More animal game

From time to time I have reported playing either the animal game (reference 1) or, rather more frequently, the aeroplane game. Here my concern is with the animal game, a game which is almost invariable played in bed, either while waiting to go to sleep or in the morning, after waking, but before rising. Eyes shut.

The idea of the animal game is to silently recite a list of names of mammals, one for each letter of the alphabet, in alphabetical order.

Rule 1 is that in any one game it must not be the case that a name names a subset or superset of a preceding name. So if one has done ‘E’ with elephant, one cannot then do ‘I’ with Indian elephant. Or if one has done ‘A’ with African elephant, one cannot then do ‘E’ with elephant. With the understanding that one is allowed to skip ‘Q’ and ‘X’ for which there appear to be no mammals.

And with the idea that using the names of places to prefix the name of the mammal, as I have just done, is not good form. Nor is the use of the names of colours. Not against the rules, but without style or panache.

For the purposes of the game, my authority is reference 3.

Rule 2 is that one cannot use a mammal that one has already used in some previous game in the session.

Rule 3 is that nothing must pop into consciousness, at least not in the form of words or pictures, other than the name of the next mammal.

So all that should happen in consciousness, all that one should experience, is the silent voicing of a series of names of mammals, with gaps in-between. I can’t say anything about timing, the duration of the voicing and the duration of the gaps; one would need an EEG machine attached to an EEG expert to do that.

There are lots of other categories which lend themselves to this sort of thing. Birds is much the same as animals, although here we have both Q birds (for example, the quetzal) and X birds (for example, Xantus's Hummingbird – with Xantus being a Hungarian ornithologist who gave his name to several birds). While with countries the rule is the names must be the English names of members of the United Nations. But there are lots of towns, so one usually adds a qualifier, perhaps something like ‘coastal towns going clockwise around the British Isles’. First names, men and women separately, is another possibility.

In what follows I concentrate on the subjective experience of playing the animal game. I doubt if the variations would add much.

If one has not played for a while it takes a little while to get back into the swing of things. But we suppose for present purposes that one has been playing reasonably regularly, that enough names of suitable animals are reasonably close to the surface.

Sometimes one gets into a groove, perhaps to the point of tapping a finger in time to the words, and the game swings along quickly, with nothing popping into consciousness other than the name of the next mammal. Anteater, beaver, colobus monkey, duck-billed platypus, elephant seal, flying fox, gorilla and so on. Or maybe not duck-billed platypus, as long names can be a bit disruptive.

Then for no apparent reason one makes a mistake. The word that pops out does indeed start with the right letter, but it is, perhaps, a fish or a bird rather than a mammal. Another common mistake is gerbil for ‘J’, when the mammal I am looking for is jerboa – there not being a lot of ‘J’ mammals, with jackal being the only other one that I use regularly.

Sometimes one gets into a groove, but one is saying each name twice. Once rather quietly, as it were, just testing the water, then, having decided that the name qualifies, rather more loudly. So one might have anteater (loud), beaver (soft), beaver (loud), caracal (soft), caracal (loud) and so on. Again, I can’t say anything about timing and once again one would need an EEG machine attached to an EEG expert to do that.

Sometimes one gets stuck, often but not necessarily on a letter which is not well populated with mammals, perhaps ‘I’ or ‘Y’. At this point, all kinds of thoughts and words pop into consciousness and one is, as it were, disqualified.

Sometimes, having got stuck, one forgets the rules and moves onto the next letter, perhaps rehearsing the names of a number of mammals for the next letter, hoping that the diversion will allow a mammal for the letter on which one got stuck to drift to the surface. Quite often this works.

What has to be done, what is the algorithm?

In the snap above I have sketched some of the processes involved in this game.

We have some data stores in orange, some mixture of working memory and longer term memory. Then some more or less unconscious processes in blue, with the arrows suggesting the flow of activity.

Leaving aside starting up and closing down, we need something to generate the next letter. A something which will need to have access to both the current letter and an alphabet. Perhaps a pointer to the current letter in the alphabet. Sometimes this next letter process will go wrong: one might have gone backwards in the alphabet rather than forwards or one might have gone too far forward, skipping over one or more letters.

We then need something to extract objects from memory or to locate objects in memory with names starting with the newly current letter – in the snap I use the word retrieve to cover both possibilities. Objects might be all objects, all mammals or something in between and I suspect that this depends on who is playing, on the context of the game and on how much he or she knows, on how many objects there are there to be extracted.

