đ đ đ three rabbits to inaugurate the month January and the year 2025
From Chris Waigl on Facebook yesterday. One fact that you need to know about CW is that she lives in Fairbanks AK (further facts, about CW and about Alaska, will become relevant as we go on):
Soft-spoken barista in a medium-loud cafĂ©, as heard by me: … and would you like salmon on top of your cappuccino?
The barista said cinnamon, CW heard salmon. Phonologically similar, but from two different conceptual worlds. Why would CW even have entertained the possibility that the barista was offering salmon?
Cinnamon is a common spice for fancy coffee (generally in the US), so the stuff is salient in the context of a cafĂ©. On the other hand, this is Alaska, where fishing is, generally, highly salient — fishing for trout, halibut, and other fish, but especially salmon — a fact that one FB commenter immediately fixed on:
—Â Dan Meyers: I mean, I wouldn’t be entirely shocked by that being an option in Alaska.
— CW > DM: That’s what I said, more or less, and the people behind me laughed.
What’s more, CW’s wife, Melinda Shore, is an angler, so salmon is a big thing in their household. Salmon is really salient for CW. She’s mentally primed for fish, especially salmon. Alive to its possibility in a way that I, in my condo in Palo Alto, am not.
In fact, just a week ago, I experienced a misreading similar to CWs mishearing. From my 12/21/24 posting “Today’s misreading”:
Encountered this morning on the New Scientist website from 12/15, what I saw as:
Ancient gnomes reveal
when modern humans and
Neanderthals interbred… Oh ⊠ancient genomes!
… Not long before I saw the New Scientist piece, Iâd come across a funny-sad photo of a garden gnome piled with wet snow (bad weather in the northeast US). So I was primed for gnomes.
In that case, the misreading was primed by an occurrence of a gnome (so called) in the recent context. CW’s mishearing was primed by a more general presence of salmon and other fish in her surroundings.
Priming. From Wikipedia:
Priming is a concept in psychology to describe how exposure to one stimulus may influence a response to a subsequent stimulus, without conscious guidance or intention. … For example, the word nurse might be recognized more quickly following the word doctor than following the word bread.
In the two misperception examples above, the priming is an extension of this notion, with the priming stimulus (the word gnome, the concept of salmon) interfering with, altering, the perception of a later stimulus (a written word — genomes — or a spoken word — cinnamon).
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