Consciousness while reading

This being prompted by skimming the papers at references 1 and 2, papers which address the extent to which reading is a parallel or, alternatively, a serial process – given first, the massively parallel capability of both the eyes and the brain and second, the very serial nature of text – particularly in languages like English in which word order is important. Is the brain working on several words in a sentence at the same time, or is it doing one word at a time? What can we deduce from tracking the movements of the eyes? When does the brain put it all together?

The word conscious appeared a few times in reference 1, prompting me to wonder about what conscious might mean in the context of reading, say reading a story – rather than about the proper subject of the paper. Or more generally, and not for the first time, what do we mean when we say we are conscious: do we have to be conscious of something, of anything at all?

By way of an aside, I associate to what I take to be a Buddhist notion of being fully conscious of nothing, of being conscious of the essential void of being. With nothing and everything, as in mathematics, being quite closely associated. Bubbles!

One needs to be conscious in the ordinary sense of the word in order to be able to read at all – although I dare say one could come up with circumstances or scenarios which confuse this simple assertion. In the less ordinary sense of the word, one is often said to be conscious of something, of something in particular. So I am conscious of this bus heading in my direction. I am conscious of being uncomfortably hot. But is this necessary, in the case of reading?

When I read a sentence, say in the Maigret story at reference 4, I am conscious when I have not understood something. I usually stop reading and I know why I have stopped. Contrariwise, when I have read and understood something, I am not at all sure what gets into, what has passed through consciousness. I could probably play some or all of the something back, if asked immediately after reading. I could probably answer comprehension questions about it. But I do not think that I am conscious of what I have read. If, for example, I read the word ‘corpse’, I am not conscious of various facts about or images of corpses coming into mind, although I dare some such stuff has been brought nearer the surface. And the word ‘corpse’ only passes through consciousness, if it gets there at all, and does not stay there very long. And perhaps all the other stuff only makes it to the surface when Simenon uses some particularly felicitous turn of phrase, or brings to mind – evokes – something that I have seen or done in the past.

There is also the question of to what extent reading words activates the vocal machinery, gets the tongue going. A question on which I have posted in the past – see, for example, reference 6 – but which I not think is relevant here.

Quite often I look a word up, for example ‘piquette’, in the context cheap, not very good wine served in a village bar twenty miles south of Paris in the 1920’s. So I look the word up, with luck turn up one or two English words to stand for the meaning and I am satisfied; that meaning fits. But again, both the words rapidly drop out of consciousness and I am not aware of relevant facts or images ever having been there – apart from the words that I have selected to stand for the meaning. These words were enough.

So when one is reading the brain is being told to bring stuff up for processing – but not necessarily to bring it all the way into consciousness. In this particular example, the brain does bring it all the way into consciousness when it needs to interrupt. When the host needs to stop reading and fetch up the dictionary.

Perhaps all this follows from my reading quite a lot. I dare say that I read more than average. And I dare say that when one is learning to read, or learning to talk for that matter, a lot more stuff about individual words is brought into consciousness. I dare say also, if I spent all day reading Maigret, even the business of consulting the dictionary might become more or less unconscious.

I associate to the business of training in some sport, for example when one is working on a particular shot in tennis or a particular stroke in golf. One starts out by being very conscious of what one is doing, by needing to be very conscious of what one is doing, but a good result is often associated with the activity drifting back down into the unconscious. Something similar happens when one learns to ride a bicycle or drive a car.

And, thinking with my fingers, I am not sure that watching a film of the story is any different from reading. In the sense that, I do not think all kinds of stuff about the stuff on the screen is being brought onto consciousness. The goings-on on the screen are not translated into inner thought of the Hurlburt variety, of reference 5. And I am only conscious of the emotions generated after the event; during the event they just are.

All of this fits with what I think some people call reporting consciousness. I am conscious of something if I can tell you about it immediately after the event. Or if I press a button when am I aware of something having been put up on the computer screen in front of me. An operational definition which can be tested, unlike all this subjective stuff.

A related issue

I have suggested that reading is largely unconscious. I also suggest that writing and speaking are too. Quite often one writes good stuff without thinking about it at all; any thinking that might have been necessary should have been got out of the way beforehand. And the same is true of speaking without a script, say telling a story to a child or making a speech to some assembled audience. Indeed, in both cases, the intrusion of consciousness is all too likely to bring the process to a shuddering halt – and restarting can take some seconds.

