Noam Chomsky Talks About How Kids Acquire Language and Ideas in an Animated Video by Michel Gondry

These days Noam Chom­sky is prob­a­bly most famous for his con­sis­tent, out­spo­ken crit­i­cism of U.S. for­eign pol­i­cy. Yet before the War on Ter­ror and the War on Drugs, Chom­sky became inter­na­tion­al­ly famous for propos­ing a nov­el solu­tion to an age-old ques­tion: what does a baby know?

Pla­to argued that infants retain mem­o­ries of past lives and thus come into this world with a grasp of lan­guage. John Locke coun­tered that a baby’s mind is a blank slate onto which the world etch­es its impres­sion. After years of research, Chom­sky pro­posed that new­borns have a hard-wired abil­i­ty to under­stand gram­mar. Lan­guage acqui­si­tion is as ele­men­tal to being human as, say, dam build­ing is to a beaver. It’s just what we’re pro­grammed to do. Chomsky’s the­o­ries rev­o­lu­tion­ized the way we under­stand lin­guis­tics and the mind.

A lit­tle while ago, film direc­tor and music video auteur Michel Gondry inter­viewed Chom­sky and then turned the whole thing into an extend­ed ani­mat­ed doc­u­men­tary called Is the Man Who Is Tall Hap­py?.

Above is a clip from the film. In his thick French accent, Gondry asks if there is a cor­re­la­tion between lan­guage acqui­si­tion and ear­ly mem­o­ries. For any­one who’s watched Eter­nal Sun­shine of the Spot­less Mind, you know that mem­o­ry is one of the director’s major obses­sions. Over Gondry’s rough-hewn draw­ings, Chom­sky expounds: “Chil­dren know quite a lot of a lan­guage, much more than you would expect, before they can exhib­it that knowl­edge.” He goes on to talk about new tech­niques for teach­ing deaf-blind chil­dren and how a day-old infant inter­prets the world.

As the father of a tod­dler who is at the cusp of learn­ing to form thoughts in words, I found the clip to be fas­ci­nat­ing. Now, if only Chom­sky can explain why my son has tak­en to shout­ing the word “bacon” over and over and over again.

To gain a deep­er under­stand­ing of Chom­sky’s thoughts on lin­guis­tics, see our pre­vi­ous post:  The Ideas of Noam Chom­sky: An Intro­duc­tion to His The­o­ries on Lan­guage & Knowl­edge (1977)

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Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in March 2015.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Direc­tor Michel Gondry Makes a Charm­ing Film on His iPhone, Prov­ing That We Could Be Mak­ing Movies, Not Tak­ing Self­ies

Michel Gondry’s Finest Music Videos for Björk, Radio­head & More: The Last of the Music Video Gods

Noam Chom­sky & Michel Fou­cault Debate Human Nature & Pow­er (1971)

What Makes Us Human?: Chom­sky, Locke & Marx Intro­duced by New Ani­mat­ed Videos from the BBC

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

The 10 Commandments of Chindōgu, the Japanese Art of Creating Unusually Useless Inventions

Back in the 1990s I’d often run across vol­umes of the Unuse­less Japan­ese Inven­tions series at book­stores. Each one fea­tures about a hun­dred osten­si­bly real Japan­ese devices, pho­tographed and described with a dis­arm­ing straight­for­ward­ness, that mash up oth­er con­sumer prod­ucts in out­ward­ly bizarre ways: chop­sticks whose attached minia­ture elec­tric fan cools ramen noo­dles en route to the mouth; a plas­tic zebra cross­ing to unroll and lay across a street at the walk­er’s con­ve­nience; an invert­ed umbrel­la attached to a portable tank for rain­wa­ter col­lec­tion on the go. Such things, at once plau­si­ble and implau­si­ble, turn out to have their own word in the Japan­ese lan­guage: chindōgu (珍道具), or “curi­ous tool.”

“There’s an essence to chindōgu that can’t be ignored,” writes Michael Richey at Tofugu, where you can view an exten­sive gallery of exam­ples. “They need to be use­ful, but only just so. Some­thing peo­ple could use, but prob­a­bly won’t because of shame,” a famous­ly pow­er­ful force in Japan­ese soci­ety.

