http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...104009.htm

"It's an experience shared by everyone: You run into someone you know, but his or her name escapes you. Now, Temple psychologist Ingrid Olson has found a way to improve the recall of proper names.

Olson dedicates her research to understanding human memory. In a recent study, she found that electric stimulation of the right anterior temporal lobe of the brain improved the recall of proper names in young adults by 11 percent. Her study appears this month in the journal Neuropsychologia."

another gadget to carry around... ;p

Curious that it improved recall of names of people but not locations. There's another article on that page related to names:

Quote:... pronouns may play a far greater role than simply replacing a proper name in a sentence. ... pronouns help keep the brain’s complex circuitry and limited memory system from being overloaded. The brain responds to proper names by creating a representation of the person in the mind, drawing from various parts of the brain to construct complex visual, sound and other information associated with that person. ... The integration of these multiple representations requires effort that can disrupt the brain’s ongoing processing of what it hears during spoken conversation.

So those smarmy sales types who are taught to repeat customers' names and name drop are actually trying to bamboozle.

And since Japanese routinely leave out names and pronouns, they're the least confused. Or Japanese is the easiest language to comprehend. Or something...

Here's an interesting tidbit from the source paper: "We previously showed that the ATL is more sensitive to social stimuli than non-social stimuli ([Olson et al., 2007], [Ross and Olson, 2010], [Simmons et al., 2009], [Zahn et al., 2007] and [Zahn et al., 2009]). The different effects in the face and place conditions of this study may therefore reflect the differential sensitivity of this region to social stimuli."

Heh, that 2007 pronoun article you pointed out is interesting. I like this part: “Language has evolved to meet our brain’s needs, and sign language is no different,” said Almor.

Yeah, I think social stimuli and language learning make good bedfellows. As long as proper names are avoided of course (adversely effects listening comprehension). ;p Less time at the computer is probably a good start though...

I thought you might pick up on that mention of sign language. Itseems like a bit of a stretch, though - that physical representation of thinking bit. As I understand it, they're drawing a parallel between the efficiency of sign language pointing to a created name location (instead of signing each letter) and the brain's efficiency in using pronouns rather than having to access a full mental representation of the person.

Off topic: btw, that discussion a while back about language skills of the hearing impaired caught my interest. I have 2 cousins born deaf and I'm embarrassed to say I'd never given much thought to their education. (They're both university grads and have no apparent impairment in reading and writing.) I've since read up on it a bit and we're going to chat next visit. My cousin's wife is bilingual Japanese (also hearing impaired), so I'm hoping she might want to talk about some of the differences.

To think of all those times I cattle proded people that couldn't remember my name and I was actually doing them a memory favor!

(lame, I know)

Off topic: @ Thora: you should try and learn the ASL, it's a bit like Heisig without readings, you can get to a basic level quite quickly (there's a great British Telecom video file about it).

(ごめんなさいいい)

EratiK Wrote:To think of all those times I cattle proded people that couldn't remember my name and I was actually doing them a memory favor!

(lame, I know)

Off topic: you should try and learn the ASL, it's a bit like Heisig without readings, you can get to a basic level quite quickly (there's a great British Telecom video file about it).

Sounds like a worthwhile endeavour, but I must try and learn Japanese, French, Python, PHP, etc., first, while continuing to improve my English. ;p

@Thora - Sounds cool. It's a really fascinating area from a linguistic perspective because of topics like embodied cognition and the examination of the role of gesture in the evolution of language -- though originally (edit: before discovering directly rather than obliquely supportive research) I was just going on hunches based on the idea that sound isn't as prominent and deafness as impeding as fusty old paradigms suggested and it was important affectively to objectively debunk any such thoughts especially if inspired by obsolete models -- but I ramble; Almor's suggestion and your concern are a bit uncertain to me, between the limitation of the article (and I can't find full papers on Almor's thoughts on ASL/etc.). From what I understand, Almor and others' research points to amodal, common correlates in the brain for processing language and stuff like pronouns, the 'intraparietal sulcus', 'spatial processing' and 'perceptual integration'.

Almor's got this 'informational load hypothesis' about referents and such: http://lib.bioinfo.pl/paper:10560327 - I like this schematic because it underscores the abstract, narratological, informational, contextual, etc. elements of analyzing language structure and how it corresponds to usage/the brain.

For his ASL thing, I took it they were saying (by the way did you know some people take issue with using 'they' as an epicene singular? I had no idea) that the same underlying processes result in the same techniques be it gestural, spoken, or textual. Though I'd like to see more research on this specific element of sign language (rather than stuff I posted about in previous threads, many of those ideas inspired by posts at Babel's Dawn), in particular the 'design' aspect of the language, i.e. by whom and for what stated goals (edit: that is to say, anchoring a name in space and pointing back to it). It'd also be interesting to see if that trend with pronouns and names develops in the same way rough approximations of OV (edit: originally I said SOV but I meant OV for home signers, as Susan Goldin-Meadow talks about: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=326) seem to arise (invented by signers or paralleled from text, etc.)...

Bonus: Oh snap! ;p