Conclusions

A reminder that the word ‘conscious’ is not simple, and talking about being conscious of this or that is not simple either. Perhaps the authors of references 1 and 2 knew what they were about when they opted to work with the term ‘attention’ instead.

To quote: ‘Attention: the direction to – or filtering of – information in our immediate environment. Whereas proponents of serial processing believe … proponents of parallel processing believe that readers generally attend to multiple words simultaneously. Attention can be directed to a region of our visual field without directly looking at it. We may also to some degree attend to locations or objects (causing those locations or objects to be processed by various brain regions) without necessarily being aware of it’.

A definition in terms of the concrete, in terms of processing resources, rather than in terms of the more tricky business of subjectivity, of consciousness. A definition which avoids consciousness tainted usages like ‘I was paying attention to what my father in law was doing while he crossed the road’ or ‘I was attending to the fire when the phone rang’.

I conclude with the snap taken of the scene just to the right of the laptop on which I am typing. I quite often attend to the pint pot therein – but I am not really conscious of it. And the words ‘pint pot’ do not usually come to mind. The brain is just computing – in some sense or other – the scene without coming to any conclusion it feels the need to bring to consciousness. Or perhaps it is just resting on something on the scene, without doing anything much. Just steadying the brain down while it gets on with its proper work elsewhere.

References

Reference 1: Consciousness is not key in the serial versus parallel processing debate - Joshua Snell & Jonathan Grainger – 2019.

Reference 2: Readers Are Parallel Processors - Joshua Snell , Jonathan Grainger – 2019.

Reference 3: Evidence of Serial Processing in  Visual Word Recognition - Alex L. White , John

Palmer, and Geoffrey M. Boynton – 2018. Some useful background on the sort of experiments done in this area.

Reference 4: La nuit du Carrefour – Simenon – 1931. Vol II of the collected works.

Reference 5: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/08/descriptive-experience-sampled.html.

Reference 6: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/11/on-saying-cat.html.

Statistics again

Yesterday's Guardian ran a piece occupying about 16 column inches, arranged in two columns, headed up 'study on aging eases fears of demographic time bomb'. A piece which I tried to read at some point during the day.

It seems that some bright spark at ONS, the Office for National Statistics, had come up with the catchy phrase 'remaining life expectancy', RLE for short. And then proceeded to come up with various analyses of same. So, for example, you might track the numbers of people for whom RLE=15 years, over time. You might analyse them by age, sex and marital condition. Sadly, I quite failed to make any sense of it. Perhaps it was too soon after lunch.

But I did associate to a similar phrase 'completed family size', CFS for short, which was a fashionable subject of analysis when I knew about such things, more than forty years ago. I think the idea was to get away from the caprices of age specific birth rates for women. At which time I remember the people (as represented by the Daily Mail and others) was more concerned with excess migration than with excess breeding, but it was a long time ago.

I then moved onto the ONS website at reference 1 and asked it about 'remaining life expectancy', which produced 532 results, of which 450 were data items and 57 were publications. Don't yet know what the rest were. And haven't yet found the trigger for the Guardian article. Work in progress. Slowly.

Reference 1: https://www.ons.gov.uk/.

Trolley 334

Another M&S food hall trolley, lightly littered, captured just past the Station Approach turning, on the way into Epsom.

No investment and no return on this occasion. But I have learned that there are few if any litter bins inside our Ashley Centre - nor, for that matter, did I notice any litter.

Approximately 150 trolleys captured since this time last year; not a bad haul. Can I keep gaining pace? Should I turn professional? Should I get some young person to check the record for errors?

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/11/trolley-182.html.

The ambitions of the disabled

This prompted by an email arriving in my in-box a few weeks ago about a young lady who has hearing problems and who is nearly blind – but who want to be a doctor. For the purposes of what follows, let us suppose that she has normal hearing but no sight, and that she has been this way since birth. In other respects she is both healthy and very talented.

It is no doubt true that many disabled people are not given the opportunity to make good use of the abilities that they do have. So, for example, in the olden days, many blind people were confined to residential institutions where they passed their time making baskets and such like out of bamboo, baskets which went on to be sold more or less for charity. We can do better than this.

