Name: 【TED】Mariano Sigman: Your words may predict your future mental health (Your words may predict your future mental health | Mariano Sigman)
Uploaded: 2017-02-10T04:57:49.000Z
Duration: 12 min 15 s
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We have historical records that allow us to know how the ancient Greeks dressed,

One natural idea is that the deepest aspects of human thought --

is that the social transformations that have shaped our culture

may have also changed the structural columns of human thought.

We may all have different opinions about this.

Actually, it's a long-standing philosophical debate.

But is this question even amenable to science?

that in the same way we can reconstruct how the ancient Greek cities looked

that the writings of a culture are the archaeological records,

doing some form of psychological analysis

of some of the most ancient books of human culture,

Julian Jaynes came up in the '70s with a very wild and radical hypothesis:

humans were what today we would call schizophrenics.

based on the fact that the first humans described in these books

in different traditions and in different places of the world,

as if they were hearing and obeying voices

that they perceived as coming from the Gods,

they began to recognize that they were the creators,

And with this, they gained introspection:

the ability to think about their own thoughts.

So Jaynes's theory is that consciousness,

at least in the way we perceive it today,

where we feel that we are the pilots of our own existence --

which is that it's built on just a few and very specific examples.

that introspection built up in human history only about 3,000 years ago

can be examined in a quantitative and objective manner.

And the problem of how to go about this is quite obvious.

It's not like Plato woke up one day and then he wrote,

and as of today, I have a fully introspective consciousness."

And this tells us actually what is the essence of the problem.

We need to find the emergence of a concept that's never said.

The word introspection does not appear a single time

So our way to solve this is to build the space of words.

This is a huge space that contains all words

in such a way that the distance between any two of them

is indicative of how closely related they are.

you want the words "dog" and "cat" to be very close together,

but the words "grapefruit" and "logarithm" to be very far away.

And this has to be true for any two words within the space.

And there are different ways that we can construct the space of words.

is following the simple assumption that when two words are related,

they tend to appear in the same sentences,

more often than would be expected just by pure chance.

that this is a very complex and high-dimensional space,

And just to give you a flavor of how well this works,

this is the result we get when we analyze this for some familiar words.

that words automatically organize into semantic neighborhoods.

the computer parts, the scientific terms and so on.

The algorithm also identifies that we organize concepts in a hierarchy.

you can see that the scientific terms break down into two subcategories