As Descartes speculated, we are tricked by our perceptions and the resultant assumptions about reality. The “reality” we experience is on some level a misconception, a false image produced by our brain based on limited information.

 

Rudnick paraphrased from:

Goodman, G. (Producer), & Russell, D. O. (Director). (2004). Special Feature on I Heart Huckabees

[Motion picture]. USA: Fox Searchlight.

 

 

Dual Language Acquisition, with Cheese

Given that I myself am in the process of acquiring another language, that my wife is a translator and a polyglot, and that we’re raising a bilingual toddler, I found the chapter on language particularly interesting and relevant to my own life. In weighing the pros and cons of teaching my daughter two languages at once, I had many discussions with my wife and did some research online. I found an interesting article on American Radio Works, where they discuss specifically a dual language immersion program in Utah, and more broadly the cognitive benefits of bilingualism. The Utah students in this immersion program outperform students who are in standard programs. These results have been replicated in other states such as Oregon, where children in bilingual programs were half a grade ahead of their peers on average.

Children that grow up bilingual or attend language immersion programs tend to have better academic performance and perform better than monolinguals on tests such as the Ericksen flanker task, which measures a person’s ability to focus and “screen out unwanted stimuli” (Freemark & Smith).  The differences between the brains of monolingual and bilingual individuals have been studied using fMRI and EEG tests. These tests point to increased activity in the frontal lobe, which has benefits for executive function, such as multi-tasking, shifting between tasks, learning, and problem solving. Fully bilingual children enter kindergarten nine months ahead and with better attention skills than their monolingual peers. I am living in Serbia and studying Serbian, and my 21-month-old daughter’s Serbian vocabulary seems to be expanding more rapidly than mine. My wife speaks to her exclusively in Serbian, as does everyone in town, everyone in preschool, and all her family here, and I am among the only ones that speak any English to her at all.  She seems to picking up both languages at about the same pace, and can obviously understand them both as well.

Serbian is quite different than English; for example, nouns have three genders, verbs have seven cases with various endings for each, and the word order often does not resemble any construction in English. In my own travels I’ve often wished that I had acquired multiple languages, and I’m surprised and disappointed that despite the proven benefits in education improvement, only a quarter of elementary schools in the U.S. offer any foreign language instruction at all. The article quotes from a textbook from the 1950’s which states that by raising a child bilingual, you risk “mental retardation” (Freemark & Smith). After decades of research, the consensus now is that “when people learn another language, they develop cognitive advantages that improve their attention, self-control, and ability to deal with conflicting information” (Freemark & Smith). By my wife and everyone else in town speaking to her in Serbian, and me speaking to her in English, I hope that I am affording her the benefits I’ve discussed above and not needlessly confusing her. I think she’s doing really well; right now when she wants her favorite food, she asks her dad for cheese and her mom for sir.

Freemark, S. & Smith, S. (2014, August 14). This is your brain on language. Retrieved from http://www.americanradioworks.org/segments/this-is-your-brain-on-language/

My Missing Month: A True Story of Amnesia and Killing a Guy I Never Met

There is a month of my life that I will never remember. It was the summer after my sophomore year, I was sixteen. I made plans to meet up with a friend that I had not seen since freshman year. My friend, Gene, lived in Chillicothe, Missouri, and knew I would be staying at my mother’s house in Kansas City not far from there all summer, so he invited me to come to “Chilli” to party with his friends. What I remember is meeting up with Gene and another friend of his whom I had never met, I forget his name, in the Bannister Mall parking lot, dropping my car off at my place, and jumping into Gene’s sports car headed for Chillicothe.Then I woke up on my mom’s couch in her living room. Members of my family were gathered around and paint-by-numbers canvases at various stages of completion were spread around the living room and kitchen, suggesting that everyone had been hanging around for a while.

“What happened?” I remember asking my mom.

“You were in a bad car accident,” she told me. It was five weeks later, my body was sore, my right ear was stitched back on to my head, and apparently, I had almost bled to death. My sister told me that I had asked her what happened five times a day for the past month. Gene’s friend had been driving and the car had smashed head-on into another car on the highway. The paramedics told my family that I had gotten out of the car and was walking down the highway with my right ear hanging from its lobe, my Dead Kennedys t-shirt soaked in blood. I was helicoptered to the emergency room and was in intensive care for four days. Gene had broken both his femurs and his hip bone, his friend had a broken arm and collar bone and had damaged his neck. In the other car was a couple on their way to their high school reunion. The wife had a broken nose, chin, and cheekbones, her face was smashed in during the collision. Her husband was killed.

