Last week if books were used to mirror our life, this week words are being analysed to understand our future.
We are learning to keep our body fit, stave away illnesses that we can predict by eating healthy, exercising etc. We even do a little Sudoku for our brains and so on. Mariano Sigman, a psychologist comes up with another fascinating aspect of knowing ourselves, “…many of us are now wearing sensors that detect our heart rate, our respiration, our genes, in the hope that this may help us prevent diseases. We can ask whether monitoring and analyzing the words we speak, we tweet, we email, we write, can tell us, ahead of time, whether something may go wrong with our minds.”
In the search for understanding how our mind is thinking, Sigman goes back in time to create an algorithm which is interestingly based on our choice and combination of words. His base is, “We have historical records that allow us to know how the ancient Greeks dressed, how they lived, how they fought ... but how did they think?”
In answer to this question, Sigman studies human thought as recorded in the writings of the time, similar, he says, to studying archaeological inscriptions. He quotes one Julius Jaynes, who he says, “…came up in the '70s with a very wild and radical hypothesis: that only 3,000 years ago, humans were what today we would call schizophrenics. And he made this claim based on the fact that the first humans described in these books behaved consistently, in different traditions and in different places of the world, as if they were hearing and obeying voices that they perceived as coming from the Gods, or from the muses ... what today we would call hallucinations. And only then, as time went on, they began to recognize that they were the creators, the owners of these inner voices. And with this, they gained introspection: the ability to think about their own thoughts.”
Using this as an example Sigman tells us how to measure introspection. He says take a count of all the words related to introspection and find the frequency with which they occur in the ancient texts of a particular culture/region. Within this “space of words”, Sigman says, the story of how the people of the culture/region thought emerges.
Sigman adds, “The algorithm also identifies that we organize concepts in a hierarchy. So, for instance, you can see that scientific terms break down into two subcategories of the astronomic and the physics terms.” Sigman treads the ground between these two words, “…you will see that it actually feels a bit like doing poetry. And this is because, in a way, walking in this space is like walking in the mind…”
His algorithm also identifies our intuitions. If talking of introspection, he says, “All that we have to do is take the books, we digitize them, and we take this stream of words as a trajectory and project them into the space, and then we ask whether this trajectory spends significant time circling closely to the concept of introspection. And with this, we could analyze the history of introspection in the ancient Greek tradition, for which we have the best available written record…for the oldest books in the Homeric tradition, there is a small increase with books getting closer to introspection. But about four centuries before Christ, this starts ramping up very rapidly to an almost five-fold increase of books getting closer, and closer and closer to the concept of introspection. “
“In the same way,” says Sigman, “that we asked about the past of human consciousness, maybe the most challenging question we can pose to ourselves is whether this can tell us something about the future of our own consciousness. To put it more precisely, whether the words we say today can tell us something of where our minds will be in a few days, in a few months or a few years from now.”
sudhamahi@gmail.com
Web link: https://www.ted.com/talks/mariano_sigman_your_
words_may_predict_your_future_mental_health
