Synaptic Firing = Cognition

A friend of mine and I spent the evening after work creating the below masterful poetic tour de force. Of course it’s no term paper epic poem, but gimme a break – I can only produce those on rare and frenzied occasions, such as when I’m about to graduate college. For now, I’m simply trying to do my part by contributing ridiculous (cognitive) science poetry to the universe. In that vein, I’ve also resolved to write cogsci limericks while I walk to work and then tape them up on my door.

Please provide limerickal contributions, on any and all ridiculous/scientific/nerdy/surprising topics. Absurd rhymes a plus.

Please note this took us about 2 hours to write. We were choosing our words very carefully.

After we were suitibly pleased with ourselves, we went around and taped copies of the poem and (pilfered) picture to the grad students’ office doors. Tune in tomorrow for reports on thrilled reactions!

Chali-Chapeau

I played the Super-Fun Word Game in French last night! It was indeed super-fun. In French it’s called Chali-Chapeau.

Before we continue, a quick poll.

              

For the uninitiated, Chali-Chapeau has three rounds. Everyone writes a bunch of nouns (proper or improper) on pieces of paper and tosses them into a hat. You then form two or three teams of a few people each, and each team gets a minute to guess as many words from the hat as possible. The first round is Catch Phrase (describe the noun so your teammates can figure it out), the second is using only one word to describe the target noun, and the third is charades. The three rounds get progressively harder, but since you use the same words in each, there’s also the component of remembering what the items were and so needing fewer guesses to figure them out.

As I was playing with a bunch of French students, I was rather worried about my ability to be good at this game, since the first two rounds hinge entirely on being verbally coherent enough to produce easily-guessable clues very quickly. Also, actually knowing what the words mean can come in handy. As I’m not very good at (a) talking quickly, (b) avoiding circumlocutions, or (c) having a large vocabulary in French, I was a bit afraid this would rapidly devolve into me sucking.

Luckily for me, though, a lot of the nouns were people (Victor Hugo was put in twice, along with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, Stalin and Gorbachev, Michael Jackson and Madonna) and most of the others were pretty common things (la fourchette = fork; le fútbol = soccer, Colombie = Columbia (where? oh.)). The weirdest item was a pousse-pousse. Someone drew me a picture like this:It seems a pousse-pousse is one of those cart things that merchants push around the streets. Here, they sell roasted almonds and the like.

That poll at the beginning actually had a point. Robespierre, in case you never read A Tale of Two Cities or fell asleep in history class for the late 1700s, was the leader of the Jacobins during the French Revolution and sent a couple thousand people to the guillotine before ending up there himself. Probably the biggest French killer in modern history, or at least one of them. Someone (not me!) put his name into the hat, and when I picked him during the first round and dashed out a “Il était un Jacobin, et a tué beaucoup de gens avec la guillotine”, I expected my partner to guess him instantly. Instead, I got blank stares from everyone around the table. No one, including whoever had written his name down in the first place, seemed to know who this guy was. In fact, when he came up in the other rounds, everyone else kept describing him as a writer.

What?! And everyone says the American public education system is bad. This is like not knowing who Andrew Jackson was. Crazy! The game was really fun, though. Can’t knock that!

Friends, Frenchmen, and Countrymen, lend me your eyes

Dear devoted fans, I most sincerely beg your pardon for being such a delinquent at posting. Diligent updates are officially recommencing. (By the way, I’m happily back in Marseille after 3 weeks home. It was wonderful to see as many of you as I did.)

In the elapsed time since my last writing, I have stimuli-ed, subject-ed, and analyzed an entire experiment. (More on specifics in future, more technical posts. Though is it bad form to write about un-official, un-solidified, and un-published but potentially publishable results on a forum such as this?)

I ran my subjects in Aix-en-Provence, a nearby city that wrote the definition of “quaint French town”. It’s small. It’s bursting with cafes. Three halves of three universities are located there, so it’s overflowing with hip, young Frenchmen and women. It’s upscale and slightly pretentious, with a completely effortless air of doing so. There are fountains and roundabouts and lots of sunshine, and it’s of course significantly more expensive than Marseille.

I was testing subjects in Aix because, even though the sciences part of the Université de Provence is in Marseille, the intro psych classes happen in Aix. Unsurprisingly, running French subjects is just like running American subjects, except that discussions about microphone calibration and how they’re doing the task wrong are a bit more difficult. Some subjects arrive bored to pieces, making it clear beyond all doubt that they’re only there because it’s a class requirement and the faster the experiment is over the better, good data be damned. Others actually, ya know, care, which is nice since they want to be psychologists, and are brimming over with enthusiasm and want to know all about the research and what it’s testing and my hypotheses.

Getting the subjects set up involved explaining to them what to do, in French. (Though a lot of them trotted out one solid English phrase, a favorite being “Nice to meet you.”)

Most introductory conversations ran exactly like this:
Me: Bonjour, bienvenue a l’éxperience! Ici est le microphone. Je suis presque prête.
Subject: Ah! Vous n’êtes pas française, non? (Most phrased the question this way, though one girl asked me “Tu est quoi?” = “What are you?” My response was “humaine”, which I don’t think she got.)
Me: Je suis Americaine.
Subject: Ooh, chouette! J’ai un ami/cousin/voisin qui a voyagé/etudié/habité à Miami/New York/San Franciso.

After the obligatory mention of their connection to the US, most of them proceeded to tell me I have a cool accent. What do you know? Apparently my verbal maceration of French is exotic and interesting. My favorite quote came from a guy selling calendars in the hallway of my apartment (I have no idea what he was doing there) who informed me “Vous avez un accent très, très joli!” (NB: This linguistic flattery did not convince me to buy a calendar.)

It seems obvious, but it’s something that never occurred to me before living here. In the US, I felt rather trite. Everyone is American. I felt like there wasn’t much interesting character or history behind it. But here, amazingly enough, everyone is French, and now I’m the odd one out. Suddenly being American got a lot more intriguing and patriotism-inducing.

Chouette!