Category Archives: Rhetorical Mastery

The Fluency of Caffeine

Problem Practices, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , , , , , , ,
Caffeine Source: Commons. wikimedia.org
Caffeine Chemistry
Source: Commons. wikimedia.org

Many of us owe the completion of at least a few big projects to the caffeine that the brain needs more than the stomach.

New Yorker Cartoonist Tom Cheney obviously loves coffee. A lot of his cartoons have featured the stuff.  My favorite is entitled the “Writer’s Food Pyramid,” with a food-group triangle of “essentials” for scribes that would give most dietitians severe heartburn. His pyramid was a play on those dietary charts that usually adorned classroom walls in the 80s.  At the wide base of Cheney’s chart are “The Caffeine’s” of cola, coffee and tea.  They anchor the rest of a pyramid of necessities which include “The Nicotines,” “The Alcohols” and “Pizza” at the very top.  Together they make the perfect fuel cell for a cultural worker.

Cheney obviously knows a lot about writers, which movie mogul Jack Warner once hilariously dismissed as “Schmucks with Underwoods.” But there’s actually some method in all of this madness.  Communication—at least the process of generating ideas—is clearly helped the spur of this addictive substance.  We have more than a few studies to suggest that writers and others who create things can indeed benefit from the stimulant.  Notwithstanding a recent New Yorker article suggesting just the opposite, caffeine is likely to enhance a person’s creative powers if it is used in moderation. I’m sure I’m not alone in oweing the completion of at least a few books to the sludge that now makes my stomach rebel.

It turns out the stimulant has a complex effect on human chemistry.  As James Hamblin explains in a June, 2013 Atlantic article, caffeine is weaker than a lot of stimulants such as Adderall, which can actually paralyze a person into focusing for too long on just thing. It’s moderate amounts that do the most good.  Even the New Yorker’s Maria Konnikova concedes the point.  Caffeine

“boosts energy and decreases fatigue; enhances physical, cognitive, and motor performance; and aids short-term memory, problem solving, decision making, and concentration ... Caffeine prevents our focus from becoming too diffuse; it instead hones our attention in a hyper-vigilant fashion."

To put it simply, the synapses happen more easily when that triple latte finally kicks in.  A morning cup dutifully carried to work even ranks over keeping a phone in one hand.  If only momentarily, its the paper cup that has top priority.

But there is an exception. A person facing a live audience in a more or less formal situation probably should avoid what amounts to a double dose of stimulation, given the natural increase of adrenaline that comes when we face a public audience.  For most of us a modest adrenaline rush is actually functional in helping us gain oral fluency.  It works to our benefit because it makes us more alert and maybe just a little smarter.  But combining what is functionally two stimulants can be counter-productive.  They can make a presenter wired tighter than the “C” string at the top of a piano keyboard.  We all know the effects.  Instead of the eloquence of a heightened conversation, we get a jumble of ideas that are delivered fast and with too little explanation.  In addition, tightened vocal folds mean that the pitch of our voice will usually rise as well, making even a baritone sound like a Disney character.

All of us are different.  But to play the odds to your advantage, it is probably better to reserve the use of caffeine for acts of creation more than performance.

Comments: Woodward@tcnj.edu

Yellow bar graphic

Turing, And The Bogus Rivalry With Machine-Based Intelligence

Models, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
IBM's Watson Wikipedia.org
                     IBM’s Watson           Wikipedia.org

In reality, humans have nothing to fear. Most measures of artificial intelligence use the wrong yardsticks.

We are awash in articles, books and films about the coming age of “singularity:” the point at which machines will supposedly duplicate and surpass human intelligence.  For decades it’s been the stuff of science fiction, reaching perhaps its most eloquent expression in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 motion picture, 2001: A Space Odyssey.  The film is still a visual marvel. Who would have thought that Strauss waltzes and images of deep space could be so compatible?  Functionally, the waltzes have the effect of juxtaposing the familiar with a hostile void, making the film a surprising celebration of all things earthbound.  But that’s another story.

The central agent in the film is the HAL-9000 computer that begins to turn off the life support of the crew during a long voyage, mostly because it “thinks” the humans aren’t up to the enormous task facing them.

Kubrick’s vision of very smart computers is also evident in the more recent A.I., Artificial Intelligence (2001), a project started just before his death and eventually brought to the screen by Steven Spielberg.  It’s a dystopian nightmare. In the film intelligent “mechas” (mechanical robots) are generally nicer than the humans who created them.  In pleasant Haddonfield New Jersey, of all places, they are shot on sight for sport.

Fantasies of machine intelligence have lately given way to IBM’s “Big Blue” and “Watson,” mega-computers with amazing memories and—with Watson—a stunning speech recognition capability that is filtering down to all kinds of devices.  If we can talk to machines, aren’t we well on our way to singularity?

For one answer consider the Turing Test, the challenge laid down by the World War II code-breaker Alan Turing. A variation of it has been turned into a recurring world competitions.  The challenge is to construct a “chatterbot” that can pass for a human in blind side-by-side “conversations” that include real people.  For artificial intelligence engineers, the trick is to fool a panel of questioners at least 30 percent of the time over 25 minutes. According to the BBC, a recent winner was a computer from the University of Reading in the U.K. It passed itself off as a Ukrainian teen (“Eugene Goostman”) speaking English as a second language.

In actual fact, humans have nothing to fear.  Most measures of “human like” intelligence such as the Turing Test use the wrong yardsticks. These computers are never embodied. The rich information of non-verbal communication is not present, nor can it be.  Proximate human features are not enough.  For example, Watson’s “face” in its famous Jeopardy challenge a few years ago was a set of cheesy electric lights.  Moreover, these smart machines tend to be asked questions that we would ask of Siri or other informational databases.  What they “know” is often defined as a set of facts, not feelings. And, of course, these machines lack what we so readily reveal in our conversations with others: that we have a sense of self, that we have an accumulated biography of life experiences that shape our reactions and dispositions, and that we want to be understood.

Just the issue of selfhood should remind us of the special status that comes from living through dialogue with others.  A sense of self is complicated, but it includes the critical ability to be aware of another’s awareness of who we are.  If this sounds confusing, it isn’t.  This process is central to all but the most perfunctory communication transactions.  As we address others we are usually “reading” their responses in light of what we believe they already have discerned about us.  We triangulate between our  perceptions of who we are, who they are, and what they are thinking about our behavior. This all happens in a flash, forming what is sometimes called “emotional intelligence.”  It’s an ongoing form of self-monitoring that functions to oil the complex relationships. Put this sequence together, and you get a transaction that is full of feedback loops that involve estimates if intention and interest, and—frequently—a general desire born in empathy to protect the feelings of the other.

It’s an understatement to say these transactions are not the stuff of machine-based intelligence, and probably never can be.  We are not computers.  As Walter Isaacson reminds us in his recent book, The Innovators, we are carbon based creatures with chemical and electrical impulses that mix to create unique and idiosyncratic individuals.  This is when the organ of the brain becomes so much more: the biographical homeland of an experience-saturated mind.  With us there is no central processor.  We are not silicon-based. There are the nearly infinite forms of consciousness in a brain with 100-billion neurons with 100-trillion connections.  And because we often “think” in ordinary language, we are so much more—and sometimes less—than an encyclopedia on two legs.