Most people are familiar with the feeling of when a word is “on the tip of one’s tongue”, also known as presque-vu.The feeling of presque-vu has been described as “mild anguish” , quite the evocative oxymoron. Unlike it’s cousin, deja-vu ( deja=”already”, vu=”seen”, and presque=”almost”), presque-vu can be simulated in an experimental setting. The familiar game of twenty questions can be seen as a way of experimentally simulating presque-vu because in the game we know the meaning of the word, but not the word itself. Why would someone want to simulate presque-vu in an experiment? One reason is that it makes it possible to consider the meaning of a word as somewhat detached from the word itself. This meaning detached from words can be seen as what’s going on in your mind when you think to yourself. Ordinarily I go about my day without wondering what’s going on in my mind, but when something like presque-vu occurs, I wrack my brain to try to find the word that I’m thinking about. Sometimes I’ll run through words that are similar in meaning, or other times I’ll have a nagging suspicion that it starts with a specific letter. Even though presque-vu might be nothing more than a neural short circuit, it’s a troubling one and makes me pause to wonder what’s really going on inside my head.
What’s going on in a person’s mind during presque-vu is called lexical access. Presque-vu is a lexical access error like Freudian slips and Spoonerisms. Whereas Freudian slips and Spoonerisms result in the wrong word coming out, presque-vu results in nothing coming out. Presque-vu is one of the reasons why I think that the speech that comes out of our mouths is not just an elaborate statistical pattern, but something that results from actual, conscious thought. Ironically though, in the case of presque-vu the only thing that comes out of our mouths is the big, fat, empty set, i.e., nothing. In lieu of a word being spoken, we are left with only our own thought and a slightly troubled feeling.
Why does presque-vu leave us feeling troubled? Imagine an extreme version of presque-vu: anomic aphasia. Anomic aphasia is brain disorder of Broca’s area that is due to stroke, tumor, or injury and results in losing the ability to use words, either in general or some broad class of words like verbs or names. In the worst case, this type of aphasia could leave a patient able to think but not able to talk, i.e., trapped in their body but unable to communicate. If it is frustrating to not be able to come up with a word, imagine suffering aphasia from a brain disorder that affects Broca’s area of the brain. According the an account of John Horan, a stroke victim, “It was four weeks after his stroke before he spoke his first word – which, understandably, was f***”.
Anomic aphasia, it is reported, can affect specific categories of words. Imagine now that you had a stroke and you lost all ability to recall and use emotion words, but the rest of your speech and thought abilities remained intact. You might think that your ability to describe your feelings to other people would be severely curtailed. But would it? I think it would be possible to communicate the same information using paraphrases that don’t directly refer to any emotion words. There would still be a frustrating feeling and talking about emotions would be a roundabout ordeal. But I think it’s an open question whether emotion words are absolutely indispensable or if we could do without them in a roundabout way.
To make this thought experiment as simple as possible, imagine that all you can say is yes or no and your goal is to communicate your current emotion to a fellow human being. This might be excruciatingly frustrating, but it would still be much better than being trapped in a mute body like a mummy. The question is whether by answering yes or no you can communicate an arbitrary emotion to another person. The answer is yes, with probability 0.88462 and on average 12.04 questions.
How do I know this, you might ask? The answer is simple: Emotion Twenty Questions (EMO20Q). Recently I have undertaken an experiment that aims to play the familiar game of twenty questions with emotions instead of arbitrary objects. So far I’ve collected a total of 26 matches, 23 of which terminated in satisfactory emotion communication, i.e., 88.462%. When the ones that did not terminate satisfactorily are averaged in as 20 questions, the average was 12.04 questions. I’m currently working on collecting more data and refining my experiments, so please check back for more details in the future.
