Sunday, March 8, 2015

Study Notes: Feb 22-Mar 7, 2015: "How Deaf People Think" &c

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

What I've been watching and reading this week: 
"Horror, the Grotesque, and the Macabre: 

  • "In the Middle Ages, gargoyles and grotesques were prominent features of sacred architecture. The danse macabre or 'dance of death'-- a dramatic or artistic representation of men being visited by Death, fruitlessly attempting to resist or escape, and finally being [led] away in a grim procession or dance-- was a popular art form."
  • "The Vatican recognized the first great horror film, F. W. Murnau's vampire film Nosferatu, in its 1995 list of 45 great films." 
  • "Despite the perversity of much modern horror, the principle abusus non tollit usam applies: The abuse does not abrogate the proper use. Neither uncritical acceptance nor uncritical condemnation is called for, but critical discernment and moral vigilance." 
  • "Michael Jones's thesis is that the whole taproot of modern horror is the modernist secular morality of the Enlightenment, especially regarding sexual morality." 
"How Deaf People Think"

  • "Those who were born completely deaf and only learned sign language will, not surprisingly, think in sign language."
  • "What is surprising is that those who were born completely deaf but learn to speak through vocal training will occasionally think not only in the particular sign language that they know, but also will sometimes think in the vocal language they learned, with their brains coming up with how the vocal language, sounds. Primarily, though, most completely deaf people think in sign language." 
  • "A completely deaf person sees, or more aptly, feels themselves signing in their head as they 'talk' in their heads." 
  • "Deafness is significantly more serious than blindness in terms of the effect it can have on the brain. This isn't because deaf people's brains are different than hearing people, in terms of mental capacity or the like; rather, it is because of how integral language is to how our brain functions... It is simply important that the brain have some form of language it can fully comprehend and can turn into an inner voice to drive thought." 
  • "Language has been shown to literally be the 'device driver', so to speak, that drives much of the brain's core 'hardware'. Thus, deaf people who aren't identified as such very young or that live in places where they aren't able to be taught sign language, will be significantly handicapped mentally until they learn a structured language, even though there is nothing actually wrong with their brains" 
  • "It is because of how integral language is to how our brains develop and function that deaf people were once thought of as mentally handicapped and unteachable." 
  • "Recent research has shown the brains of the completely deaf never fully associate spoken language in the way sign language gets ingrained in their brains as a language, principally they never develop an 'inner voice', which is necessary for our brains to process information."
  • Miranda Pickersgill: "Bilingualism is still very much a hot potato. We have come in for a lot of flak and been accused of pushing deaf children into a signing ghetto. Yet the deaf had a big price to pay when the old methods failed. Not only could they not communicate, but they were left without a code to think in. We can no longer ignore what the research tells us."
  • Helen Keller: "Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness... Since I had no power of thought, I did not compare one mental state with another." 
  • "If you take a deaf person and make them grip something hard with their hands while asking them to memorize a list of words, this has the same disruptive effect as making a hearing person repeat some nonsense phrase such as 'Bob and Bill' during memorization tasks." 
  • "There are also literally thousands of simple sign 'languages' used among family units. This is particularly the case with non-deaf parents that have a deaf child. They will often develop numerous home signs and some sort of structured system of using the signs to communicate. These simple 'languages' are typically called homesign or kitchensign." 
  • "American Sign Language resembles Chinese in form more than it does English in terms of [how] a single gesture often represent[s] a phrase or whole idea, rather than a single word."
  • "Deaf people typically clap by striking their hands together only when surrounded by hearing people. Otherwise, they use the more expressive motion of raising their hands and twisting their wrists rapidly to 'clap'."
  • "The earliest record of sign language being used dates all the way back to the fifth century B.C., in Plato's Cratylus, where Socrates states: 'If we hadn't a voice or a tongue, and wanted to express things to one another, wouldn't we try to make signs by moving our hands, head, and the rest of our body, just as dumb people do at present?'"


