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Evidence for Unconscious Math, Language Processing Abilities
the_newsbeagle writes "It's hard to determine what the unconscious brain is doing since, after all, we're not aware of it. But in a neat set of experiments, researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's consciousness lab found evidence that the unconscious brain can parse language and perform simple arithmetic. The researchers flashed colorful patterns at test subjects that took up all their attention and allowed for the subliminal presentation of sentences or equations. In the language processing experiment, researchers found that subjects became consciously aware of a sentence sooner if it was jarring and nonsensical (like, for example, the sentence 'I ironed coffee')."
They made your brain throw an exception
OFC it will come up a few layers
Not if you use permanent expresso
rewriting history since 2109
I agree. I'm now aged 55 but I remember regular occasions like this from my late teens/early 20's when a solution that I was pondering on in the evening was obvious the next morning after sleep. Was it rest or was it my pea-brain working at it while I "slept". I have no clue, but this was common for me in both Maths and Physics. Does it happen now? Don't know as I'm not in the game of trying to show someone what I know (undergraduate), so I have not for a number of years (decades), had to put it to the test.
Students who learn piano are often taught to take breaks between practice sessions (or even just 2 half hour sessions per day instead of one single hour session). As a piano teacher myself, I've recently encouraged my own students to take 5 minutes breaks, and even 5-20 second breaks WITHIN a session to allow the subconscious mind to make more sense of a passage or scale etc. Not sure how popular this kind of technique across other teaching disciplines is.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
The sensory-brain system is actually an integrating machine in that it integrates time-variant functions (physical phenomena) into constants.
For example:
Pressure wave > sound of a certain pitch
EM wave in the visible spectrum > color
Heck, even an electric current > taste (We've all stuck a 9V battery on your tongue, right?)
Set your phasers on "funky"!
So I conclude that you'd get even better insights if you slept in the shower.
Sudoku is not Math. It's something that happens to have numbers in it (but they could be any other kind of symbols, and it would work in exactly the same way).
Debateable. The fact that it uses numbers, rather than arbitrary symbols or letters, certainly doesn't make it some kind of arithmetic workout; but Sudoku puzzles are special cases of Latin squares, and there is(as with most puzzles that anybody cares about) active mathematical futzing with algorithms for generating puzzles, algorithms for solving them, and proofs of various things about solution sets for various variants(NxN grids, more than two dimensions, etc.)
What I don't know is the degree to which the sudoku-solving population at large is consciously involved with this, unconsciously has latched on to some reasonably optimal algorithms but wouldn't recognize them if it saw them formalized, or is basically just plugging numbers into the Sunday paper...
Next time you're in heavy traffic going 70 mph, try consciously thinking about every move you're making and the move every other vehicle is making or about to make. It will make your head explode.
I know that this really isn't your point, but you touched off a hobby horse of mine.
That's exactly how I drive, if you want to be really safe, it's the only way you can drive.
I'm a paramedic, I routinely drive a 12,000lb (~5,500kg, for those that prefer) vehicle at high rates of speed through maneuvers that are wholly unexpected by a majority of the other drivers on the road, that's the only way I can drive.
I assess every other vehicle on the road, every pedestrian walking along side, and every cardboard box sitting on the curb. I know where they are, how fast they're going, how well they're driving (well, I usually skip that for the boxes.), how likely they are to interfere with my lane space, and as an added bonus, how they're likely to respond to the sight of me in their rear view mirror. From the moment they come into my vision until the moment they leave it, I look at everything no less than once every 5 seconds.
At the same time, I'm also keeping a running evaluation of the degree of urgency I have as it relates to how fast I'm willing to go, how hard I'm willing to accelerate (in any of the three axises available to me), and when and where I have to do what in order to meet those constraints.
That being said, I also drive like that in my personal car (Though I do skip the whole running red lights thing). It's not easy by any means, it requires a great deal of focus, good observation skills and keen geospatial awareness, but it's doable, and it works.
I've driven over half a million miles in ambulances, and probably another half million in my personal car. I've been in two accidents, both of which occurred within a year of getting my license, and both of which I know (as much as you can know such things) that if I could go back and do it again with the skills I have now, I could avoid them. (Oh, and for the record, neither of them were ruled as being my fault at the time.).
Right, sorry.
</soapbox>
I needed a sig so people would know who I am, but I was too drunk to make something witty, so you get this instead.
It seems to me that this is not really news. When I was studying Linguistics many, many years ago, it was pointed out to me that we shape entire sentences in our brain before we become aware of them and before we speak the words. This is how we can make unintentional errors when we speak - spoonerisms for example, where the initial sounds of one word are substituted with that of a subsequent word (Wikipedia gives this example: "Three cheers for our queer old dean!" (dear old queen, referring to Queen Victoria)).
Since we are unaware of these errors prior to speaking them, it seems only logical that the subconscious/unconscious mind has the ability to recognize grammatical mistakes, since it has the capacity to formulate them. The human mind seems to be *built* to absorb rules of grammar and vocabulary at a very low level. We learn the rules of whatever language(s) we grow up speaking subconsciously by hearing them applied by those around us. Sure, people correct pronunciation and grammar in the young from time to time but a lot of it is just seemingly absorbed at a young age. After age 8 or so, you need to really study to learn a language in most cases, before that you can learn up to 3 languages at the same time apparently - although usually only if you speak each one to an individual that uses that language exclusively with you.
So this seems interesting but not all that earth shattering to me at least. Although of course this is /. so I didn't RTFA :p
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid