On Feb 7, 2013, at 11:38 PM, caldwell-brobeck <[email protected]> wrote:
> Here's an article you might find interesting: > http://www.pnas.org/content/106/11/4567.full > (tinyurl) > http://tinyurl.com/bayflls Interesting article. Thanks for the link. > > For a small example from my own experience, when I lived in Nfld I got > introduced to the notion of a "large" day. it was a term I had never > heard before, it refers to the sort of day when the air is soft and > fresh, the sky is blue and clear, and the people you happen across all > seem expansive and welcoming. Of course to really get a sense of the > word you have to hear it expressed in a content and optimistic manner. > It gave me a new category to assemble experiences, a subpartition of > "nice" or "pleasant" days, and now the word comes to mind when I'm > talking about the weather, particularly with those familiar with Nfld, > or Cape Breton..... I was not persuaded by the NAS article that language conditioned preattentive color perception. It seems more plausible that by having already named a phenomenon in itself (in this case, a specific color, such as ghalazio), a person would then be able to identify it among others on a spectrum more easily (or as Genesis put it, name the animals and have dominion over them). By having learned what an oboe sounds like, as distinct, say, from a clarinet or saxophone, one can more easily discern the oboe's sounds in an orchestral piece. I know I can, and I say to myself, "That's the oboe." But knowing the vocabulary didn't enable me to hear the oboe: learning what an oboe sounds like enabled me to hear it. I could just as easily said, "Ah, there's that sound again." Many years ago, I met a British artist who had come to the midwest (Iowa, I think) in his late 20s or 30s. He had already developed an abstract style of painting that mainly consisted of irregular shapes of color applied in a very painterly or brushy manner. His paintings contained almost no geometric shapes or other figural elements except a horizontal line from edge to edge. He showed me some pictures of his from right before he came to the US and later after living in Iowa and South Carolina (where we met during the Spoleto festival). The "horizon" as he called it moved down from a high location (noticeably above the midpoint) to a very low location in his paintings. He said when he got to Iowa, he was immediately struck by how big the sky was compared to his experiences in England (I think he was from the Midlands), and that affected where he placed the horizontal line in his paintings. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
