I once saw a blind kid on TV that had developed a way of clicking with his mouth that he could use it to navigate sidewalks. This was pretty cool and it made me pay attention to my own sense of hearing and wondering what it must be like to use that kind of ability. I payed close attention to situations that it might be possible to hear the place of walls etc. Doing this for sometime it changed my relationship to my hearing.

I became aware when a sound is louder because additional bounces of wave energy hit my ear rather than having only the direct line-of-sight propagation. I picked up the threshold where I hear the primary sound and it's echo as simultanous sound or as two separate sounds. After paying attention to things that I theorethically knew why they would happen I could tap into kinds of "feels" in the sound. My mind somehow clicked and connected geometric forms to the echo timing profile. In understand only discrete sounds conciously but the prolonged direction-changing continous echo that a sloped wall makes I could sense intrisically. And I found out that for example claps are very directional and you can kind of like cast different claping to a wall like you would shine a flashlight.

All in all my sense of hearing became much more like my sense of seeing with good 3D-structure. Experiencing this new way of hearing was very interesting and cool. However once I got settled how to hear like a echolocator I had trouble conceptualising what it is like not to hear like it. My guess is that if you don't pay that much attention a lof information goes unextracted. But it was a big surprise that it wasn't "obvious" how much information a given hearing includes. I didn't gain a better ear. The amount of information I was receiving would have needed to stay same, but I guess I previously couldn't structure them properly.

And I realised that i had atleast two hearing modes even before this new "3D" mode. A mono mode where you can decipher what kind of sound it is and can recognise what causing it with only knowing that it is "nearby within hearing distance" and couldn't be able to face the sound and need to visually look for clues where the sound is coming. Then there is kinda "arrow" mode where you know to look at the direction where the sound is coming from. But it is kinda cool when in "3D" mode I can hear around the corner on what kind of space there is which I can't do in "arrow" mode.

Thinking about how sound waves work it kinda makes sense how the perception changes between "mono" and "arrow mode". If you are in a empty room and make big enough noise there is significant echo going from every direction. Without able to read the timing finestructure it feels like coming from everywhere. However if you in the same kind of room don't make quite as much noise then the component directly going towards you will dominate the echoes. There is also an explanation why the "arrow" isn't a pinpointer but a fuzzy approximation, when you try to read the texture/shape information as location information it will give a slightly contradictory result.

I am using language here where I first feel a certain way and then be puzzled on why it would feel this way and then start theorising in this way. I guess it's worth noting that having more theory won't give you insight in what your experience is. It was kinda mindopening to be able to target those feelings relatively theory-free and then the joy of finding the explanation. For example how sound propagation first felt "waterlike" and only afterwards confirming that that makes perfect sense as the waves are not equal in strength in all directions and do have dampening as they propagate.

I really couldn't confirm that I wasn't just reading too much into what I was supposedly experiencing, that I have just pretended to experience things while only actually wanting to experience them so. But then after I aquired the skill I passively would first pick up sounds and have 3D impressions of them when not actively pursuing to hear anything (and usually be frightened about it) and only then turning to look at them that this was a legit change in perception when the expectations formed by hearing would be confirmed by sight. For example I would drive by a post with a bike and suddenly be very aware of something square on my right, the wheel sounds giving enough echo basis that the post would pop-up against the background a lot more than it visually does. Or driving alleys making a sudden echo chamber on an otherwise echoless street. I also found out that glass sticks out a lot more than other materials (oh there is a large object to my right, oh it's just a window).

For me I have discovered what it is to be like an echolocator which I guess is supposed to be the main alien part in the bat metaphor. There is also a joke on how drugs make you "taste blue" but I have come to experience that and how it makes sense to "see sound". But the behavioural effects of this different kind of experiencing are not that telling or direct. I would not pass the vampire turing test because that isn't to the point, it would need to be refined to be that but it is not trivial how that would be made.

The operation that made me undergo this change seems to be paying attention. It doesn't seem to be that I learned a new fact. Althougth I clearly see that having atheory why I am feeling what I am feeling did have aguiding effect. Maybe call it a imagination aid? I would say it might be a deficiency in understanding and not knowledge that limits people not being able to experience bats. And it is possible for humans to understand what it is to be an echolocator. I would guess that if I had sufficiently clear descriptions on what kinds of "facets" my perceptions include I should be able to play it out how I would experience the situation had I that kind of a sense. So I think it might be possible to imagine seeing 4 primary colors but it takes skill in this "pay attention to your qualia structures" thingy that people are not in general very good at.