    "Multilinguals Have Multiple Personalities"



  • Noam Scheiber: "My Hebrew self turns out to be much colder, more earnest, and, let's face it, less articulate. In English, my natural sensibility is patient and understated. My style in Hebrew was hectoring and prosecutorial." 
  • "It's surprising, though, that people who are actually fluent in two languages also feel their personality as they switch between languages."
  • "Between 2001 and 2003, linguists Jean-Marc Dewaele and Aneta Pavlenko asked over a thousand bilinguals whether they 'feel like a different person' when they speak different langauges [sic]. Nearly two-thirds said they did." 
  • "The English stories more often featured female achievement, physical aggression, verbal aggression toward parents, and attempts to escape blame, while the French stories were more likely to include domination by elders, guilt, and verbal aggression toward peers."
  • "The women in French stories were more likely to stand up for themselves, whereas the female characters in the Portuguese narratives tended to cede to others' demands." 
  • "Whether that's due to the different context in which she learned French and Portuguese, an inherent difference between the two languages, or some combination, researchers have yet to figure out." 


    "Raising Backyard Chickens for Dummies"



  • "Get to know your local chicken expert." 
  • "Before you burn countless hours diagnosing chicken problems by browsing fowl message boards, find a local poultry purveyor and be done with it."
  • "At least one of your chickens will die a horrible death." 
  • "You may get a rooster in the bunch." 
  • "Chicken sexing is only a 90 percent proposition..." 
  • "There seems to be no rhyme or reason when backyard chickens will decide to lay eggs. They may lay every day for a month, then take a break for a few days, then lay every other day. Make sure they have a good, whole grain food with at least 17% protein, water them often, and keep the light on until you go to bed." 
  • "Has you kid ever had a nagging set of symptoms that you simply could not diagnose? Have you ever spent hours perusing the internet to try and figure out what's wrong with them? Well, prepare to do the same with your chickens." 
  • "Eating fresh eggs is a sublime culinary adventure. For this reason alone you should get your own chickens." 
  • "Watching backyard chicken television is a zen experience. I never thought I would say this but I like watching my chickens play together. They are funny and each of them have different 'personalities'. They chase each other, push each other around, fly up in the air a few feet and drop down, roll in the dirt, scratch and peck, etc. Sitting on the porch and looking at them makes me happy for some reason. Maybe it reminds me of simpler times, or lets me daydream about living on a farm-- I don't know. Either way, I like it." 
  • "Hens have around two good years of laying before their production declines and they become freeloaders. When the cost of feed is greater than the money you save in eggs then you have a little mental cost-benefit analysis to complete."



