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John_Maxwell_IV comments on Never Leave Your Room - Less Wrong
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There is an excellent example of "priming" the mind here.
The idea is that specific prior knowledge drastically changes the way we process new information. You listen to a sine-wave modulated recording that is initially unintelligible. You then listen to the original recording. You are now primed. Listen again to the modulated recording and suddenly the previously unintelligible recording is clear as day.
I first listened to all of the samples on December 8th, when the link was posted on kottke.org. If I'm not mistaken that means it's been exactly 100 days since I last heard, or even thought about, these recordings. I listened to them again just a few minutes ago and understood every single one of them perfectly.
I can't decide if this is impressive or terrifying.
Thanks for the link, very interesting indeed.
In my case, though,I could hear a few words the first time I listened to the sine-wave modulated version. It became much clearer after listening to the primer, though.
Sadly, once you've heard the primer, you can't really go back to hearing it the way you heard it the first time, so you can't compare back to back. It's a bit like "hidden" messages in songs; once you hear them, it very hard to revert back to hearing the original lyrics.
Hmm.
I found that with all of those I could make out at least some, and in some cases all, of the words in the sine-wave versions without the "priming" original recording. The very first example on that page was pretty much perfectly clear to me on the first listening; others were more work.
Then, for the ones where I hadn't been able to make out all the words in the sine-wave version, I listened to the "primer" and tried again with the sine waves. In each case, I found that I could then recognize the words I'd found unclear before, but I wouldn't say they were "clear as day" or anything like; more like "well, OK, I suppose it could be interpreted that way".
The effect of priming, for me, therefore appears to be very small.
I tried the first pair on my wife, and her response appears to be the canonical one. Obviously I'm just strange. Anyone else have the same experience as me?
Do you own the Aphex Twin album "The Richard D James Album"? Because they all made perfect sense to me at first listen, and immediately reminded me of the brief speech interludes on that album.
No, and I've never knowingly heard anything by Aphex Twin.
Of the five recordings on that page I was able to figure out three without listening to the clear speech.