They also adhere to a set of prin­ci­ples laid down by Ken­ji Kawaka­mi, for­mer edi­tor of the coun­try house­wife-tar­get­ed mag­a­zine Mail Order Life, who first revealed chindōgu to Japan by show­ing off his pro­to­types in the back pages. These ten com­mand­ments of chindōgu are as fol­lows:

  1. A Chindōgu Can­not be for Real Use — They must be, from a prac­ti­cal point of view, use­less.
  2. A Chindōgu Must Exist — A Chindōgu must be some­thing that you can actu­al­ly hold, even if you aren’t going to use it.
  3. There must be the Spir­it of Anar­chy in Every Chindōgu — Chindōgu inven­tions rep­re­sent the free­dom to be (almost) use­less and chal­lenge the his­tor­i­cal need for use­ful­ness.
  4. Chindōgu Tools are for Every­day Life — Chindōgu must be use­ful (or use­less) to every­one around the world for every­day life.
  5. Chindōgu are Not for Sale — Chindōgu can­not be sold, as this would go against the spir­it of the art form.
  6. Humor is Not the Sole Rea­son for Cre­at­ing a Chindōgu — Even if Chindōgu are inher­ent­ly quirky and hilar­i­ous, the main rea­son they are cre­at­ed is for prob­lem solv­ing.
  7. Chindōgu are Not Pro­pa­gan­da — Chindōgu are, how­ev­er, inno­cent and made with good inten­tions. They should only be cre­at­ed to be used (or not used).
  8. Chindōgu are Nev­er Taboo — Chindōgu must adhere to society’s basic stan­dards.
  9.  Chindōgu Can­not be Patent­ed — Chindōgu can­not be copy­right­ed or patent­ed, and are made to be shared with the rest of the world.
  10. Chindōgu Are With­out Prej­u­dice — Every­one should have an equal chance to enjoy every Chindōgu.

These prin­ci­ples result­ed in the kind of inven­tions that drew great fas­ci­na­tion and amuse­ment in their home coun­try — you can watch a short Japan­ese tele­vi­sion broad­cast show­ing Kawaka­mi demon­strate a few chindōgu above — but not only there. The Unuse­less Japan­ese Inven­tions books came out in the West at just the right time, a his­tor­i­cal moment that saw Japan’s image shift from that of a fear­some inno­va­tor and eco­nom­ic pow­er­house to that of an inward-look­ing but often charm­ing nation of obses­sives and eccentrics. Of course such peo­ple, so West­ern think­ing went, would come up with fash­ion­able ear­rings that dou­ble as earplugs, a cup hold­er that slots into a jack­et pock­et, and shoes with toe-mount­ed brooms and dust­pans.

Kawaka­mi has con­tin­ued to invent and exhib­it chindōgu in recent years, and even now his work remains as ana­log as ever. “There’s always some process in ana­log prod­ucts, and these process­es them­selves can be their pur­pose,” he told the Japan Times in a 2001 inter­view. “If you look at dig­i­tal prod­ucts, they all iso­late peo­ple and leave them in their own small world, depriv­ing them of the joy of com­mu­ni­cat­ing with oth­ers… I can’t deny that they make life more excit­ing and con­ve­nient, but they also make human rela­tion­ships more shal­low and super­fi­cial.” Those wise words look wis­er all the time — but then, you’d expect that degree of insight into 21st-cen­tu­ry life from the man who may well have invent­ed the self­ie stick.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“Tsun­doku,” the Japan­ese Word for the New Books That Pile Up on Our Shelves, Should Enter the Eng­lish Lan­guage

“Inemuri,” the Japan­ese Art of Tak­ing Pow­er Naps at Work, on the Sub­way, and Oth­er Pub­lic Places

An 82-Year-Old Japan­ese Audio­phile Search­es for the Best Sound by Installing His Own Elec­tric Util­i­ty Pole in His Yard

Dis­cov­er the Japan­ese Muse­um Ded­i­cat­ed to Col­lect­ing Rocks That Look Like Human Faces

The Muse­um of Fail­ure: A Liv­ing Shrine to New Coke, the Ford Edsel, Google Glass & Oth­er Epic Cor­po­rate Fails

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

A New Academic Hoax–Complete with Fake Articles Published in Academic Journals–Ventures to Show the “Corruption” of Cultural Studies

We should be sus­pi­cious when researchers assume their con­clu­sion; when the results of an aca­d­e­m­ic study mere­ly con­firm the author’s pre-exist­ing bias­es. Humans are wired to seek con­fir­ma­tion, a cog­ni­tive deficit so deeply engrained that it can be exploit­ed among laypeo­ple and spe­cial­ists alike. Art his­to­ri­ans have been fooled by forg­eries, his­to­ri­ans by fake man­u­scripts, and pale­on­tol­o­gists by pho­ny fos­sils. Physi­cist Steven Wein­berg ref­er­enced such high-lev­el hoax­es in a 1996 essay in The New York Review of Books, and he placed that year’s aca­d­e­m­ic scandal—known as the “Sokal Hoax”—among them.

The gist of the Sokal affair runs as fol­lows: NYU math­e­mat­i­cal physi­cist Alan Sokal sus­pect­ed that post-struc­tural­ist-influ­enced cul­tur­al stud­ies was jar­gon-laden, obfus­cat­ing BS, and he set out to prove it by author­ing his own “post­mod­ernist” text, an arti­cle full of mis­used ter­mi­nol­o­gy from quan­tum physics. He sent it off to the jour­nal Social Text, who pub­lished it in their Spring/Summer issue. Sokal then revealed in anoth­er jour­nal, Lin­gua Fran­ca, that the arti­cle had been a fraud, “lib­er­al­ly salt­ed with non­sense,” and had only been accept­ed because “(a) it sound­ed good and (b) it flat­tered the editor’s ide­o­log­i­cal pre­con­cep­tions.”

