Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran once remarked that people would never understand each other unless their language is reduced to half a dozen words. The truth is that often we need only that many words (a small amount of information) for effective communication. Bruno Galantucci possibly realized this when he discovered that necessity is the mother of invention in a very different way. He is a cognitive scientist interested in revealing the secrets of successful communication.
A device behaves like a roll of paper that scrolls downwards all the time, so that you won’t get a chance to jot down letters, numbers and other characters, precisely at a time when you want to mark things that you see on a computer screen. You are one of the two players in a game by Dr. Galantucci, in which you share with the other a number of symbols, commonly recognizable but not conveying the same meanings. The task at hand is as challenging as inventing a new language.
The players have to find one another in a virtual bungalow, which typically consists of four rooms arranged in a square, with a doorway connecting adjacent rooms. Seated at interconnected computers but unable to see or hear each other, they don’t have much time to explore their surroundings before they start playing. But, they can pick clues from the icons (circles, hexagons, flowers, etc) which they see own each floor. Of course, with good spatial awareness one can move through all the rooms in a jiffy and get an idea of the layout, but all are not game for it.
Despite this, however, the experiments show that reliable symbolic systems emerge pretty fast. Some players extract different features of the icons (such as the number of vertices, or some linear abstraction of a shape), while others rely on a numbering system for the rooms, moving clockwise or otherwise. A third technique is to place marks on different parts of the screen so as to label the rooms by their relative position in space.
Dr. Galantucci’s work suggests that differing ideas about how their languages depict the world do not stop people from communicating with each other. At least in virtual world contexts, what is critical for successful communication between a pair is not an agreement on the meanings of handy symbols, but an agreement on the action to be taken when they confront them. Yes, people only need to convey a small amount of information to communicate effectively.
SNEAK PREVIEW
Female sense of humor
Bill Cosby. Mitch Hedberg. Eddie Murphy. What do they have in common? All of them are good comedians and, unfortunately, all of them are males too. Too bad, for a new study shows that women are more likely to enjoy a good joke than men. More interestingly, the male and female brains reactions to humor reveal that women are more analytical in their approach. Women experience more pleasure when they decide something really is funny. They appear to have less expectation of a reward, which in the study was the punch line of the cartoon. So, when they get to the joke’s punch line, they are more pleased about it.
Feeling lonely? It’s the genes
It is possible that people who feel lonely can overcome their problem in a caring social environment, but in some cases, the hereditary factor rules. Research on twins is the best way to understand the truth of the matter, because twins raised together share many of the same environmental influences as well as similar genes in most cases. Dutch researchers find that about 50 percent of identical twins and 25 percent of fraternal twins share similar characteristics of loneliness. Feelings of loneliness perhaps reflect an innate emotional response to stimulus conditions that are beyond our control.
QUIZ No.208
1. We associate a special kind of screwdriver with …
– Doctor Who
– Huckleberry Finn
– Popeye The Sailor
– Dr. Frankeinstein
1. Doctor Who (refers to the sonic screwdriver).
2. Think of this scientist and you will reach American baseball superstar Louis Gehrig.
– Carl Sagan
– Linus Pauling
– Stephen Hawking
– Robert A. Millikan
2. Stephen Hawking (who got Lou Gehrig’s disease).
3. All with some highlander connection, but who had worked for Vladmir Lenin’s newspaper Pravda?
– Andrew Divoff
– Anthony De Longis
– Alexandra Vandernoot
– Arsen Kotsoyey
3. Arsen Kotsoyey
4. Dragging a coffin behind him, the hero enters a dull city in which movie?
– ‘Django’
– ‘Midnight Cowboy’
– ‘Valdez Is Coming’
– ‘Mean Streets’
4. Django.
5. Who claim(s) to have created remote controlled turtles for spying missions?
– Alexei Burikov
– AI Laboratory, MIT
– Woodrow and Hoff
– World of Robots
5. Alexei Burikov