Around five weeks were completely unaccounted for in my memory. I can relate to the quote from the text attributed to Tim Tebow, suffering a concussion after being sacked, he asked, “did I hold on to the ball?”(193). I was shocked to learn that over a month had passed during which I had been intermittently conscious, yet had absolutely no recollection of anything that had transpired. Based on what I read in chapter seven in reference to memory formation, it is safe to assume that I likely sustained damage to one or more areas of my medial temporal lobe (MTL) because I suffered from both graded, retrograde amnesia and anterograde amnesia. “Retrograde amnesia is amnesia for events that happened before the injury,” (193) and mine was graded because the events nearer in time to the trauma, such as being in the car beforehand, are absent, while memories from earlier were unaffected. “Anterograde amnesia is amnesia for events that occur after an injury (the inability to form new memories)” (193). This is demonstrated by my lack of memory for a month after the accident. Due to the trauma, “the process that transforms new memories from a fragile state… to a more permanent state” (193) called consolidation was not possible for my brain.

It has been almost twenty years since that summer, and I don’t think of it that often. When I do, I feel extremely fortunate to be alive and healthy (with both my ears), knowing not everyone that day was so lucky. I think of how fragile our brains are and how fortunate we are to have such a magnificent organ. Sometimes I think of trying to track down the woman from the accident or writing her a letter, but honestly, I don’t know what I could write. If she were standing in front of me right now, I would apologize and offer her my sincerest condolences for her loss.

-Goldstein, E. Bruce. (2008)Cognitive Psychology (Third ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Semantic Regularities in Zen

 

In their use of setting, meditation, and koan introspection, Zen masters demonstrate a sophisticated knowledge of the tenets of cognitive psychology and an understanding of the mechanisms responsible for perception. Through various manipulations of the concept of semantic regularities in particular, they make the most of these principles to impart wisdom to their students, helping them toward their goals of realization and enlightenment.

In Goldstein’s discussion of the mechanics responsible for perception, he describes bottom-up processing in which a person perceives information coming in through their sense receptors, as well as top-down processing in which a person’s recognition of an object or situation is based on their prior knowledge, experience, and expectations. He describes the latter as a mental process akin to a very rapid form of problem solving during which our mind attempts to identify, label, and impart meaning to what we perceive. Semantic regularities are among the tools people utilize in top-down processing to use prior knowledge to impart meaning, and Zen masters make use of these regularities (both in language and in scene recognition) to aid their teaching. Like other Buddhist sects, Zen rests on the eight pillars which are guidelines relating to appropriate life and conduct. Two of these pillars are “right understanding” and “right practice,” and it is toward these two goals specifically that masters utilize their understanding of cognition to assist their students.

In the article “Dogen and Koan” the author insists that Dogen, “the founder of the just-sitting school of Zen” did utilize the koan as one method of teaching this “right understanding.” The koan is a method of Zen instruction that uses apparently nonsensical questions which encourage the practitioner to subvert or bypass their everyday sense of logic in order to perceive higher truths. Zen does not trust mere logic to bestow a sense of ultimate reality, and uses to koan to help overthrow logical processes. For example, when investigating the nature of the self, it is true that you are yourself, your familiar identity, but that is not the whole truth. You are also interconnected with every other entity in the universe, what Buddhists refer to as being “Buddha-nature,” that is to say you are both one and two and infinite simultaneously, or as the masters say, “not one, not two.” By contradicting logic, the master flips the notion of linguistic semantic regularity on its head to guide others toward a deeper conception of reality.

In contrast, the Zen master utilizes the concept of semantic regularities in a very straightforward manner as it pertains to teaching “right practice.” In Zen, the Sangha refers to the community or brotherhood, and Zen monasteries usually have a meditation hall, or zendo. On page 65, Goldstein writes, “semantic regularities are the characteristics associated with the functions carried out in different types of scenes.” People will perceive what they expect to perceive in a given setting. A zendo is where walking and sitting meditation take place for a Sangha. Meditation is not undertaken with any goal in mind, it is the means and the end of practice, hence Dogen’s admonition, “just sit.” By using the setting of the zendo, people expect to realize a deeper sense of interconnectedness, and their perceptions fall in line with these expectations.

While in their oral teachings Zen are communicated through paradoxes and mystic irrationalities, in practice it is deceptively simple. In its philosophical underpinnings, it inverts the linguistic sense of semantic regularities to expand minds, in its everyday practice, relies on a practitioner’s semantic regularities in the zendo in order to guide one’s expectations in order to facilitate awakening.

Sources:

-Dogen and Koan: the Ultimate Truly Definitive unquestionable Smoking Gun. (n.d.) Retrieved September 12, 2014 from http://www.patheos.com/blogs/wildfoxzen/2014/08/dogen-and-koan-the-ultimate-truly-definitive-unquestionable-smoking-gun.html

-Goldstein, E. Bruce. (2008)Cognitive Psychology (Third ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.