Name: 【TED】馬理阿諾．西格曼: 你的用詞可能透露你未來的精神健康狀態 (Your words may predict your future mental health | Mariano Sigman)
Uploaded: 2017-04-04T21:59:58.000Z
Duration: 12 min 15 s

We have historical records that allow us to know how the ancient Greeks dressed,

我們有歷史紀錄可循，可以讓我們知道 古希臘人如何穿著、

One natural idea is that the deepest aspects of human thought --

有一個很自然的方法就是， 去探索人類最深層的想法——

is that the social transformations that have shaped our culture

去探索造就我們文化的社會變革，

may have also changed the structural columns of human thought.

這些變革也許就是 改變人類想法的主要因素。

We may all have different opinions about this.

對這一點，大家或許有不同的看法。

Actually, it's a long-standing philosophical debate.

實際上，這是一個存在已久的哲學辯論。

But is this question even amenable to science?

究竟這個問題是否可以 經由科學來處理？

that in the same way we can reconstruct how the ancient Greek cities looked

如同僅藉由一些磚頭， 我們得以重建希臘古都的外貌，

that the writings of a culture are the archaeological records,

藉由一些文化作品、建築歷史、

doing some form of psychological analysis

of some of the most ancient books of human culture,

人類古老文化書籍的心理分析，

Julian Jaynes came up in the '70s with a very wild and radical hypothesis:

裘利安．傑尼斯在70年代， 發表了一個相當大膽激進的假說：

humans were what today we would call schizophrenics.

是我們現在俗稱的 「精神分裂症患者」。

based on the fact that the first humans described in these books

在世界各地不同的傳統及地方，

這些書籍裡面所描述的人類行為

in different traditions and in different places of the world,

as if they were hearing and obeying voices

他們認為是從神祗那邊傳來的聲音。

that they perceived as coming from the Gods,

而如今，我們會稱之為 「幻聽」或「幻覺」。

他們開始認知到 那些聲音是他們自己創造的，

他們就是那些內在聲音的主人。

they began to recognize that they were the creators,

有了這樣的認知，他們學會了自省：

And with this, they gained introspection:

所以傑尼斯對「意識」的理論就是，

the ability to think about their own thoughts.

至少現今我們覺察到「意識」、

So Jaynes's theory is that consciousness,

感受到我們自己就是 人生導師的體悟

at least in the way we perceive it today,

where we feel that we are the pilots of our own existence --

但它有一個很明顯的問題就是，

它是建立在極少又特定的案例上。

which is that it's built on just a few and very specific examples.

3000年來人類才建立起 自省能力的這個理論，

是否可以經得起「量化」 且「客觀」的考驗。

that introspection built up in human history only about 3,000 years ago

至於要如何做的問題， 也是相當簡單明瞭。

can be examined in a quantitative and objective manner.

但我的意思並非，比如， 柏拉圖有一天突然醒來說，

And the problem of how to go about this is quite obvious.

It's not like Plato woke up one day and then he wrote,

我今天，擁有完整的自省意識了」 那樣的簡單而已。

and as of today, I have a fully introspective consciousness."

而這告訴我們，我們要找出 問題的本質為何。

我們必須找到從來沒有被 談論過的概念。

And this tells us actually what is the essence of the problem.

We need to find the emergence of a concept that's never said.

在這些書本中從未出現過一次。

The word introspection does not appear a single time

所以為了解決這個問題， 我們要建立一個文字的空間。

在這個大空間裡， 包含了相當多的字，

So our way to solve this is to build the space of words.

This is a huge space that contains all words

兩個字彼此之間的 關聯性程度。

in such a way that the distance between any two of them

is indicative of how closely related they are.

你會想，「狗」、「貓」 應該是比較有關聯性的，

但「葡萄柚」和「對數」 就沒甚麼關聯了。

you want the words "dog" and "cat" to be very close together,

而在這個空間裡的任何兩個字， 都必須是可以被量測出來的。

but the words "grapefruit" and "logarithm" to be very far away.

而我們有很多方式 可以建立起這些字的空間架構，

And this has to be true for any two words within the space.

方法一，是只要請教專家就行了，

And there are different ways that we can construct the space of words.

當兩個字出現關聯性時， 去追蹤它們的預設狀況，

is following the simple assumption that when two words are related,

they tend to appear in the same sentences,

more often than would be expected just by pure chance.

這個單純且帶有運算技巧 的方法必須好用，

我們分析了一些經常用到的字，

that this is a very complex and high-dimensional space,

這些詞彙會自動地歸納成 語義相近的相鄰群組，

And just to give you a flavor of how well this works,

所以你可看到，水果跟身體部位，

this is the result we get when we analyze this for some familiar words.

演算法也可以把我們要 整理的概念分門別類出來。

that words automatically organize into semantic neighborhoods.

你可以看到，科學的字彙 被拆解成兩個子類，

the computer parts, the scientific terms and so on.

The algorithm also identifies that we organize concepts in a hierarchy.

舉個例子，「天文學」這個詞彙，

you can see that the scientific terms break down into two subcategories

天文學之間，偏向科學的位置，

而它自己卻是一個天文學的字彙。

我們可以持續尋找 其它類似的情況。

實際上，如果你盯著這些字一陣子，

然後隨機搭配連結一下這些字，