A Neuroscientist Explores the “Sanskrit Effect”
blogs.scientificamerican.com
blogs.scientificamerican.com
Another interesting note is that Vedic mantras are sometimes traditionally learnt and recited in what is known as a Ghana patha. If i were to number the words in a sentence, “The cow jumped over the moon” as 1 2 3 4 5 6 and then if I were to recite the sentence now permuting the words as 1 2 2 1 1 2 3 3 2 1 1 2 3,, 2 3 3 2 2 3 4 4 3 2 2 3 4.... The complexity increases. This is because words can be joined together in Sanskrit. Furthermore each letter in Vedic Sanskrit has three ways of pronouncing it (similar to the Chinese four accents) and these can change as you permute and apply the sandhi rules as well.
I haven’t seen such complexity in other languages (though it’s possible it may exist) but such complexity is why it wouldn’t surprise me that the effect could possibly be specific to Sanskrit.
Just a nitpick: Vedic Sanskrit has pitch accent, not tone. Chinese is tonal. And I'm a huge fan of ghana patha as well!
shanti people - tandava (david garry x dion 2017 club edit) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8w3R5yEBhcY
shanti people - mahishasura mardini (droplex remix) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4em0Wh8ZgR0
it is a ukrainian group i believe, the singer gets very little pronounciation 'off', atleast in these two vids
My email is in my profile if you'd prefer to tell me more about this offline.
Previous studies involving other brain activities have shown improvement in grey matter before, for e.g. London Taxi driver in one study showed improvement in brain development.
For about 1000 years before writing starts in India, we have the language developing in the hands of bards singing for ritual reasons to audiences which increasingly could not understand the words. So for many centuries it was evolving under pressures very different from normal language.
Eventually, it regained broader application, but still a an elite language and thus still had unusual evolutionary pressures.
I haven’t seen any studies of what they might give up in the process, though it does involve a lot of sitting.
Example: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/london-taxi-memor...
Kind of casts the whole dispute with Uber thing into a whole different light, doesn't it?
I am sorry for their sunk cost, but really minicabs+gps and now uber/Lyft et al are as good, or would be if taxis didn’t have a pick up monopoly.
This can of course be replicated with a computer, but a simple GPS is not going to cut it. Advanced machine learning, voice recognition like nothing I have ever seen, very good A.I. to resolve misunderstandings about where tourists and other non frequent travellers might really want to go instead of where they actually said. And so on and so on. We can get there. An underpaid, recently started and soon to be replaced, stressed uber driver in his uncles car armed with a GPS app is just not going to cut it. Yet.
Uber doesn't allow hailing from the street either.
IIRC at the exam you could get questions like "The passenger tells you that his cousin mentioned a building with a bas-relief of Holy Mary holding Jesus, it was right around the angle from his hotel, but he does not remember the hotel's name".
You are supposed to know the place and the best way to get there, based on just this (also, a good number of "knowledgeable" taxi drivers go for an official London Tour Guide exam soon after, with relatively little effort, considering they have already memorized thousands of places, monuments and architectural details).
Different customers might prefer different total packages on different occasions.
I for one rarely need the more expensive Driver-with-the-Knowledge option, especially when I can ask Google many of the same questions.
Looks we agree about everything that we actually made explicit. The disagreement was about the implicit meaning of whether price was included in the meaning of 'better job'.
A theoretical machine could do a better job. In practice, we can't build anything that can reason about routes anywhere near as well as London cabbies do. And I'd say that even without knowing about The Knowledge.
Pamar's comment above has a very good example of the kind of thing "a machine" is still very, very far from achieving.
"Earlier studies of the brain of the cabbie had already noted the increase in "grey matter" in the hippocampus, an area found at the base of the brain."
this is funny because the British actually did that exactly with imposition of english education to create the obedient clerk class for their colony, and claimed it was in fact liberation
and then the germans claimed sanskrit was theirs and could not possibly be of indian local origin and nazi-fied the 'aryan' language
and of course no european scholar could countenance the possibility of hindu epics like the ramayana and mahabharata let alone the vedas could be older than the homeric epics of greek civilization and conveniently 'dated' all indian history to preserve their superiority
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALEHkgOx8EE “Embodying the Vedas - A day in the Śrī Kṛṣṇayajurveda Pāṭhaśālā” (The article mentions the closely related Shukla Yajurveda.) (Examples of the training are from 00:00 to 00:55, from 04:59 to 05:35, from 08:00 to 09:08, from 11:15 to 13:40.)
