Depending on the duration and intensity of what one had involved oneself in, emergence from an Immersive Experience will be accompanied by a Cognitive Transformation Period, lasting hours, days, perhaps weeks. To be clear, the associated neural reconfiguration should be thought of as occurring in addition to rather than instead of the ever-present ebbs and…
I recently overheard an exchange that drew my attention to a previously unexplored aspect of verbal communication, which I will refer to as Exchange Structure. Though such structures can be graphically represented numerous ways, I didn’t spend time evaluating the options, and simply chose the first that came to mind. It’s all very straightforward, with…
It’s irritating when people use terms 1. that could be replaced with fewer-syllable terms without loss or alteration of the conveyed meaning. 2. they understand only vaguely or not at all. Regarding the 1st point, candidate term-pairs guilty of this offense cannot merely be synonyms, for most synonyms differ subtly in meaning, usually through differences…
Contrary to the law of midday meals, some things hardly need to be worked for in order to be earned. They can be earned, in other words, for a lesser price than it seems they are worth. In even other words, so as to balance the books of the linguistic expression economy, a part of…
Efforts to use seldom seen people as sensors of one’s own changes in cognitive function are complicated by the fact that observations of changes in one’s appearance trump those of subtler changes by virtue of being easier to articulate and obliging what is nothing short of a social expectation. This would be a point undeserving…
People can elicit praise simply by avoiding embarrassing consequences that their own carelessness made likely to occur. A good example is “Nice catch!” following the timely rescue of an object that, through lack of awareness, was sent falling to the floor. It’s a curious thing, applauding sans sarcasm someone who made a mistake. Whether the…
Communicating a message using absolute terms leaves a stronger impression than if relative terms are used, but also makes the message more susceptible to failing under the scrutiny of fact-checkers. Words like “all”, “always”, and “every” usually trump words like “usually”, “most”, and “often”, as far as a message’s penetrating potential is concerned. You’ll note…
Several months ago on the radio there was an interview with a scholarly-type fellow regarding the origin of laughter in pre-humans. Sorry about the series of words ending with the phoneme /o/ in the previous sentence; one of the twins from the prior post still lingers. The interviewee theorized that the earliest instances of what…
The intended recipient of a solicitation for attention is made aware of the situation, and of their role in it, through means other than just the solicitor-spoken words. Consider five people standing in a semi-circle formation, equidistant from, and with backs facing, a sixth person who shouts “Hey, you!” For ease of communicating the point,…
In spite of all the negatives that tarnish much of the advertised allure, there is at least one societal benefit to the existence of smoking as an activity. That it is an intangible benefit and is consequently difficult to quantify should not be interpreted to mean that its impact is negligible. After all, many of…
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