Communication seems to be a bit of a theme just at present!
About 18 months ago, I wrote a piece on Learning from Dogs about Rupert Sheldrake’s fascinating book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. The reason that this has come up again (and, as it happens, I’m rereading Sheldrake’s book just now) is a recent item on the Big Think website called Can We Have Brain-to-Brain Communication? Here’s what was written.
Dr. Michio Kaku addresses the question of Collective Intelligence. Some people think that the next big innovation in the coming decades is not going to involve the Internet because we can already connect computers to the human mind. Therefore, Dr. Kaku says this brain-to-brain communication would involve not just the exchange of information, but also the transmission of emotions and feelings, “because these are also part of the fabric of our thoughts.”
There’s also an interesting 4-minute video by Dr. Kaku that may be accessed here.
But then again, many pet owners would probably take it for granted that our cats and dogs can read our mind, as Dr. Sheldrake rather entertainingly explains below.
Before closing today’s post, the research that Dr. Sheldrake has undertaken is very impressive. His website is here, from which one learns that,
Dr. Sheldrake
Rupert Sheldrake, one of the world’s most innovative biologists and writers, is best known for his theory of morphic fields and morphic resonance, which leads to a vision of a living, developing universe with its own inherent memory.
He worked in developmental biology at Cambridge University, where he was a Fellow of Clare College. He was then Principal Plant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), in Hyderabad, India. From 2005 to 2010 he was Director of the Perrott-Warrick project. , funded from Trinity College, Cambridge.
One of the seven experiments concerned unexplained abilities of animals, and I published a series of papers on the unexplained powers of animals, see Papers on animals .
My research with Aimée Morgana into the telepathic powers of her African Grey Parrot, Nkisi, led to the celebrated debate at the London RSA with Prof Lewis Wolpert, which is featured on this website The Telepathy Debate
More information is available on Nkisi, including a tape of one of his conversations with Aimée in The Nkisi project
So if your pet is looking at you as though they know what you are thinking – they probably are!
I make no apologies for today’s post being more emotional and sentimental.
The phrase ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me‘ is well known throughout the English-speaking world and surprisingly goes back some way. A quick web search found that in the The Christian Recorder of March 1862, there was this comment:
Remember the old adage, ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never harm me’. True courage consists in doing what is right, despite the jeers and sneers of our companions.
So if in 1862 the saying was referred to as an ‘old adage’ then it clearly pre-dated 1862 by some degree.
A few days ago, Dusty M., here in Payson, AZ, sent me a short YouTube video called The Power of Words. I’m as vulnerable as the next guy to needing being reminded about what’s important in this funny old world. Then I started mulling over the tendency for all of us to be sucked into a well of doom and gloom. Take my posts on Learning from Dogs over the last couple of days, as an example.
There is no question that the world in which we all live is going through some extremely challenging times but anger and negativity is not going to be the answer. As that old reference spelt out so clearly, “True courage consists in doing what is right, despite the jeers and sneers of our companions.”
So first watch the video,
then let me close by reminding us all that courage is yet something else we can learn from dogs.
Togo the husky
In 1925, a ravaging case of diphtheria broke out in the isolated Alaskan village of Nome. No plane or ship could get the serum there, so the decision was made for multiple sled dog teams to relay the medicine across the treacherous frozen land. The dog that often gets credit for eventually saving the town is Balto, but he just happened to run the last, 55-mile leg in the race. The sled dog who did the lion’s share of the work was Togo. His journey, fraught with white-out storms, was the longest by 200 miles and included a traverse across perilous Norton Sound — where he saved his team and driver in a courageous swim through ice floes.
A new angle on the famous ‘hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil’ saying!
What climate change??
That new angle being ‘hear no climate change, see no climate change, speak no climate change!‘
So what has prompted this outburst from me? It started with me seeing a truly scary graph that was on Peter Sinclair’s Climate Crock blogsite on the 20th September. That was the graph that was published yesterday on Learning from Dogs under the post title of It’s not rocket science! If you didn’t see that graph yesterday, don’t read further on until you have looked at it.
Thus while today’s post could easily be interpreted as yet another blogpost from yet another writer about climate change, that is not the case. What I am doing is taking a quick trip across a few recently published items that really do make it utterly clear what is happening to the Earth’s biosphere, all in support of a very simple question to two gentlemen who are currently in the news; stay with me for all to become clear!
However, this is what caught my eye, (an interview between Dr. Francis and Peter Sinclair).
