oddities of the human mind

First off, so this post makes some sense, I will point out that I have been awake for the past 26 hours, and that before that I slept only four hours, and the night before that only four hours, so I am really tired (and as I don't drink caffeine, I am only running on my own juices).

I am only writing this post for the immediacy of scientific inquiry.

My first point is unrelated to my exhaustion. I have been doing this experiment on myself and polling random people. I have been telling people they cannot think, that they have to answer me with the first thing that comes to mind, and then I ask "Name something you haven't done before." I've gotten some appropriate answers (the most common being "had sex" as my friends here, unlike back home, are mostly virgins), but I also got some inappropriate answers (like "sleep," which is wrong but it is always on our minds). It got me thinking about the generation of random noise by some kind of synaptic connection in the semantic net. When I tried this first on myself, I thought, "driven through the grand canyon" which is fairly normal, but the second time I tried I thought, "eaten an apple on the moon" which really is just noise. So there are three subtypes of results: accurate answers, random noise, and errors. I was wondering what exactly in our cognitive structure determines these immediate answers and what kinds of connections produce gross errors or bizarre noise. It is like when you play that game where someone says a topic and you have to immediately say something related or you lose. For instance, when I've played, someone could say something like "things found in an office" and two people would say "folders" and "pens" and someone would say "tigers." All three had the same task at hand, but for some reason the third person generated an error while the other two people produced accurate results.
I realize this probably seems boring, but as I work in a cognitive science lab and read lots of papers about these sorts of errors in statistical thinking, it is interesting to me. It has also allowed me to experiment and think on my own a bit and break free from the Bayesian statical models I'm surrounded with at work (although I do not doubt that this noise/error generation could probably be modeled with Bayesian statistics as well).

Interesting thing number 2: (hopefully I haven't gone on about this before in here; I don't think I have) my experiment at work, in its most recent form (it is again under revision now) failed, and it failed because of human illogic. I have learned in this job that people really aren't logical. We model them with computer models, and they still answer random, wildly contradictory things on occasion (or as in this experiment, frequently and reliably). The only person to pass the experiment is a friend of mine that has taken it in every version and heard me explain it.
So the experiment consists of showing people evidence of causal structures (in this case it is evidence of physical effects in mice from hypothetical injections of chemicals). Subjects are given twenty pieces of "evidence" (slips of paper with affected mice on them). There are five structures. First off, I have really enjoyed watching the learning curve as people learn how to more efficiently organize the data. Ok, so after each structure they are asked two sets of questions: what chemical would you inject to get effect whatever, and what was a scientist who injected chemical whatever trying to do.
The conditions we were testing for made this question a little bit tricky, but some amouunt of logical thought would produce the result we wanted. However, we found that everyone relied solely on numbers and really deconstructed the causal structure. Many people answered the question of what they would do correctly but missed the questions about the scientist (which is blatantly contradictory). We tried everything we could to get people to connect the structures in their minds, but nothing worked.
Friday (some day anyway, I can't tell which) I tried something new. I first gave my friends the experiment using the paper evidence (this time taking away the evidence before allowing them to answer in an effort to discourage reliance on numbers). I honestly was expecting this revision to work, but it didn't; people still answered incorrectly by decoupling the structures. Then I gave them the same *exact* structure but in word form (ie instead of ten out of twenty mice with pictures of brittle hair, they hear that chemical whatever "sometimes" causes brittle hair; the "sometimes" replaces the specific causal frequency). Everyone (except on confused friend) got that structure right. They were all shocked when I told them they were the same structure. So anyway, I discovered something really interesting about human reliance on numbers in empirical data. It makes you question some scientific qualitative vs quantitative observations if quantitative details can cause very illogical thought processes.

Random fact number 3 (this one finally relying on my exhaustion): I was standing in front of the mirror brushing my teeth a few minutes ago when I underwent this thought process:
If I just open the sodium channels to depolorize it then it will let in peace, hope, love, safety---
wow, my thoughts are really random and don't make sense--
and if it lets those in then I will fire and things will be okay.
So obviously my thought process, due to exhaustion and the repetitive motion of brushing my teeth, was really nonsensical. But what is so interesting is that somehow, in the very midst of my illogical, disconnected thinking (mixture of my sadness over past memories and my mental fixation with neuroscience at the moment), *I thought something very self-reflective and logical, namely that I was thinking illogically.* Then my thoughts promptly becane nonsensical again, but I realized in some non-thinking part of me that I was aware of their nonsensical nature. When I get really tired, this happens to me. It could have to do with some unique psychological features that my mind has, but I think it is possibly somthing humanly ubiquituous (it would be interesting to try to find that out, but not feasible) that the mind, even as it strays absolutely into a sort of non-conscious haze, is still *aware* of itself in a very passive way. I could hear my thoughts, but I just was idly aware that they were discombobulated. Somehow there was a logical aspect of me making this observation of the illogical part of me.

Final tidbit: I wrote my linguistics paper on statistical learning of word segmentation in infants and monkeys. I find it really interesting that generative grammar and other statistical formulas for language rule acquisition can apply in a species that has never said a human word. What I mean is that it makes sense that monkeys can derive some language rules since it has been shown that some species of monkeys (Vervet, Tamarin) have something that strongly resembles a language. But what baffles me is that these monkeys can determine word segmenation in *human* speech. They've never spoken a word like the words we speak in their lives, but somehow their orientation responses prove that they comprehend the differences between words, non-words, and word-boundaries. That is so bizarre to me. I wouldn't believe it if they hadn't done the experiment to prove it (although I don't find the experiment compellingly absolutely conclusive). Why in the world do monkeys have the evolutionary equipment to determine *human* (not just monkey) grammar rules?
And the more interesting question- why do we not have the capacity to determine monkey grammar rules intuitively the way they have the capacity to determine our rules? Our language is far more complex and developed, and yet we lack this advanced intuition that primates can have.

Ok that's quite enough and quite more than I was planning on reambling about. There are just too many interesting things to think about. Sadly, though, I have been thinking about math and physics less and less and computer programming, neuroscience, philosophy, and cognitive science more and more since the latter are the fields I am going into and the former are just the fields I love.

FINAL FINAL tidbit- I just realized upon looking back at old posts that I did write about the monkeys on here before (probably when I read the papers), and I think it's really quite interesting that I have/had no recollection of that.