Sokal’s hoax, it was round­ly claimed, demon­strat­ed that cer­tain fash­ion­able quar­ters of the aca­d­e­m­ic human­i­ties had dete­ri­o­rat­ed into bab­ble, sig­ni­fy­ing noth­ing more than rigid ide­o­log­i­cal com­mit­ments and a gen­er­al dis­re­gard for the actu­al mean­ings of words and con­cepts. Wein­berg wasn’t so sure. At most, per­haps, it showed the edi­to­r­i­al fail­ings of Social Text. And while human­ists may abuse sci­en­tif­ic ideas, Wein­berg points out that sci­en­tists of the stature of Wern­er Heisen­berg have also been prone to slip­shod, qua­si-mys­ti­cal think­ing.

But the Sokal hoax did expose to the wider pub­lic a ten­den­cy among a coterie of aca­d­e­mics to indulge in mys­ti­fy­ing lan­guage, includ­ing the mis­use of jar­gon from oth­er fields of study, usu­al­ly in imi­ta­tion of French the­o­rists like Jacques Lacan, Julia Kris­te­va, or Jacques Derrida—whom, it must be said, all wrote in a very dif­fer­ent intel­lec­tu­al cul­ture (one that expects, Michel Fou­cault once admit­ted, at least “ten per­cent incom­pre­hen­si­ble”). For a good many peo­ple in the aca­d­e­m­ic human­i­ties, this wasn’t much of a rev­e­la­tion. (Sokal has since pub­lished a more thor­ough­ly crit­i­cal book with the apt title Beyond the Hoax.)

Part of the prob­lem with his hoax as a seri­ous cri­tique is that it began with its con­clu­sion. Cul­tur­al stud­ies are rife with crap argu­ments, ide­ol­o­gy, and incom­pre­hen­si­ble non­sense, Sokal believed. And so, when his paper was accept­ed, he sim­ply rest­ed his case, mak­ing no effort to engage char­i­ta­bly with good schol­ar­ship while he ridiculed the bad. Which brings us to the cur­rent state of the aca­d­e­m­ic human­i­ties, and to a con­tem­po­rary, Sokal-like attack on them by a trio of writ­ers who rest their case on a slight­ly broad­er base of evidence—20 fraud­u­lent arti­cles sent out to var­i­ous niche cul­tur­al stud­ies jour­nals over a year: four pub­lished (since retract­ed), three accept­ed but not pub­lished, sev­en under review, and six reject­ed.

The authors—academic philoso­pher Peter Boghoss­ian and writ­ers Helen Pluck­rose and James A. Lindsay—revealed the hoax this week in an arti­cle pub­lished at the Pluck­rose-edit­ed Areo mag­a­zine. One needn’t read past the title to under­stand the authors’ take on cul­tur­al stud­ies in gen­er­al: “Aca­d­e­m­ic Griev­ance Stud­ies and the Cor­rup­tion of Schol­ar­ship.” While all three hoax­ers iden­ti­fy as left-lean­ing lib­er­als, the broad-brush char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of whole fields as “griev­ance stud­ies” reveals a prej­u­di­cial degree of con­tempt that seems unwar­rant­ed. In the arti­cle, they reveal their moti­va­tions and meth­ods, out­line the suc­cess­es of the project, and post the com­ments of the arti­cles’ ref­er­ees, along with a video of them­selves hav­ing a good laugh at the whole thing.

This last bit is unnec­es­sary and obnox­ious, but does the new hoax—“Sokal Squared” as it’s been called—genuinely under­mine the cred­i­bil­i­ty of cul­tur­al stud­ies as a whole? Is it “’hilar­i­ous and delight­ful,’” asks Alexan­der C. Kaf­ka at The Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion, or “an ugly exam­ple of dis­hon­esty and bad faith?” Har­vard polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Yascha Mounk tact­ful­ly finds in it a seri­ous case for con­cern: “Some aca­d­e­m­ic emperors—the ones who sup­pos­ed­ly have the most to say about these cru­cial top­ics [dis­crim­i­na­tion, racism, sexism]—have no clothes.”