What she told me in a recent interview was that the sea ice record is not something that we just pay attention to in September – there will, in fact, be reverberations that will make fall and winter “very interesting” around the globe.
An unusually strong storm formed off the coast of Alaska on August 5 and tracked into the center of the Arctic Ocean, where it slowly dissipated over the next several days. The center of the storm was located in the middle of the Arctic Ocean.
On Wednesday, the National Snow and Ice Data Center concluded Arctic sea ice is at its lowest late-August level since records began, and the area covered by ice has continued to shrink in September. Since 1979, the 1.54 million square miles of ice is the smallest coverage on record at the North Pole, the report states.
With so many questions surrounding these latest findings, perhaps one of the most immediate is whether this melting of sea ice will affect the upcoming winter across the United States and Northern Hemisphere. Is it possible that a lack of Arctic sea ice could change weather patterns across the globe?
Four meteorologists spoke about these possibilities, and while they didn’t say dramatic weather shifts are imminent in the short-term, they did give some thoughts on what could happen.
One of the meteorologists was Dr. Jeff Masters, Director of Meteorology, Weather Underground. He wrote,
In my December 2011 blog post, I discuss research by Dr. Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University, who found that Arctic sea ice loss may significantly affect the upper-level atmospheric circulation, slowing its winds and increasing its tendency to make contorted high-amplitude loops. High-amplitude loops in the upper level wind pattern (and associated jet stream) increases the probability of persistent weather patterns in the Northern Hemisphere, potentially leading to extreme weather due to longer-duration cold spells, snow events, heat waves, flooding events, and drought conditions.
Several studies published in 2012 have linked Arctic sea ice loss to an increase in probability of severe winter weather in Western Europe, Eastern North America and Eastern Asia.
Then if one goes to that December 2011 blog post, one reads this,
“The question is not whether sea ice loss is affecting the large-scale atmospheric circulation…it’s how can it not?” That was the take-home message from Dr. Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University, in her talk “Does Arctic Amplification Fuel Extreme Weather in Mid-Latitudes?“, presented at last week’s American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. Dr. Francis presented new research in review for publication, which shows that Arctic sea ice loss may significantly affect the upper-level atmospheric circulation, slowing its winds and increasing its tendency to make contorted high-amplitude loops. High-amplitude loops in the upper level wind pattern (and associated jet stream) increases the probability of persistent weather patterns in the Northern Hemisphere, potentially leading to extreme weather due to longer-duration cold spells, snow events, heat waves, flooding events, and drought conditions.
Arctic sea ice loss can slow down jet stream winds
Dr. Francis looked at surface and upper level data from 1948 – 2010, and discovered that the extra heat in the Arctic in fall and winter over the past decade had caused the Arctic atmosphere between the surface and 500 mb (about 18,000 feet or 5,600 meters) to expand. As a result, the difference in temperature between the Arctic (60 – 80°N) and the mid-latitudes (30 – 50°N) fell significantly. It is this difference in temperature that drives the powerful jet stream winds that control much of our weather. The speed of fall and winter west-to-east upper-level winds at 500 mb circling the North Pole decreased by 20% over the past decade, compared to the period 1948 – 2000, in response to the extra warmth in the Arctic. This slow-down of the upper-level winds circling the pole has been linked to a Hot Arctic-Cold Continents pattern that brought cold, snowy winters to the Eastern U.S. and Western Europe during 2009 – 2010 and 2010 – 2011.
OK, nearly finished! Stay with me for one last item. Did you note in that blog post (the first section quoted) this, “Dr. Francis presented new research in review for publication …“? Here’s the Abstract from that publication, from which one reads,
Evidence linking Arctic amplification to extreme weather in mid-latitudes
Key Points
Enhanced Arctic warming reduces poleward temperature gradient
Weaker gradient affects waves in upper-level flow in two observable ways
Both effects slow weather patterns, favoring extreme weather
Jennifer A. Francis, Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA
Stephen J. Vavrus, Center for Climatic Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, USA
So to the point of both yesterday’s Post and the information above.
Will someone tell me why Messrs Barack Obama and Willard Mitt Romney so fervently adopt the stance of ‘hear no climate change, see no climate change, speak no climate change!‘
I am indebted to Peter Sinclair for his permission to reproduce the graph below. It was embedded in his post on Climate Crocks on the 20th September, a post he not unreasonably called The Planetary Emergency.
