transformation cycle

Dr George, professor of ‘lifespan development’, can identify what year you graduated from high school during a 20-minute interview while blindfolded. Clues? Verbal expressions, vocabulary, explanatory-style, values, ideals, etc. “..basically, it’s recognizing what’s in focus and what’s on the periphery of their narrative. Tells you what cohort they belong to.” What’s a cohort ..? “A cohort is a group of people who pass through periods of historical and social change at around the same age. As a result, they experience these events during the same period of development. People who were in their adolescence when 9/11 occurred for example, or those who were coming-of-age while fighting in Iraq. It makes a difference in the way they express themselves and how they explain current events. Their narrative is an interaction between lifespan-development and socio-cultural development.” He says, however, if college was a transformational experience .. they’re not so easily pegged. “It’s a game changer” Why’s that ..? “Because it sets in motion a transformation-cycle that follows them throughout life. Like recurring periods of renewal ..they shed what’s out-of-date and adapt more contemporary elements to their narrative. In other words, they periodically cover their tracks.”

Reading behavior

When I make a conscious effort, I can kind of catch a glimpse of whatever’s going on inside my head that helps me grasp the meaning of what I’m reading and relate it to other things I know about. It may be part of my training, but ..what I’m seeing is not unique to me. It is a process that’s common to everyone. It’s universal. It’s been observed and documented by linguists all over the world. As I read, I’m building an ‘event-chain’. An event-chain is made up of information from prior-sentences, which I get from working-memory, and prior-experience, which I get from long-term memory. When I read about the rebel invasion of Tripoli this week, I immediately built a relatively simple event-chain based on a limited set of events stored in long-term memory. It looked something like this:

However, as I read further ..I discovered this was not the case. The invasion was the result of Kadafi’s own undoing. Now my event-chain looks something like this:

Suddenly NATO air strikes don’t seem quite so important anymore. My first reading was in error. It doesn’t take into account a whole heap of events I didn’t know about. My second event-chain probably doesn’t either. However, I still come away with the feeling that I’m sufficiently informed, which leads to something else I’ve noticed: I struggle with yielding to the probability of the unknown, which is always greater than what I can fit into an event-chain. However, an event-chain is about all that I can fit into my pea-brain.

Temporal binding

The hippocampus is a brain structure that plays a major role in the process of memory formation. It is not entirely clear how the hippocampus manages to string together events that are part of the same experience but are separated in time. Newly published research finds that there are neurons in the hippocampus that encode the sequence of events that make up experience [link] and [link].

Dyslexia

Voice recognition involves perceiving differences in the way people speak. Individuals with dyslexia, however, cannot do this. The problem is a slight auditory impairment. They can understand perfectly well what others are saying and who is speaking. They’re just not as sensitive to subtle phonic variations between speakers. 

A study by Tyler Perrachione at MIT [link] reaffirms the theory that the underlying deficit in dyslexia is about processing the sound of what’s written, not about seeing what’s written. They took it a step further and discovered a link between reading difficulty and the social ecology surrounding spoken language. Individuals with dyslexia have difficulty hearing consistent properties of speech within speaker as well as differences between speakers. “Lots of research has shown that individuals with dyslexia have more trouble understanding speech when there is noise in the background” says Perrachione. “These results suggest that part of the problem may be trouble following a specific voice.”

They took it another step further and found something that I find interesting. Individuals without dyslexia have the same difficulty hearing phonic variation between speakers in their second language (Mandarin Chinese) as dyslexics do between speakers in their native language. This corroborates my observation that children, without dyslexia, often perform at the same level as children with dyslexia when they are being taught to read for the first time in a foreign language. They don’t have the ‘phonic background’ necessary to identify the phonetic compounds of words. I believe this puts children from non-English backgrounds at a disadvantage when learning to read in English-speaking schools [link]