This is a point worth pur­su­ing, and cer­tain recent scan­dals should give every­one pause to con­sid­er how bul­ly­ing and group­think man­i­fest on the aca­d­e­m­ic left at the high­est lev­el of pres­tige. But the great major­i­ty of aca­d­e­mics are not “emper­ors” and have very lit­tle social or eco­nom­ic pow­er. And Mounk is care­ful not to over­state the case. He points out how the hoax has unfor­tu­nate­ly giv­en wel­come “ammu­ni­tion” to right-wing con­ser­v­a­tive axe-grinders:

Many con­ser­v­a­tives who are deeply hos­tile to the sci­ence of cli­mate change, and who dis­miss out of hand the stud­ies that attest to deep injus­tices in our soci­ety, are using Sokal Squared to smear all aca­d­e­mics as biased cul­ture war­riors. The Fed­er­al­ist, a right-wing news and com­men­tary site, went so far as to spread the appar­ent ide­o­log­i­cal bias of a few jour­nals in one par­tic­u­lar cor­ner of acad­e­mia to most pro­fes­sors, the main­stream media, and Democ­rats on the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee.

The Fed­er­al­ist spe­cial­izes in irre­spon­si­ble con­spir­a­cy-mon­ger­ing, the kind of thing that sells ads and wins elec­tions but doesn’t belong in aca­d­e­m­ic debate. The ques­tion Mounk doesn’t ask is whether the hoax­ers’ own atti­tudes encour­age and share in such hos­til­i­ty, an issue raised by sev­er­al of their crit­ics. As physi­cist Sean Car­roll wrote on Twit­ter, “What strikes me about stunts like this is their fun­da­men­tal mean­ness. No attempt to intel­lec­tu­al­ly engage with ideas you dis­agree with; just trolling for the lulz.” McGill Uni­ver­si­ty polit­i­cal the­o­rist Jacob T. Levy expressed sim­i­lar reser­va­tions in an inter­view, notes The New York Times, say­ing

even some col­leagues who are not fans of iden­ti­ty-ori­ent­ed schol­ar­ship are look­ing at the hoax and say­ing ‘this is poten­tial­ly uneth­i­cal and doesn’t show what they think it is show­ing.’ Besides, he added, “We all rec­og­nized that this kind of thing could also be done in our dis­ci­plines if peo­ple were will­ing to ded­i­cate a year to do it.”

There­in lies anoth­er prob­lem with Sokal Squared. Hoax­es have been per­pet­u­at­ed by smart, ded­i­cat­ed forg­ers, con-artists, and pranksters in near­ly every field, show­ing up all sorts of experts as poten­tial dupes. The sin­gling out of cul­tur­al stud­ies for par­tic­u­lar ridicule—the char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of stud­ies of race, gen­der, dis­abil­i­ty, etc. as “griev­ance studies”—reveals an aggriev­ed agen­da all its own, one that ignores the seri­ous prob­lems cor­rupt­ing oth­er dis­ci­plines (e.g. indus­try fund­ing in aca­d­e­m­ic sci­ences, or the gross overuse of under­grad­u­ate stu­dents as the main sub­jects of studies—groups that hard­ly rep­re­sent the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion.)

Some, but not all, of the suc­cess­ful­ly-pub­lished hoax papers sound ludi­crous and ter­ri­ble. Some, in fact, do not, as Justin Wein­berg shows at Dai­ly Nous, and should not shame the edi­tors who pub­lished them. Some of the jour­nals have much high­er edi­to­r­i­al stan­dards than oth­ers. (An ear­ly hoax attempt by Boghoss­ian tar­get­ed an ill-reput­ed, pay-to-play pub­li­ca­tion.) The whole affair may speak to broad­er fail­ures in aca­d­e­m­ic pub­lish­ing that go beyond a tiny cor­ner of the human­i­ties. In part, those fail­ures may stem from a gen­er­al trend toward over­worked, under­paid, increas­ing­ly pre­car­i­ous schol­ars whose dis­ci­plines, and fund­ing, have been under relent­less polit­i­cal attack since at least the 1990s and who must keep grind­ing out pub­li­ca­tions, some­times of dubi­ous mer­it, as part of the over­all dri­ve toward sheer pro­duc­tiv­i­ty as the sole mea­sure of suc­cess.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky Explains What’s Wrong with Post­mod­ern Phi­los­o­phy & French Intel­lec­tu­als, and How They End Up Sup­port­ing Oppres­sive Pow­er Struc­tures

John Sear­le on Fou­cault and the Obscu­ran­tism in French Phi­los­o­phy

Noam Chom­sky Slams Žižek and Lacan: Emp­ty ‘Pos­tur­ing’

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The Origins of the Death Growl in Metal Music

When Arab-Span­ish Sephar­di Jew­ish mer­chant Abra­ham ben Jacob first encoun­tered the Vikings in Den­mark, he had this to say:

“Nev­er before I have heard ugli­er songs than those of the Vikings in Slesvig. The growl­ing sound com­ing from their throats reminds me of dogs howl­ing, only more untamed.”

Now what Mr. ben Jacob actu­al­ly heard we will nev­er know, but the descrip­tion does sound a lot like the “Death Growl” famil­iar to fans of death met­al. (The appear­ance of Vikings and the pre­pon­der­ance of Scan­di­na­vians with­in the genre cer­tain­ly make this tale sound true.)

