Remembering

Remembering
Tonight's pizza evening was especially good and welcome. Rain returned (we seem to be having an usually wet autumn) and so there was no boules afternoon to distract me. But there were a dozen of us at the Bar du Pont for pizza (four English and eight French) and that seemed to be a perfect number for chatting in our usual “franglais”.

A point that came up in conversation was the distinction, if any, between recall and remember in English and rappeler and se souvenir in French. Friend Jo thought there was a temporal distinction between the English words, recalling being more instantaneous than remembering but I couldn't quite see that. In French, according to René and Ahmel, se souvenir applied more to intangible items and rappeler to concrete objects (despite the common “rappel” signs which remind you of speed limits, which aren't exactly concrete). And, they said, se souvenir was tending to disappear in common usage in favour of rappeler. That made the distinction in French clearer but didn't seem to have much light to shed on the English equivalents, except that the nouns recall and remembrance are quite well separated, somewhat along the French intangible/tangible lines. You may recall departed friends/family doing or saying something but you don't recall them in the abstract; you remember them.

For some reason this made me remember (recall) a conversation ,many years ago with a journalist colleague who trained as a psychologist. He pointed me towards an article in a Canadian psychology journal about response times. A project team of psychologists had been investigating response times in relation to stars in “reaction sports”: tennis, cricket, baseball, etc. A good sample of the stars in these sports at the time had been tested to ascertain their reaction times, which were generally believed to be way above normal. In fact the tests showed that their reaction times were within the normal range, albeit at the high end. What was even more surprising was that, in matches, these players were timed at responses much faster than their tested reaction times. So, back to the blackboard on response time tests? Apparently not; the tests were sound. The explanation that was agreed on was a distinction between what happens in the cerebrum and the cerebellum, in the brain. The former is responsible for what we popularly call instinctive reaction (although psychologists won't accept the validity of the term instinct) and the latter for reactions requiring prior thought. Since a tennis player can't know where a fast serve is going to land (or a cricketer where a fast ball is), the part of the brain involved should have been the cerebellum. But the reaction times indicated that it was the cerebrum that was involved. So what must have been at play was a kind of pattern recognition, with patterns stored in the cerebrum that would forecast where the ball would land. In better players, this pattern recognition was better developed than in poorer players.

This explanation also went some way towards explaining why, for instance, tennis players receiving a simple shot over the net, with their opponent sprawling on the ground, sometimes fail to make the simple shot back into the other half of the court and put the ball out. To make the correct shot, the player has to switch from cerebrum working to cerebellum working and, quite frequently, fails to make the switch. The problem is confusion.