It is also true that humans are vertebrates, a group of animals which have evolved good quality eyes, and humans have good quality eyes backed up by good quality brains. Vision is both powerful and an important part of what we are. So not having vision is very challenging.

One of the challenges is that fact the learning has become very vision-centric. It may have been the case a hundred years ago that a blind person could participate in a lot of academic life with the aid of Braille and of a personal assistant with a good reading voice. I very much doubt if that is the case now, clever electrical and computing toys notwithstanding. I believe it would be very much harder to thrive in academia now than it would have been then, and that this will be particularly true of the sciences, medical or otherwise. A difficulty probably compounded just presently by the squeeze on teaching resources, certainly in austerity England.

And then so much of the work of a doctor, particularly a physical rather than a mental one, revolves around vision: looking at the patient, looking at images of the insides of the patient and looking at images on computers and in books. While, at least to a greater extent, the work of a mental doctor – a psychiatrist or a psychologist – is more sound and language orientated. A great deal can be done with what a patient says and the way that they say it. A great deal can be done by talking to a patient. And it is probably true that while a blind person misses out on all the visual cues that come with spoken language, such a person is probably more sensitive to that spoken language itself. There are ups as well as downs.

Which perhaps leads me to an answer of sorts. One applauds the drive and ability which gets our hypothetical young blind person into medical school and onto the lecture circuit. But maybe it would be better for all of us if she settled for an occupation which was less vision centric. Perhaps helping people with mental disorders or mental issues, in some capacity or other.

Reference 1: https://setting-sights.blog/. The lady in question’s blog. The source of the image included above.

Reference 2: https://setting-sights.blog/about/. Something about her.

Reference 3: https://www.medscape.com/today. The source of the email that reached me.

Reference 4: https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2019/07/01/alexandra-adams-we-need-to-do-more-to-raise-awareness-of-workplace-discrimination-in-the-nhs/. Another piece about her.

Ut majeur

Saturday past to the Wigmore Hall to hear the Nash Ensemble, mainly on account of the programme including the Schubert C major quintet, D.956, said by the programme to be Schubert's greatest chamber work. Plus the Haydn quartet Op.76 No.3 and the von Weber clarinet quintet Op.34. Not to be confused with Webern who came about a century later.

The programme of music

Curiously, the snap above reveals nothing of the grain of the paper on which the programme was printed, even at full zoom. Unlike an unpublished snap of the screen of my laptop which, at full zoom, clearly shows the array of pixels making up that screen.

Substantial lock plate

A dull cold evening, overcast and cold.

At the station intrigued by the very substantial lock plate which had been added to the door to the power shed at the country end of the London platform, maybe half a centimetre thick. Seemed a bit out of proportion to the door and door frame, which would not, I would have thought, resisted attack by a sledgehammer.

Pleased to find that the cold had not stopped all the young people coming out to play, with one conspicuously turned out young lady in the block of seats next to ours. A young lady who spent the journey applying full war paint, dropping a modest number of used tissues around her as we went. And when the carriage more or less emptied at Vauxhall, calmly put her feet up on the seat opposite. But at least the war paint was well done.

Plenty more young people milling around the concourse area at the entrance to the tube at Vauxhall, but we got onto the platform fast enough, to emerge at a busy Oxford Circus. Once again, having paid my dues on my last visit, we took our picnic on the tables and chairs outside the Finery.

Music stand with lower prongs

Hall nearly full, with some signs of the friends of the ensemble, for which see reference 1. Musicians in what might be called fairly smart casual, a bit too casual for BH's taste. But I was happy enough. All played from real music, with care being taken at a couple of points with the page turning, with the right hand leaf being propped up on the prong of the music stand for fast turning. First violin first, then a few bars later the second violin. Not a wheeze I have seen before. Turning up the bottom right hand corner of the page yes, propping it up no.

First half very good. Visit to the Cock & Lion in the interval. Second half even better, with audience very enthusiastic at the end. But with the second piece being something of substance rather than the more usual short modern piece, a long concert, which meant that we were maybe forty minutes later out than usual.