     "Multiple Systems FAQ" & "Terms" & a few other sites



  • "Q: What is a Multiple System? A: It's a group of people sharing the same body, while still being individuals with their own personalities and interests." 
  • "Q: How does that work? A: The easiest way to describe it is like being in a single room with a single link to the world (or worlds) beyond the room." 
  • "Many systems prefer words such as 'headmates' instead of 'alters'."
  • "A good portion of people do not [black out]. Also, most system members communicate with each other so no real information is lost. Some people still do, though it's usually a sign of miscommunication within the system." 
  • "Q: Where do your headmates go when they're not fronting? A: Sometimes they go in-world and ignore meatspace. Other times, they'll stick around and look over the shoulder of whoever's fronting."
  • "Q: What is in-world? A: It's a living space/world for the headmates to go and spend their time while not fronting. In some cases it's merely a parallel mock-up of the world around the body." 
  • "[System is] a term used for someone who's multiple to refer to all of them. Family works too." 
  • "Q: What is a 'gateway system'? A: Various worlds branching off from a centeral [sic] space in-world. A gateway can also refer to a system that is interconnected with other worlds so that people can pass through. Some stay, some don't." 
  • "Fronting: Being up front or 'in control' of the body." 
  • "In-world: Referring to a world within the system or mind." 
  • "Headspace: This can refer to any 'interior' space, whether it's just a single room or an entire world (or worlds)." 
  • "Age-sliders: A headmate whose age fluctuates." 
  • "Keeper/Core: The 'original' person in a system. Please note that not all systems may have a core." 
  • "World-slider: A headmate who can travel to other systems, or who moves between worlds/universes in general." 
  • "Walk-ins: A headmate that isn't constantly present." 
  • "Little: A headmate who is a child or of young age." 
  • "Fictive: A headmate based on a fictional character." Um, what? They also mention otherkin, by the way. Between this crap and the other universes, and some angel bupkis that I'm too tired to go look up and show to you, yeah, there is a whole bunch of credibility lost on this whole show. There might be a grain of truth here, something weird going on with a very small subset of the population of people with multiple identities, and who have sufficient control that you can't really call it a disorder, but all of this stuff? Yeah no. It's Bigfoot. Still makes for good story fodder tho. 
  • On their Team page, they list such members as The Ange System, "a group of non-humans, fictives, and walk-ins" and "The Weyr, "a system mostly made up of a median who refer to ourself/ves as the Parallels, being four parallel universe versions of the same person... We've also got a basilisk called Basil and cat-person called Jinx." On the Ange-specific page, the list of fictives includes "the group of Homestucks, all of whom who front fairly often: Karkat Vantas, Terezi Pyrope, The Signless, Nera (The Disciple), and Maya (The young Condesce from universe Alpha/Meenah)."
  • From the FAQ at Dreanshore.net: "Q: Why do some people say they have fictional characters or people from stories as part of their systems? How is that possible? A: Well, we're not saying that the characters literally hop right out of stories to take a ride in one's brain, although some choose to interpret it this way. Actually, in our experiences (both personally and from what we've read), having people in a system who are modeled after or supposed to be various characters is not uncommon. Billy Milligan, for instant, has theorized that their Arthur was originally modeled after Sherlock Holmes. Unfortunately, since multiplicity is (or was, in the past) viewed by both therapists and skeptics as a form of make-believe gone too far... the idea of fictional characters as part of systems has been used to deride and denigrate multiples, as if it 'proves' the extent of our delusional nature." Well, yeah. "...Ironically, many actors, writers and artists have described having the characters they depict or portray 'living in their heads,' talking to them, having a degree of will of their own. As far as we're concerned, this proves not that there's anything wrong with them but rather than multiplicity is natural: that the human mind has an innate ability and tendency toward forming other minds." 
  • From the Living Plural Asks Page: "These days I guess people who are versions of real people are called 'factives' (in the olden days of my youth they were 'introjects' but I'm guessing that term has fallen by the wayside..."

    "Hermione Granger Versus the Methods of Rationality" 



  • "It's easy to fall into the trap, ironically, of not thinking critically about this text in part because the presentation suggests a reading of the text that accept[s] Rationalist!Harry as both author surrogate and sole voice of reason." 
  • "Texts train your readers how to read them, and this text has a recurring difficulty in telegraphing its intentions." 
  • "If you're going to write, you may as well do it with a whole rather than a halved ass." 
  • "Metatextual reactions, of course, are not bad at all. It's a good sign of critical reading. However, when you have a bunch of (largely female, I think) readers responding to a major emotional moment in your story by calling you a sexist asshole... well, that suggests to me that there's been a major disconnect between the story you're attempting to tell and the story that people are reading."
  • "A Formalist criticism, as I've said before, BEGINS AT THE BEGINNING and ENDS AT THE END, as God ordains, forever and ever and ever Amen. It's a fine way of working because it allows you to examine how a theme develops and possibly turns on its head by the end of a narrative. But it is not accurate to how people react to a text. You do not read a text feeling completely neutral about it until the end, when you pass judgment. You do not read a text ignoring the theme until the end, when you pass judgment. For goodness sake, this is why people stop reading books or leave movie theaters." 
  • "It is no coincidence that the good activists [in feminism] are those whose message is most appealing to said white, straight, cismales. It's a good way of breeding division within a movement and stifling radicalism-- after all, the stigma of being grouped in with The Bad Camp is a powerful swayer of behaviors, considering how much humans want to be accepted rather than persecuted." 
  • "Just because a theme is present and coherent does not make that theme defensible from other critical standpoints." 
  • "Formalism-- the New Criticism that sought to find deep themes in everything-- always positioned itself as fundamentally universal and above such petty things as the status of non-white, non-straight, non-men in texts. Feminist theory, queer theory, colonial and race theory... this stuff all emerges in part as a critique of that purported universality, and the message frequently boils down to this idea: 'If the champions of your themes are always white, upper middle class, cismen, and every other narrative arc in your story bends around them, then you DON'T really have a universal experience or truth, do you? You have a narrow perspective that tells readers outside that narrow band that they should just be more like those straight white uppermiddleclass cismen." 