Cheek­i­ly referred to by non-met­al fans as the “Cook­ie Mon­ster Voice,” this par­tic­u­lar style has evolved over time as met­al changed in the 1980s, from the pierc­ing screams of Dio and Iron Maid­en to the growl of Sepul­tura and Can­ni­bal Corpse. And that’s matched by the demon­ic and doom-laden sound of the music and the Grand Guig­nol hor­ror of the lyrics, which delight fans with its deprav­i­ty and dis­gust, the gross­er the bet­ter.

Whether it’s your cup of tea or not, you have to admit that the ‘80s and ‘90s saw the growth of a brand new vocal style that seemed to come out of nowhere.


YouTu­ber Poly­phon­ic tries to unrav­el its ori­gins in the video above, which, we have to admit, fol­lows the Wikipedia arti­cle on the Death Growl point by point. But that’s okay–imagine if all Wikipedia arti­cles had their own videos…would that be a bad thing?

On the oth­er hand, Polyphonic’s video does leave out some antecedents to this style, all of who get named checked by var­i­ous folks in the com­ments. (Yes, YouTube com­ments that are worth read­ing!)

In par­tic­u­lar, there’s no men­tion of African-Amer­i­can artists like Howl­in’ Wolf, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, or Clarence Frog­man Hen­ry. Wolf in par­tic­u­lar became a huge influ­ence on anoth­er incred­i­bly gruff and gut­tur­al singer, Tom Waits, who often sings like the Dev­il has his lar­ynx.
And do the dis­tort­ed vocals on Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” or on King Crimson’s “21st Cen­tu­ry Schizoid Man” real­ly count? Or the var­i­ous screams on Pink Floyd songs?

When Poly­phon­ic returns to the 1980s, he’s on firmer ground. Lem­my from Motör­head makes more sense as an influ­ence, and by the time we get to Ven­om, then Death, then Man­tas, it is eas­i­er to see where the Death Growl came from. (But come on, no men­tion of Napalm Death? They were the first growl­ing band I ever heard, and hats off to BBC DJ John Peel for not only play­ing them when the debuted, but he had them in ses­sion.)

If inter­est­ed, I would rec­om­mend explor­ing the YouTube com­ments fur­ther and make up your own mind. And if you are inter­est­ed in learn­ing this tech­nique, there are folks who will teach you.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Bat­tle-Scarred Heavy Met­al Musi­cians Play Rock ‘n’ Roll Clas­sics on Hel­lo Kit­ty Instru­ments

96-Year-Old Holo­caust Sur­vivor Fronts a Death Met­al Band

1980s Met­al­head Kids Are All Right: New Study Sug­gests They Became Well-Adjust­ed Adults

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

The Cornell Note-Taking System: Learn the Method Students Have Used to Enhance Their Learning Since the 1940s

How should you take notes in class? Like so many stu­dents who came before me and would come after, I had lit­tle idea in col­lege and even less in high school. The inher­ent­ly ambigu­ous nature of the note-tak­ing task has inspired a vari­ety of meth­ods and sys­tems, few of them as respect­ed as Cor­nell Notes. Invent­ed in the 1940s by Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty edu­ca­tion pro­fes­sor Wal­ter Pauk, author of How to Study in Col­lege, Cor­nell Notes involves divid­ing each page up into three sec­tions: one to para­phrase the lec­ture’s main ideas, one to sum­ma­rize those ideas, and one to write ques­tions. After writ­ing down those main ideas dur­ing class, imme­di­ate­ly sum­ma­rize and add ques­tions about the con­tent. Then, while study­ing lat­er, try to answer those ques­tions with­out look­ing at the main body of notes.

You’ll find a com­plete and con­cise expla­na­tion of how to take Cor­nell Notes at Cor­nel­l’s web site, which includes infor­ma­tion on the “Reflect” stage (in which you ask your­self broad­er ques­tions like “What’s the sig­nif­i­cance of these facts?” and “What prin­ci­ple are they based on?”) and the “Review” stage (in which you “spend at least ten min­utes every week review­ing all your pre­vi­ous notes” to aid reten­tion).

For a more detailed visu­al expla­na­tion, have a look at teacher Jen­nifer DesRochers’ instruc­tions for how to take Cor­nell Notes in the video above, which now approach­es one mil­lion views on Youtube. Her own ver­sion encour­ages tak­ing down main-idea sum­maries in draw­ings as well as text, and includ­ing things like “key points” and “impor­tant peo­ple or ideas” in the ques­tion col­umn.

