Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/31/an-intriguing-list-of-little.html
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But bias confirming Reddit comments in a quarantined sub are gospel truth because they make the god emperor seem even more awesome so they must be true! /s
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Little known, maybe not obvious.
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AAAAHHHH! P-ZOMBIES ARE REAL!
(Seriously, this has really freaked me out.)
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…and not everyone can conjure up visual imagery…
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I call BS on the voiced/unvoiced consonant thing. My lips do not do the same thing with “b” as with “p”, and my tongue does not do the same thing with “d” as with “t”. It’s not just a matter of activating vocal folds, it’s a difference in sharpness, or impact, or whatever.
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Interesting. Here’s a blogpost (which is apparently part of a series) which has a bit more:
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I think you may be referring to aspiration: ‘p’ and ‘t’ (and also ‘c’) are usually aspirated in English, while ‘b’ and ‘d’ (and ‘g’) aren’t. The big exception is after ‘s’: the ‘p’ in ‘pin’ is aspirated, that in ‘spin’ is not. Similarly top/stop, kin/skin.
Fun fact: the initial sound in ‘Beijing’ is not actually a ‘b’ (at least not in Chinese), it’s an unaspirated ‘p’. This is difficult for a native English-speaker to pronounce in an initial position (certainly for this English speaker), hence its rendering in English as a ‘b’.
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I wonder if people without internal narrative are immune to telepaths? Has any story including telepathy considered this.
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Percentages are reversible. 8% of 25 is the same as 25% of 8 and one of them is much easier to do in your head.
That one simultaneously made me feel dumb and blew my mind. The voiced/unvoiced consonant one is obvious if one has learned any Japanese. Many of the rest are about things I’ve never even thought about thinking about, so they kind of feel like “unfacts” to me. The odd/even numbered roads one, for instance - I’m usually more concerned about the road over a short distance, where the “North” road is actually taking me West, for example.
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I love the concept. The only problem I see is that you’d first have to be sure your readers were comfortable with the idea of some people having internal narratives and some not - and it’s certainly not something I’d thought about before this post.
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“If there’s no lead in your pencil you won’t need a rubber.” (I don’t know if this works in American English…)
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I have very little internal dialogue. When words are assigned too quickly, they can stuff experience into an ill fitting suit.
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My friend is like this. She’s amazed that I can think of a shape and build it out of Lego. Weirdly, she’s an artist. Quite a good one too. It gives me a headache just thinking about it.
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I’m sure it is true that some people think about words more than others. But it is self-evidently nonsense to say that anyone thinks in words.
In order to “hear” a thought verbalised, you must have already had the non-verbal form of that thought. Like, the sentence “I should call Marsha” cannot precede thinking of Marsha, calling, your feelings on the subject etc. To suppose otherwise would create the question of who is saying these thoughts, and what is happening inside their mind, in an infinite regress.
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There is a recurrent askreddit question along the lines of How can deaf people be thinking if they can’t be thinking in spoken words?
Which really goes to show how little some people understand about their own thought processes.
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But that supposes the verbal and non-verbal forms are the same, and I don’t think that’s always the case. I can feel sad, or angry, or afraid, and not know why until I’ve “talked it through” with myself: the verbalisation is an essential part of my chain of thought. Certainly the non-verbal beginnings and the verbalised end product are related, but they are not the same thought: the latter is an extension and development of the latter.
At least, that’s how it seems to me.
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In language it’s referred to voiced and unvoiced. I kind of agree that not everyone forms the sounds the same way, but I learned about voiced/unvoiced studying Japanese 20 years ago. That’s the whole function of the Den-Den’s, to switch between unvoiced/voiced.
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“self-evidently nonsense” you say?
I think in sentences. I have conversations with myself. It’s not nonsense at all.
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