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruuPbvViOe4 “Glimpses of the current status of Vedic tradition in Kerala” (Examples of the training are from 00:00 to 03:44, from 08:45 to 12:57, from 13:15 to 14:46)
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZbpPAjukHI “Champakaapura Veda Paathashale” (Examples are from 06:35 to 07:43, etc.)
(These three from this playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL63uIhJxWbgjpQhSwfAmS... ; click around for more.)
If you look at the age at which students start, theories like “people with strong verbal memories will choose to memorize mantras” (proposed in another comment) are easy to discard. Of course, other statistical effects are still possible, such as selection bias (people who do not have or develop the needed memory may abandon training, etc).
I was curious because I want to know how much of BNF grammar functionality is represented in it. Perhaps BNF is just a rediscovering/reformatting of the Sanskrit grammar?
This is for pretty much the same reason that the grammatical formalisms modern linguists use also go beyond BNF. Linguists are interested in issues of grammaticality that actually do need context (such as subject-verb agreement) and so obviously context-free grammars can't do the whole job!
(For a programming example, you can see type correctness as a case of how well-formedness of programs depends on context -- whether a variable can be used in an expression depends on its type.)
People can say this, but that won't make it true. There are unexaggerated 100% odds that what Pāṇini specified was not a complete description of the speech of his time or any other point in history, just as no complete description of any modern language exists today. It's not for lack of scholastic effort; the idea of completely specifying a human language isn't even well defined.
> I want to know how much of BNF grammar functionality is represented in it. Perhaps BNF is just a rediscovering/reformatting of the Sanskrit grammar?
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003GUBIJ8/ describes the style in which Pāṇini's rules are written. (I'm not saying this is the best source to answer that question, just that it's a book I've read and its description is probably enough for your purposes.)
That is an odd claim to make because Sanskrit was not a language of day to day speech. Those would be the vernaculars of the time. Sanskrit was very much a crafted language used for much more formal purposes.
This is what many folk in Universities want us to believe, but having seen day-to-day language used and taught, I don't think it is, or was ever true. Apparently even the devadasis knew it extremely well back in the day, much as did people from many other 'backward' 'castes'.
It's almost as if a school of people want the tradition dead, because its staying alive is too... erm... worrying ? Lots of complicated power structures hang in the balance, as India's tortuously chooses between its past and the past its master want it to have / have had.
This needs a reputable citation. What an anonymous user personally thinks about it is hardly relevant.
By the way, knowing a language is very different from use in day to day speech.
Fair enough. Here's the interview with Shatavadhani R. Ganesh from where I get my tidbits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xQ2EkrXBy4&list=PL54675312C...
> By the way, knowing a language is very different from use in day to day speech.
I know the difference. Have you ever visited Sanskrit universities/gurukulas in India ? It's simply magical. Sanskrit is taught in the language itself, and students chat with their teachers and amongst themselves in the language. This made me very happy!
This is even acknowledged on various Indology mailing lists, where the western scholars note this, often rather bitterly, often peppering the immediately following sentence with generic insults and racist disdain.
Apologies for getting political here, but I've never understood why the field is so hostile to India (British origins ?). East Asia departments by comparison are filled with Sinophiles/Japanophiles.
> I know the difference. Have you ever visited Sanskrit universities/gurukulas in India ?
A personal magical experience has little to do with the fact in contention here -- was Sanskrit a language for day to day conversation among the commons.
Very little in your comment speaks to that claim, nothing in fact, except may be some part of the video. Whether Sanskrit can be picked up as a spoken language by motivated people is not the point of contention. I can point you to many communities that speak in a language that was never used as a language of day to day speech by the commons.
On whether I have visited a Sanskrit university -- Does having a close family member as a Prof in Sanskrit count ?
Alas, most traditional scholars don't really bother writing papers (atleast, not in English AFAIK).
> Very little in your comment speaks to that claim, nothing in fact, except may be some part of the video.