That DesRochers’ video now approach­es one mil­lion views sug­gests stu­dents still find the Cor­nell Notes sys­tem effec­tive, as much as or even more so than they did when Pauk first pub­lished it. Over time, of course, its users have also aug­ment­ed it: take Doug Neil­l’s video “Improv­ing Cor­nell Notes With Sketch­not­ing Tech­niques” above, which com­bines stan­dard Cor­nell Notes with his sys­tem of “sketch­not­ing,” also known as “visu­al note-tak­ing and graph­ic record­ing.”

He pro­vides exam­ples of what such Cor­nell-for­mat­ted sketch­not­ing might look like, explain­ing that “hav­ing the option of doing some­thing more visu­al in your mind trig­gers a dif­fer­ent type of pro­cess­ing pow­er, so that you’re more active in the way that you’re respond­ing to the ideas. You’re not just pas­sive­ly tak­ing in infor­ma­tion.” The nature of school, as stu­dents in every era have known, can often induce a state of pas­siv­i­ty; sys­tems like Cor­nell Notes and its many vari­a­tions remind us of how much more we can learn if we have a way to break out of it.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,300 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

Richard Feynman’s “Note­book Tech­nique” Will Help You Learn Any Subject–at School, at Work, or in Life

Wyn­ton Marsalis Gives 12 Tips on How to Prac­tice: For Musi­cians, Ath­letes, or Any­one Who Wants to Learn Some­thing New

Carl Sagan’s Syl­labus & Final Exam for His Course on Crit­i­cal Think­ing (Cor­nell, 1986)

What’s a Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly-Proven Way to Improve Your Abil­i­ty to Learn? Get Out and Exer­cise

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The History of Philosophy Visualized in an Interactive Timeline

The con­nec­tions we make between var­i­ous philoso­phers and philo­soph­i­cal schools are often con­nec­tions that have already been made for us by teach­ers and schol­ars on our paths through high­er edu­ca­tion. Many of us who have tak­en a phi­los­o­phy class or two leave it at that, con­tent we’ve got the gist of things and that spe­cial­ists can parse the details per­fect­ly well with­out us. But there are those curi­ous peo­ple who con­tin­ue to read abstruse and dif­fi­cult phi­los­o­phy after their intro class­es are over, for the sheer, per­verse joy of it, or from a burn­ing desire to under­stand truth, beau­ty, jus­tice, or what­ev­er.

And then there are those who embark on a thor­ough self-guid­ed tour of West­ern philo­soph­i­cal his­to­ry, attempt­ing, with­out the aid of uni­ver­si­ty depart­ments and fad­dish inter­pre­tive schemes, to weave the dis­parate strains of thought togeth­er. One such auto­di­dact and aca­d­e­m­ic out­sider, design­er Deniz Cem Önduygu of Istan­bul, has com­bined an ency­clo­pe­dic mind with a tal­ent for rig­or­ous out­line orga­ni­za­tion to pro­duce an inter­ac­tive time­line of the his­to­ry of philo­soph­i­cal ideas. It is “a pure­ly per­son­al project,” he writes, “that I’m doing in my own time, with my lim­it­ed knowl­edge, for myself.”

Önduygu shares the project not to show off his learn­ing but, more humbly, to “get feed­back and to make it acces­si­ble to those who are inter­est­ed.” It may be pre­cious few peo­ple who have both the time and incli­na­tion to teach them­selves the his­to­ry of phi­los­o­phy, but if you are one of them, this incred­i­bly dense info­graph­ic is as good a place to start as any, and while it may appear intim­i­dat­ing at first glance, its menu in the upper right cor­ner allows users to zero in on spe­cif­ic thinkers and schools, and to con­fine them­selves to small­er, more man­age­able areas of the whole.

As for the time­line itself, “view­ers can zoom in and out,” notes Dai­ly Nous, “and see philoso­phers list­ed in chrono­log­i­cal order, with ideas they’re asso­ci­at­ed with list­ed beneath them. These ideas, in turn, are con­nect­ed by green lines to sim­i­lar or sup­port­ing ideas else­where on the time­line, and con­nect­ed by red lines to oppos­ing or refut­ing ideas else­where on the time­line. If you hov­er your mouse cur­sor over a sin­gle idea, all but it and its con­nect­ed ideas fade. You can then click on the idea to bring those con­nect­ed ideas clos­er for ease of view­ing.”

The design­er admits this is a “nev­er-end­ing work in progress” and main­ly a source for remind­ing him­self of the main argu­ments of the philoso­phers he’s sur­veyed. The major sources for his time­line are “Bryan Magee’s The Sto­ry of Phi­los­o­phy and Thomas Baldwin’s Con­tem­po­rary Phi­los­o­phy, along with oth­er works for spe­cif­ic philoso­phers and ideas.” But many of the con­nec­tions Önduygu draws in this exten­sive web of green and red are his own.