As Peter wrote,
As you can see from the graphic above, the actual observations of arctic sea ice melt are far outstripping the climate model predictions of just a few years ago, that the denial-sphere continues to call “alarmist”. Apparently, not alarming enough.
The point of publishing this on Learning from Dogs is simply as an introduction to a post coming out tomorrow called Hear no evil; or is that hear no climate change?, the purpose of which is to ask a very simple question of the two gentlemen wishing to reside in the White House as President of the USA for another four years. All revealed tomorrow!
How Virtual Reality Has Changed the English Language and the Way Humans Communicate
Introduction
Is it noise or content?
One of the wonderful consequences of spending far too much time ‘blogging’ is the connections that I have made over the last 27 months. I have come across a wonderful range of interesting writers and learnt so much more from those links. However, that’s not all, by a long chalk. A number of you have offered to contribute an essay to Learning from Dogs. (And if you are reading this and would like to offer a guest post then ‘fill your boots!‘ )
So it was that a few weeks ago I received an email from Alexa Russell. She offered me a guest post that I found very interesting, leading to it being published today.
I asked Alexa to write a little about herself, to which she replied, “I am a freelance writer who likes to write about technology, education and the changing nature of society. I am currently considering graduate school but fear being scared off by mounting costs and diminishing returns.”
So onto the post, which Alexa explains is about the ways in which virtual reality and digital devices change how we humans communicate and use the English language. Alexa is the author of several resources on studying English and the value in earning anEnglish PhD. Here she asks what Learning from Dogs has previously wondered — do we need to understand language in order to get the message?
oooOOOooo
How Virtual Reality Has Changed the English Language and the Way Humans Communicate
Technology has changed the way we communicate in some obvious (and occasionally obnoxious) ways. Grammar, punctuation, and even a more general respect for lexical rules have diminished in favor of speed and facility in text messages, which are now the most common communicative tool. Probably more periods have been omitted in the last two days than in the hundreds of years since the Gutenberg Bible. None will be omitted here, but maybe they should be.
As social networks expand, making an acquaintance at a coffee shop can easily translate to a lifetime connection – thanks to Facebook. And finally, there is a way to sever contact without engaging in direct conflict – defriending. The funniest thing about defriending is that it is usually considered as an unimpeachable revocation, as starkly offensive as a breakup – when in fact the message has not even crossed the digital threshold to the real world.
As virtual reality and networks progress, so too do our attempts to understand exactly what has happened and may happen to our grip on physical reality. There are a myriad of movies that attempt to explore the subject: The Matrix, Inception, and Avatar, to name a few of the most popular. In The Matrix, Neo discovers that he can will himself to do anything, move with almost infinite speed, gain superman strength, as long as he can carry that belief to his avatar in The Matrix. In Avatar, the protagonist cannot walk in real life but is then given a taller, stronger, more agile host to control. Inception tests the boundaries of the physical, as well as the emotional, as the virtual realities of the “hacked” mind have real impact on his or her emotional truth.
The conclusions that all of these movies come to is the same, albeit shocking fact: virtual reality has real-world effects. Neo can die if he believes he has died. Love can transfer from the blue, tall, strong, avatar to the avatar’s handicapped controller. Inception controls the outlook and actions of an individual well beyond the confines of the dreamworld. It can even come to define the rest of the dreamer’s life.
Virtual reality allows us to shed our physical shells and our weak points. There is nothing holding us back from becoming what or who we want to be. The zits and potbellies of real life give way to what is being communicated. Equally, as in the Matrix, World of Warcraft and even in NASA’s new medical diagnosis virtual reality for astronauts, skills can be learned more quickly than ever will be possible in real life. The NASA device gives astronauts an instant how-to guide, which will enable them to collect data and provide diagnoses as if they had years of medical school under their belts.
So, it really shouldn’t be all that surprising that grammar, punctuation, and spelling have lost a lot of their importance. When people communicate through a virtual medium, they can forget things like academic training and rules of grammar. The value of training and rules is diminishing. It is the essence of the message, not its style, that matters. The biggest question, however is, can you understand the essence?
oooOOOooo
You can understand why it was such a pleasure to receive Alexa’s essay! And the question left in the air, so to speak, in her closing sentence, is one of huge import. As we add to, or is it replace, our tradition of the ‘spoken’ word with this new-world of staccato speak, what’s happening to the essence of the message!
I do hope that Alexa will grace these pages again.
Learning from Dogs 