You're correct. I don't work in the field, but a quick Google search threw this up.
https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=NDrqaELkKTEC&pg=PA38&lpg...
I'm sure if one were inclined, one could find more material.
> Whether Sanskrit can be picked up as a spoken language by motivated people is not the point of contention. I can point you to many communities that speak in a language that was never used as a language of day to day speech by the commons.
Fair enough. That said, what kind of evidence would 'prove' the said proposition ? Is there evidence to the contrary which would fit this standard ?
Latin for instance, may not have been spoken in its classical form, but the vulgar form is believed to have been widely spoken.
Similarly, if someone were given freedom to ontologically ground my words (say, 'common' == '> 1e4, of various diversities'; 'sanskrit' == 'paninian grammar'), merely to prove me wrong, the game is not worth playing (which circles back to my first point).
I have no problems believing that a colloquial form of Sanskrit was spoken, that would be the very definition of a vernacular. A situation not different from the Latin example you gave.
Records of a direct quote of a protagonist who is commoner, in literature or preferably in royal records etc would be acceptable evidence. Otherwise how can one differentiate it from claims that humans rode dinosaurs with wings.
BTW I don't disagree with you when you state there is a bias against such subject matter (you can look up the issue of Taylor's expansion of trigonometric functions by the Kerala school of mathematicians much before Newton). The way to address this would be do counter that with proper research results and processes.
Is it possible that only people with larger hippcampi and other cortical regions are good at memorizing large texts? (that is, the causal link is inverted)
Is it possible that people who learn or do something focussedly over a long stretch of time (practice music 4 hours a day) show larger development over those same areas than the average distracted person?
It's more than possible -- it's well-documented with some kinds of meditative practice. [1]
The only interesting question this article raises for a knowledgeable person is whether or not the Sanskrit language _itself_ would have an effect on cognition, but it never succeeds to prove it would or offer a mechanism for how it would work, and instead asks for funds for more studies.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/meditationpapers/top/?sort=top&t=al...
https://www.reddit.com/r/MeditationNerds/top/?sort=top&t=all
If there is such an association, self-selection bias must be accounted for. It might be that dementia risk factors or subclinical pre-dementia pathology makes a person less likely to pursue training as a pandit.
Also, anecdotal reports from Ayurvedic doctors suggest a lot of things. For example, that the right sort of yoga practice leads to 80-year-olds who look and feel like teenagers.
How interesting...
(Anyone who read the book can relate...)
Part of the problem in teasing out the effect is that there is an inherent selection bias in the type of people who receive this type of education (or any education, in the not too distant past) to conclude from population analyses to what degree the particular task of literary memorization confers this benefit. Someone's going to have to ferret out the mechanism or do controlled longitudinal studies, which will be costly and fraught with difficulty. Even Socrates (i.e. Plato) was attuned to the idea that memory was under attack with the advent of writing[0] and a culture that has other information retrieval technology, so it's debatable whether we could really plumb the depths of what human cognition could be under different pressures. It's also unclear how early this kind of training has to be started too in order to have an effect.
[0]https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/literally-psyched/on-wr...
I do find it plausible that certain (combinations of) language and verse metre might have mantra-like qualities, conducive to achieving trance states that could affect the brain. India has been on the case for a looong time, so it wouldn't surprise if Sanskrit + Vedic poetry present a particularly sophisticated example.
This quote, coupled with a lack of a proposed mechanism as to how the Sanskrit language would itself have an influence on cognition, means that as far as we know right now there is no such thing as the Sanskrit Effect.
It makes for a catchy headline, though, and the other stuff in the article speaks to my own successful experiments in memory training -- if interested, look up the books from the World Memory Championship winner.
Other alternatives are to contact a local chapter of the volunteer organization Samskrita Bharati if there's one (or watch these videos produced by them: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLudSN7Po9muLeRM6545s6...), or to try http://www.learnsanskrit.org/ for something online. See more book reviews at https://sanskritstudio.wordpress.com/book-reviews/
If you say what your reasons are for learning Sanskrit, there may be other suggestions….
people with strong verbal memories will choose to memorize mantras.
I'd like to see a similar study of people who remember hundreds of prime digits.