He explains his ratio­nale here, not­ing, “The lines here do not always depict a direct trans­fer between two peo­ple; I think of them as trac­ing the devel­op­ment of an idea through­out time with­in our col­lec­tive con­cep­tion.” Spend some more time with this impres­sive project at the His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy Sum­ma­rized & Visu­al­ized (the site works best in Chrome), and feel free to get in touch with its cre­ator with con­struc­tive crit­i­cism. He wel­comes feed­back and is open to oppos­ing ideas, as every life­long learn­er should be.

via Dai­ly Nous

Relat­ed Con­tent:

150+ Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy Visu­al­ized

A His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy in 81 Video Lec­tures: From Ancient Greece to Mod­ern Times 

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy … With­out Any Gaps

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Museum Discovers Math Notebook of an 18th-Century English Farm Boy, Adorned with Doodles of Chickens Wearing Pants

We are trained by tra­di­tion to think of his­to­ry as a series of great men’s (and some women’s) lives, of great wars and roy­al suc­ces­sions, con­quests and trag­ic defeats, rev­o­lu­tions and world-chang­ing dis­cov­er­ies. The ordi­nary, every­day lives of ordi­nary, every­day peo­ple seem tedious and unre­mark­able by com­par­i­son. But archivists know bet­ter. Their jobs are not glam­orous, but what they lack in fame or aca­d­e­m­ic sinecures, they make up for with chance dis­cov­er­ies of the kind that we see here—doodles in the 1784 math note­book of one Richard Beale, a 13-year-old farm boy from rur­al Kent, Eng­land.

The archivists at the Muse­um of Eng­lish Rur­al Life (MERL) were so excit­ed about this find they made a Twit­ter thread about it, explain­ing its prove­nance in a bun­dle of eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry farm diaries, which “are a lot like nor­mal diaries but with more cows.”

The museum’s pro­gram man­ag­er, Adam Koszary, has a good ear for the medi­um, tweet­ing out oth­er wit­ti­cisms about Richard’s adven­tures in tak­ing notes: “But, like every teenag­er, math­e­mat­ics couldn’t fill the void of Richard’s heart. Richard doo­dled.” He drew pic­tures of his dog, incor­po­rat­ed draw­ings of ships into his equa­tions, and impec­ca­bly illus­trat­ed his word prob­lems.

One can almost imag­ine the lis­ti­cle: “Rur­al 18th-Cen­tu­ry Eng­lish Folk: They’re Just Like Us!” They think about their pets a lot. They draw when they get bored. They doo­dle tiny sketch­es of chick­ens in pants…Wait what? Yes, a chick­en in trousers appears among Richard’s doo­dles, one of the many charm­ing fea­tures that land­ed MERL’s sto­ry in The Guardian and gar­nered famous fans like JK Rowl­ing. Like seem­ing­ly every­thing on the inter­net, the chick­en in pants has sparked con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, such as “Why do the trousers appear to be sol­id like Wallace’s in The Wrong Trousers?” and “Was Richard Beale acquaint­ed with the town of Hens­broek in the Nether­lands?”

These ques­tions, writes Guy Bax­ter, asso­ciate direc­tor of archive ser­vices at MERL, are only part­ly tongue-in-cheek. The Dutch town of Hens­broek, does indeed have a coat of arms fea­tur­ing a chick­en in pants that bears a very close resem­blance to Richard’s draw­ing, though it is entire­ly unlike­ly that Richard ever trav­eled to the Nether­lands. The arms of Hens­broek “are a famous exam­ple of ‘cant­i­ng’, which uses a pun on a name to inspire the design,” notes Bax­ter. (Hens­broek lit­er­al­ly means “hens pants.”) The ori­gin of Richard’s design is more mys­te­ri­ous. “It is pos­si­ble that he knew about cant­i­ng arms,” Bax­ter admits. “Or maybe he just had a vivid imag­i­na­tion.”

The lit­tle sto­ry of Richard Beale and his math home­work doo­dles shows us some­thing about our frac­tured, frag­ment­ed world and the anx­ious, divid­ed lives we seem to lead online, says Ollie Dou­glas, cura­tor of MERL’s object col­lec­tions: “Social media is awash with high­ly per­son­al­ized engage­ments and com­men­taries on the world…. You only need to look through the respons­es to this sin­gle Twit­ter thread (and that fact that a ready­made chick­en-in-trousers gif was avail­able for us to shame­less­ly retweet) to see that the messy com­plex­i­ty of our world is still being shared and that we are all still doo­dlers at heart.”

