Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [429]
“rooned the sif into hlf the and the foig aurene to”
The so-called sentences, some of which sound like a bad simulation of Jabberwocky, range from the “semantically congruent” (they make sense) through the “semantically random” (the individual words make sense but the sentence does not) to the “pseudo-word list” (nonwords in no syntactical order).
The young woman’s choices of which buttons to push don’t actually matter; what the four researchers are interested in is what the fMRI scans show about her brain activity as she hears the spoken words. And in fact what they show is exciting, although the researchers, in their report, couch their findings in the usual impassive academese: “Syntactic and semantic processes engaged during sentence comprehension occur in distinct but overlapping parts of the temporal and parietal lobes. These regions make use of syntactic and semantic information in different ways.” The details, too recondite to repeat here, add up to an intriguing finding: The human brain has different specialized circuits for interpreting the semantics (meaning) and the syntax (sentence structure) of heard speech.1
—A white-coated man, scalpel in hand, bends over a laboratory table and, slowly laying open the body of a brown Australian marsupial mouse, searches for its tiny adrenal glands. The mouse, a male, had died after many hours of continuous copulation; all males of this species, Antechinus stuartii, expire after a nonstop bout of five to twelve hours of sexual activity, which they engage in only during a two-week period of the year. Examination of the adrenals of a number of such mice leads to an explanation: The length of daylight and average temperature during the reproductive season induce extreme hyperactivity of the male mouse’s adrenals, which trigger the prolonged and stressful copulation that ends in death.2The study adds to a growing body of knowledge of seasonal influences on the behavior of mice… and men.
—In a room designed to look like a cocktail lounge, a small group of volunteers meet, are served drinks (some get vodka and tonic, some only tonic, though what they are told they’re getting isn’t necessarily the truth). After fifteen minutes of drinking and chatting, they are shepherded into a back room where they watch a twenty-five-second video of two basketball teams passing balls back and forth, and are asked to count the number of times the white-shirted team passes the ball. During the action, a woman dressed in a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the screen, beats her chest, and walks off. When the video is over, the researchers interview each participant; they find, remarkably, that of the forty-six who took part in a dozen small sessions, only 18 percent of those who had a real drink had noticed the gorilla—and even more remarkably, that fewer than 50 percent of those who got a placebo (nonvodka) drink had noticed it. The two significant implications: Even mild intoxication strongly affects the ability to notice anything other than what one is paying attention to (passing the basketball), and even sober people are not likely to notice an unexpected and unusual object if they are paying attention to something else—a finding that could be of crucial importance to eyewitness testimony in court cases.3
—In a psychology lab, two student volunteers stand at opposite sides of a narrow table; a central curtain hangs between them, screening them from each other, and they have been instructed not to speak. Each grasps a handle of a crank that runs under the table from one to the other. On the table is a large, flat, blue disk, with two small marks at its edge, one on each side. From above, a target area (a small white oblong) is projected onto each side of the disk. The participants can rotate the disk by means of the crank handles, and when told, they try to move the mark on the disk into the target area as quickly as possible, then wait for a new target to appear. Since each student has a handle of the crank and no instructions as to how to proceed, the participants are as likely to