You are currently browsing the daily archive for August 19th, 2007.
Dr. Amit Almor of my alma mater and his team have used fMRI images of the brain to see just what is going on when people use pronouns versus proper nouns. They found that the spatial area of the brain lights up when proper nouns are used, implying that the brain builds a new representation each time. When pronouns were used, these areas did not light up.
So representations for proper nouns are merged as processing goes on. However, too many of them can result in disruption in the processing of new input. Interestingly, a similar phenomenon occurs in users of American Sign Language. Signers point to a space in the air as a reference point for proper nouns, a function similar to pronoun usage in spoken language. Pretty cool.
If you don’t know which candidate agrees with you most, there is a great blind test that will match you with the candidate who most agrees with you (link sent to me by my good friend at the Wrathful Dove). You simply indicate whether you Support/Oppose/Other an issue and then whether that issue is no big deal (meh), important, or key. The test was quite accurate for me in choosing my top two, which I suppose is confirmation that I choose my candidate based on the issues. I’m curious to see who really does agree with most Americans.
Take the test yourself and please drop me a comment with your results.
My results:
- Kucinich 68
- Gravel 54
- Obama 30
- Paul 29
- Edwards 28
- Clinton 28
- Richardson 25
- Biden 25
- Dodd 23
- Brownback -15
- Cox -22
- McCain -27
- Thompson -28
- Huckabee -28
- Tancredo -51
- Hunter -60
- Giuliani -60
- Romney -61
