[geeks] New Tech Schools: Digital Harbor in Baltimore

[der Mouse]

>>> I had an interesting acid trip once, where I could still easily
>>> understand the grammar and syntax of English, but I no longer could
>>> understand any of the words.  (vocabulary -> 0)

That'd be interesting, alright.

> This was some of the most interesting stuff I learned in Intro to
> Linguistics... it seems completely bizarre to me, almost enough that
> I want to hit myself in the head really hard just to see what it (the
> language dysfunction, not the head trauma) feels like.

I once was in a light drowsy trance - eyes closed, not sleepy enough to
fall asleep, but disconnected from most of my motor and much of my
sensory I/O - and had a most peculiar percept: I saw a sheet in front
of me with words on it, but, when I focused on a word to look at the
letters making it up, it disappeared.  Provided I didn't try to look at
the individual letters, I could read off the words just fine (the text
didn't make any sense, but that's a separate issue).  I was getting
high-level percepts (the words) without the low-level percepts making
them up (the letters).

I conjecture that it must hve been subjectively somewhat similar to
blindsight.  (Perhaps not coincidentally, I had recently been reading
about blindsight.  Google blindsight if you're not familiar with it;
it's a fascinating subject.)

As for finding out what it feels like - there are researchers using
external magnets to temporarily shut down parts of subjects' brains, to
deliberately induce blindsight
(http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/11/1101_051101_blindsight.html);
I imagine the same technique could be used to shut down language
processing areas temporarily.

I too think it would be absolutely fascinating to experience.

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