After recommending a couple of Chrome extensions in this comment I realized it may be useful to have a dedicated thread for Chrome extensions (a quick Google search revealed no such threads in the archives).

The extensions I currently use are listed here, with my favorites boldfaced. I'm curious to see what extensions others use.

Translating the article Entropy, and Short Codes, there is a part where Eliezer writes about how words for categories are created, and (if I understand that correctly) the most frequently used categories are likely to get the shortest words.

The specific examples are: "furniture", "chair", "recliner". The shortest one is "chair", because that one is most frequently used in speech. Word "recliner" is too specific, it refers to a rare set of objects, so people will use it rarely. On the other hand, "furniture" is too general; people will usually want to be more specific than that, so people will use this word also rarely.

Unfortunately, this example does not work completely well in Slovak translation. I am curious about other languages. Please give me examples, and also the number of syllables (which is sometimes not completely obvious for those who don't speak the language). Use the same order of words (from most general to most narrow) as in the English example. Here are the data I already have:

English: furniture (3), chair (1), recliner (3)

Slovak: nábytok (3), stolička (3), sklápacie kreslo (5)

Cog sci question about how words are organized in our minds.

So, I'm a native English speaker, and for the last ~1.5 years, I've been studying Finnish as a second language. I was making very slow progress on vocabulary, though, so a couple days ago I downloaded Anki and moved all my vocab lists over to there. These vocab lists basically just contained random words I had encountered on the internet and felt like writing down; a lot of them were for abstract concepts and random things that probably won't come up in conversation, like "archipelago" (the Finnish word is "saaristo", if anyone cares). Anyway, the point is that I am not trying to learn the vocabulary in any sensible order, I'm just shoving random words into my brain.

While studying today, I noticed that I was having a lot more trouble with certain words than with others, and I started to wonder why, and what implications this has for how words are organized in our minds, and whether anyone has done studies on this.

For instance, there seemed to be a lot of "hash collisions": vocabulary words that I kept confusing with one another. Some of these were clearly phonetic: hai (shark) and kai (probably). Another phonetic pair: toivottaa (to wish) and taivuttaa (to inflect a word). Some were a combination of phonetic and semantic: virhe (error), vihje (hint), vaihe (phase, stage), and vika (fault). Some of them I have no idea why I kept confusing: kertautua (to recur) and kuvastaa (to mirror, to reflect).

There were also a few words that I just had inordinate amounts of trouble remembering, and I don't know why: eksyä (to get lost), ehtiä (to arrive in time), löytää (to find), kyllästys (saturation), sisältää (to include), arvata (to guess). Aside from the last one, all of these have the letter ä in them, so maybe that has something to do with it. Also, the first two words don't have a single English verb as an equivalent.

There were also some words that were easier than I expected: vankkuri (wagon), saaristo (archipelago), and some more that I don't remember now because they quickly vanished from my deck. Both of these words are unusual but concrete concepts.

Do different people struggle with the same words when learning a language? Are some Finnish words just inherently "easy" or "hard" for English speakers to learn? If it's different for each person, how does the ease of learning certain words relate to a person's life experiences, interests, common thoughts, etc.?

What do hash collisions tell us about how words are organized in our minds? Can they tell us anything about the features we might be using to recognize words? For instance, English speakers often seem to have trouble remembering and distinguishing Chinese names; they all seem to "sound the same". Why does this happen? Here's a hypothesis: when we hear a word, based on its features, it is mapped to a specific part of a learned phonetic space before being used to access semantic content. Presumably we would learn this phonetic space to maximize the distance between words in a language, since the farther apart words are, the less chance they have of accessing the wrong semantic content. Maybe certain Finnish words sound the same to me because they map to nearby regions of my phonetic space, but a speaker of some other language wouldn't confuse these particular words because they'd have a different phonetic space? I'm just speculating wildly here.

I'd be interested to hear everyone else's vocab-learning experiences and crazy hypotheses for what's going on. Also, does anyone know any actual research that's been done on this stuff?

These comments really highlight how different people need different surface tricks - to me, the distinction between Working Really Hard and Moving Towards The Goal makes a lot of sense, and you helped me recognize that I sometimes use the former mindset when I know from experience that the latter is much more effective for me. I will now make an effort to change that habit.