Fol­low the Muse­um of Eng­lish Rur­al Life for updates to this sto­ry.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Math Doo­dling

Fyo­dor Dos­to­evsky Draws Elab­o­rate Doo­dles In His Man­u­scripts

The Doo­dles in Leonar­do da Vinci’s Man­u­scripts Con­tain His Ground­break­ing The­o­ries on the Laws of Fric­tion, Sci­en­tists Dis­cov­er

Woody Guthrie Cre­ates a Doo­dle-Filled List of 33 New Year’s Res­o­lu­tions (1943): Beat Fas­cism, Write a Song a Day, and Keep the Hop­ing Machine Run­ning

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Wendy Carlos’ Switched on Bach Turns 50 This Month: Learn How the Classical Synth Record Introduced the World to the Moog

When the Moog syn­the­siz­er appeared in the late 60s, musi­cians didn’t know what it was for, so they found some very cre­ative uses for it, includ­ing mak­ing nov­el­ty tracks like “Pop Corn,” a huge hit for Ger­shom Kings­ley from the 1969 album Music to Moog By. But the Moog was more than a quirky new toy. It was a rev­e­la­tion for what syn­the­sized sound could do, of a tech­nol­o­gy that seemed like it might have unlim­it­ed pos­si­bil­i­ty if har­nessed by the right hands. The Moog showed up in 1967 on albums by the Doors, the Mon­kees, the Byrds—psychedelic bands who under­stood its futur­is­tic promise.

Yet it also entered the homes of mil­lions of lis­ten­ers through a clas­si­cal album. In 1968, the Moog fea­tured solo on the high­est-sell­ing clas­si­cal album of all time, Switched on Bachby elec­tron­ic com­pos­er and pianist Wendy Car­los, known for her work with Stan­ley Kubrick on the scores of films like Clock­work Orange and The Shin­ing. Car­los met Moog in 1964 at a con­fer­ence for the Audio Engi­neer­ing Soci­ety and had the chance to inves­ti­gate one of his ear­ly mod­u­lar synths. “It was a per­fect fit,” she says, “he was a cre­ative engi­neer who spoke music: I was a musi­cian who spoke sci­ence. It felt like a meet­ing of sim­pati­co minds.”

Car­los helped Moog devel­op his designs, he helped her find her voice, the fuzzy, buzzing, dron­ing, hum­ming sound of an ana­log synth, which some­how made a per­fect fit for selec­tions from Bach’s Well-Tem­pered Clavier and Two-Part Inven­tions. When Car­los released Switched on Bach, her first stu­dio album, it was “an imme­di­ate suc­cess,” as Moog him­self said. “We wit­nessed the birth of a new genre of music”—fully syn­the­sized key­board music, with­out any acoustic instru­ments involved what­so­ev­er. The Moog proved itself, and Car­los impressed both pop fans and the clas­si­cal com­mu­ni­ty, many of whom ful­ly embraced the phe­nom­e­non.

A record­ing of Switched on Bach pre­miered at Carnegie Hall, Leonard Bern­stein pre­sent­ed an arrange­ment of Bach’s “Lit­tle” Fugue in G minor arranged for Moog, organ, and orches­tra at one of his Young People’s Con­certs, and no less a Bach author­i­ty than Glenn Gould praised the album, not­ing that it had “made elec­tron­ic music main­stream” even as it intro­duced entire new audi­ences to Bach. Car­los has since pre­served her mys­tique through intense per­son­al pri­va­cy and strict con­trol of her copy­right. You’ll find pre­cious lit­tle of her music on the inter­net: a snip­pet here and there, but no Switched on Bach stream­ing online.

It is well worth pay­ing for the plea­sure (I’d rec­om­mend doing so by track­ing down an orig­i­nal vinyl press­ing.) Car­los released a fol­low-up the next year, The Well-Tem­pered Syn­the­siz­er, then anoth­er inter­pre­ta­tion of Switched on Bach for the album’s 25th anniver­sary. This year it turns 50. You can cel­e­brate not only by lis­ten­ing to the orig­i­nal, but check­ing out its equal­ly majes­tic fol­low-up albums, the Spe­cial Edi­tion Box Set, and a recent “spir­i­tu­al suc­ces­sor” to Car­los’ orig­i­nal, Craig Leon’s 2015 Bach to Moog, a re-inter­pre­ta­tion of Bach using the very same syn­the­siz­er Car­los did those many years ago. Almost.

The Sys­tem 55, the col­lec­tion of large, clunky banks of patch bays, oscil­la­tors, fil­ters, envelopes, etc. that Car­los used, was reis­sued three years ago. In the short doc­u­men­tary above, you can see pro­duc­er and com­pos­er Leon talk about Car­los’ con­tri­bu­tions to mod­ern, and clas­si­cal, music and his own hybrid use of the ear­ly syn­the­siz­er with midi and a string sec­tion. He demon­strates how rad­i­cal­ly the dis­tinc­tive Moog sound can be shaped by its wonky dials and switch­es, but also how it can sub­tly col­or the sound of oth­er instru­ments with­out impos­ing itself. Such a rev­o­lu­tion­ary instru­ment required a tru­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ary album to announce it to the world.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Scores That Elec­tron­ic Music Pio­neer Wendy Car­los Com­posed for Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange and The Shin­ing

Hear Sev­en Hours of Women Mak­ing Elec­tron­ic Music (1938- 2014)

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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