Day 2, CoEDL Summer School. "You could be dead!"

Remember day one, when we ate lunch in the great hall and made new friends and our classes were filled with puzzles and possibility?

Welcome to day two.

• “Imagine what could happen in four to eight seconds. Everything. You could be dead!” - on the temporal lag of fMRI data (which measures blood flow in the brain) compared to EEG data (which measures electrical activity in the cortex)

• How do you make a room full of linguists laugh? Show them a video tracking the eye- movements of someone reading a series of unambiguous German sentences with an ambiguous sentence thrown in at the end. Classic!

• (It actually is laugh-out-loud funny. The eye-tracking dot skips across the page from word to word, line to line, like a rabbit bounding through the undergrowth. Happy little eye-movement! Look at it go! But suddenly - disaster! The reader is unable to disambiguate the final sentence, and the eye-tracking dot goes over those lines again and again and again, back and forth, unable to move on, getting more and more bewildered, frightened, scared. You start cheering it on. You can do it little eye-movement! I believe in you! It’s hilarious. I wish I had the video.)

• How do you silence a room of typologists? Ask them “what is a subject?”

• How do you silence a room of phonologists? Ask them “what is a syllable?”

• Three hour phonology lectures on a sunny Friday afternoon are like a boxing match. (Probably.) You can’t lose your concentration; can’t lose your confidence. The stories I could tell. If you get knocked out you better get up again right away. The minute you start to doubt yourself, it’s all over. Mind over matter. Hang in there. Go zen. Never mind the blood, the tears. You can do this. You are the walrus. You are the left-headed foot. You are the VC syllable. You crawl out of the lecture, bruised and battered. You survived this time. You’re alive. Celebrate.