Schmid

John Lewis

Out to inspect the Christmas windows at John Lewis in Oxford Street, which I thought wre rather good, both clever and jolly. Much better than the rather pompous Victoriana that they usually offer at Fortnum & Mason's. I was rather taken with the Lego contraption, lower middle, despite the large number of special parts, while BH was much more interested in the dragon, a wing of which is to be seen top left. The star of an extensive series of television commercials - which I found rather silly some days later when she got around to showing one to me. What about the expense of it all? What about the planet?

Oxford Circus still busy. Plenty of dressed up young people on the tube, some in display mode. Just missed a train at Vauxhall, which, being late, meant getting on for a half hour wait. During which Cortana failed to find the picture included above, the middle of which was used for the front cover of the programme, the work of one Julius Schmid, a Viennese painter from the turn of the 19th century, now well known for this painting, painted nearly a century after the event, but otherwise obscure. A striking painting, but rather staged and unconvincing. Home something after 2300.

The top part of the account

Then this morning I was moved to check up on the Nash ensemble, fairly quickly getting myself to an account for what I suppose is the year ending April 2019. Quite a modest turnover, nothing like a decent living for getting on for a dozen people, all of whom must have day jobs. But interesting to see where all the money goes. I also learned that they are rather banally named for the Nash terraces around the music school some of them went to in Marylebone Road, the place noticed at reference 5.

John Nash, 1918

One of the two paintings of this name, sometimes visible in the Tate Britain. One of a pair of paintings of corn fields. Rather pale colours, compared with both the reproduction in our dining room and what I remember of the original. I thought I had already posted this image, but search fails to find it and so included here for future reference.

PS: another example, as it happens, of the odd workings of charity law in this country (and not many others). The Nash Ensemble, fine ensemble though it is, can hardly be considered a majority sport, or even a popular sport. Up there with Eton College and other such oddities. No.255017.

Reference 1: http://www.nashensemble.org.uk/.

Reference 2: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=amadeus+equipment+nash. Possibly the first time that I heard this ensemble, back in February 2012, with the number of hits on the blog archive suggesting at least a few times since. Record confused by Nash terraces, Nash painters and Nash mathematicians.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/11/fields.html. With one of the Nash mathematicians turning up here. Coincidentally, perhaps my first recent exposure to the 'L' mathematicians mentioned yesterday. See reference 4 below.

Reference 4: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/11/trick-of-memory.html.

Reference 5: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/10/cello.html.

Trolley 333

First spotted in the small car park outside Epsom station this morning, still there when I came back this afternoon. So no other trolley jockeys operating in the vicinity.

Returned to the M&S food hall where both regular and large stacks were full to overflowing. Perhaps the late afternoon rush was dying down. But, for the first time, at least as far as I can remember, I recovered a £1 coin for zero investment.

I almost celebrated by taking a beverage in the nearby Wetherspoon's but desisted. Ditto the nearby Marquis. Instead, simply walked home to a cup of home brew.

PS: I shall have to go back tomorrow to investigate the white lines, which seem to have resulted in image processing artefacts.

Trick of memory?

Yesterday evening I felt sure that I had very recently read a piece in the Guardian about the Chinese putting a satellite into orbit on the dark side of the moon, a trick that involved finding a place where the various forces of gravity cancelled out, which in turn involving some equations involving a chap called Legendre. This was a serious matter because, inter alia, if this satellite was to start doing bad things, there was no way we could get at it.

So this morning I try to recover the article. The Guardian website has nothing. The paper copy Guardians of Monday and Tuesday have nothing. Have I been dreaming, on the way getting into a muddle between the three French mathematical gentlemen called Laplace, Lagrange and Legendre? Three gentlemen whom I have recently been looking up.

Further digging turns up reference 1, from where I get to reference 2. So there is a connection between a Chinese satellite (in an L2 halo orbit around point L2 in the snap above), points where gravitational fields cancel out (at least in some sense) and Lagrange, although I am now worrying about how those points move around in time, as the sun, earth and moon move around. And about why the moon doesn't seem to be making any lines of its own in the snap.

So I think I must have seen something, somewhere. But where?

Clearly something with which to while away the long winter evenings.

Reference 1: https://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/2018/0519-change-4-relay-satellite.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_orbit.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lissajous_orbit. For those with bigger appetites.