The Reality Check Episode 79

Olympics Revisited + Euphamism Treadmill + Audiobooks vs Books

Part 1:

So, how do we actually say that who won the Winter Olympics? Do we just count the number of medals? Or do we count who has the most gold medals? 

If we count the most medals, then the US won. if we count the most gold medals, the Canada won. But, there's another issue about the country population. Norway is around 8 times smaller than the US by population size, but they have 23 medals, and the US has 32. 

We can also look at the amount of athlete and see the percentage of the medals. Another thing is that if you send 2 teams for one sport, then it is impossible for both to have gold medals. 

There are also effects by the fundings the country gives to the athletes. 

So, if you only win by 1/100, then is it really skill? Or is it just chance? Of course if you win by 3 seconds, you obviously win of course. 

So, basically, don't just blindly look at the number and say who is the better country at the Winter Olympics. 

Part 2: 

Euphemisms often evolve over time into taboo words themselves, through a process described by W.V.O Quine, and more recently dubbed the "euphemism treadmill" by Steven Pinker. This is the well-known linguistic process known as “pejoration” or “semantic change”.

Words originally intended as euphemisms may lose their euphemistic value, acquiring the negative connotations of their referents. In some cases, they may be used mockingly and become dysphemisms.

In his remarks on the ever-changing London slang, made in Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell, mentioned both the euphemism treadmill and the dysphemism treadmill. He did not use these now-established terms, but observed and commented on the respective processes as early as in 1933.

For example, the term "concentration camp", to describe camps used to confine civilian members of the Boer community in close (concentrated) quarters, was used by the British during the Second Boer War, primarily because it sounded bland and inoffensive. Despite the high death rates in the British concentration camps, the term remained acceptable as a euphemism. However, after Nazi Germany used the expression to describe its death camps in the 1930s and 1940s, the term gained a widespread negative connotation, particularly in connection with the Holocaust.

Also, in some circles, the euphemisms "lavatory" or "toilet", are now considered inappropriate and were replaced with "bathroom" and "water closet", which in turn have been replaced by some with restroom and W.C. These are also examples of euphemisms which are geographically concentrated. The term "restroom" is rarely used outside the United States. "W.C." was previously quite popular in the United Kingdom, but is passing out of favor there, but becoming more popular in France, Germany and Hungary now as the polite term of choice. - Wiki

Science Myth of the Week: 

A new study by Carnegie Mellon University scientists shows that because of the way the brain works, we understand spoken and written language differently, something that has potential implications in the workplace and in education, among many other areas.

In the first imaging study that directly compares reading and listening activity in the human brain, Carnegie Mellon scientists discovered that the same information produces systematically different brain activation. And knowing what parts of the brain fire during reading or listening comprehension affects the answer to one of the classic questions about language comprehension: whether the means of delivery through eyes or ears makes a difference.

"The brain constructs the message, and it does so differently for reading and listening. The pragmatic implication is that the medium is part of the message. Listening to an audio book leaves a different set of memories than reading does. A newscast heard on the radio is processed differently from the same words read in a newspaper," said Carnegie Mellon Psychology Professor Marcel Just, co author of the report that appears in this month's issue of the journal Human Brain Mapping.

Just said that the most recent methods of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) were applied to measure brain activity during these high level conceptual processes. Rather than examining the processing of single digits or words, his group is applying brain imaging to societal, workplace, and instructional issues.

"We can now see how cell phone use can affect driving, how reading differs from listening, and how visual thinking is integrated with verbal thinking," Just said.

Using the non invasive fMRI, scientists were able to measure the amount of activity in each of 20,000 peppercorn sized regions of the brain every three seconds and create visual maps of how the mental work of thinking was allocated throughout the brain from moment to moment. To the scientists' surprise, there were two big differences in the brain activity patterns while participants were reading or listening to identical sentences, even at the conceptual level of understanding the meaning of a sentence.

First, during reading, the right hemisphere was not as active as anticipated, which opens the possibility that there were qualitative differences in the nature of the comprehension we experience in reading versus listening. Second, while listening was taking place, there was more activation in the left hemisphere brain region called the pars triangularis (the triangular section), a part of Broca's area that usually activates when there is language processing to be done or there is a requirement to maintain some verbal information in an active state (sometimes called verbal working memory). The greater amount of activation in Broca's area suggests that there is more semantic processing and working memory storage in listening comprehension than in reading.

Because spoken language is so temporary, each sound hanging in the air for a fraction of a second, the brain is forced to immediately process or store the various parts of a spoken sentence in order to be able to mentally glue them back together in a conceptual frame that makes sense. "By contrast," Just said, "written language provides an "external memory" where information can be re­read if necessary. But to re play spoken language, you need a mental play back loop, (called the articulatory phonological loop) conveniently provided in part by Broca's area."

The study doesn't attempt to suggest that one means of delivering information is better than another, Just said. "Is comprehension better in listening or in reading? It depends on the person, the content of the text, and the purpose of the comprehension. In terms of persons, some people are more skilled at one form of comprehension and typically exercise a preference for their more skilled form where possible. It may be that because of their experience and biology they are better and more comfortable in listening or reading," he explained. -CM