    "Hunger Metagames"



  • "The key idea is that to outsmart your opponents in a battle of wits (as if there was any other kind) you must think recursively: you must be able to think about what your opponent is thinking. The amount of recursion you can handle is your level." It sucks when your opponent decides to flip a coin. 
  • "There's a particular weight to the choice, in the fic [HPMOR], of referring to the these [sic] levels as part of Playing The Game. It's meaningful because any gamers in the audience-- whether video- or tabletop-gamers-- will probably catch on to the fact that this recursive thinking in levels is very similar to the concept of the metagame. The metagame is what goes on around and outside of an individual match. Any alliances, choices of strategies based on other players, even attempts to out-think judges or the rules of a tournament... all of this stuff is part of the metagame, the game beyond the game. It's thinking about the game in terms of a higher level of play. [ellipsis original]"
  • "Katniss decides that she wants to beat the game on Every. Single. Fucking. Level. Take that in for a moment, would you? Think about her decision to flip the proverbial bird at the state not in terms simply of rebellion, but in terms of forcing an outcome in the highest possible level of recursion. She has out thought the people running the whole show. She is one level higher than you." 
  • "What this book is training. Not to be a brutal killer, of course, but to be a metagame thinker-- to think recursively. Not only that, it teaches both that metagame thinking is cool and desirable in a hero, and importantly, that metagame thinking has its own limits, and can be self-destructive when taken too far." 
  • "This game is, in essence, a preparatory program that sets up works like HPMOR, or Frank Herbert's Dune, or Le Guin's The Dispossessed, or any number of brilliant classic works of literature. And I hate to hammer this point home, but it does so when few other books do. How recursive of a thinker, for example, is Bella Swan?" 
  • "So, the reason I am currently quite excited about The Hunger Games is that they are endorsing cleverness and intellect in a way that few other things are. Their popularity seems to suggest that people are eager for such things, as well, which gives me great hope for the future of young adult literature, and literature in general." 


    Miscellaneous



  • C. S. Lewis, Religion and Rocketry, via Decent Films' review of District 9: "We know what our race does to strangers. Man destroys or enslaves every species he can. Civilized man murders, enslaves, cheats and corrupts savage man... [Men] will do as their kind has always done. What that will be if they meet things weaker than themselves, the black man and the red man can tell... I therefore fear the practical, not the theoretical, problems which will arise if we ever meet rational creatures which are not human. Against them we shall, if we can, commit all the crimes we have already committed against creatures certainly human but differing from us in features and pigmentation; and the starry heavens will become an object to which good men can look up only with feelings of intolerable guilt, agonized pity, and burning shame. [ellipsis and word replacements original to review]"
  • John McWhorter, "Let's Stop Pretending That French Is an Important Language": "The idea that American-born children need to learn French has become more reflex than action, like classical music played at the wedding of people who live to modern pop. French in educated America is now a class marker, originating from that distant day when French was Europe's international language." 
  • John McWhorter, ": "What, then, will be a new marker of linguistic classiness? One could be to seek languages for actual use rather than as a fashion statement...."

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