We then need to scan those retrieved objects to find one which satisfies the various criteria. Get object, test object and branch according to the result. If fail, get next object. If succeed, pass the name of this object on for silent voicing in consciousness.

At this point I get the impression that there is a final check, a check which is carried out unconsciously but which returns some sort of feeling of confidence to consciousness. One has got it right and one can move on to the next letter.

Consciousness should then remain silent, empty and inactive, until the next object is ready for silent voicing. The trouble here being that no one process has exclusive access to consciousness and it is all too likely that something else will be made conscious during what was supposed to be a silent time. Perhaps something from the process under consideration, perhaps something from some quite different process. This is suggested by the two boxes top right.

For example, if one is at ‘E’ the word ‘eel’ might pop into consciousness, before it has been tested, before it has been failed, with the intended inhibition of work in progress having failed. Interestingly, it is the words which pop into consciousness, the names of animals rather than their portraits. A different sort of failure would be passing ‘vervet monkey’ for ‘V’ when one had already had ‘primate’ for ‘P’. A straightforward error, rather than some work in progress slipping into consciousness which should not have. Different again would be starting to worry about whether one had locked the back door before going to bed.

Perhaps if one practised seriously, one could get both the unconscious and the conscious to behave themselves.

Odds and ends

The name ‘duck billed platypus’, a favourite for ‘D’, is possibly too long to hold in consciousness in entirety in the sound form needed here. Maybe it needs to be played word by word in three or four successive frames of consciousness, which would imply some more machinery to do this. But it may also be that reading the words on the page would be different, their not looking nearly so clumsy as they sound.

I have tried and more or less failed to play the game while one on one of my matinal walks. I think there must be too much other stuff going on for the brain to be able to cope with the extra load.
When only half awake there is a tendency to slip from one version of the game to another, without at first noticing. And, more often, just to drift off somewhere else, to stop playing altogether. Or to drift off into sleep, which may have been the idea in the first place.

Just plain counting – one, two, three, four and so on – is a related activity which is apt to block out any other conscious activity. On the other hand, I believe that I sometimes count unconsciously, at least for a short while, while thinking about something else altogether. Most often when I am climbing a long flight of steps, perhaps up from the tube train platform at Tooting Broadway or Vauxhall. One knows because the counting suddenly surfaces. Such counting is reasonably accurate on the few occasions that I have bothered or been able to check.

A game I do not play very often is just plain counting, usually while I am on one of my matinal walks, with the objective being to see how far one can get before one’s attention wanders. I think I have sometimes got to 100, but not much beyond that. Even silently, saying a number like ‘one hundred and twenty three’ seems to contain too many syllables and to occupy too much time to be able to settle to a rhythm.

Counting is also apt to entrain some kind of rhythmic activity, in the case that that is not what one was counting in the first place.

A successful round of the animal game requires a lot of work of the unconscious, with just the answers making it to consciousness.

Implications for LWS-N

LWS-N is about what is in consciousness, it is not about how that what is selected or put together. That said it is quite possible that the LWS-N compiler would get mixed up with the sort of processing described above; it all depends on how compartmentalised things are, and about that we know little.

There is however the requirement that LWS-N be able to be silent, while otherwise up and running. Perhaps analogous to the rests in music, important in classical music, perhaps more or less absent in popular music.

And despite its apparent simplicity there are also various technical problems about how the information involved here is to be expressed in the frames of LWS-N. What do we do with long names like ‘duck billed platypus’, names which possibly span more than one frame? How does it encode the ‘some sort of feeling of confidence’ mentioned above?

Conclusions

Part of the interest of this animal game arises from it being a simple game with simple rules which does not involve any external sensory activity: one can work out exactly what has to be done, even if one cannot be sure about how exactly it is done. It is also a game which nicely illustrates both how much is going on in the unconscious that we are not aware of and how little control we usually have over what does appear, does pop up into consciousness.

But perhaps there is also a hint that one can train oneself to have more control. Perhaps this is part of what Buddhists get up to, so perhaps I should go back to the book noticed at reference 6.

PS: I can manage Tooting Broadway and Vauxhall, coming in at between 60 and 70 steps, without too much puffing. Some central London tube stations come in in at around 100 steps and I do not attempt those unless they are moving, which seems to cut the number of steps to be climbed by around 50%.

References

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/new-game.html.

Reference 2: http://thewebsiteofeverything.com/animals/birds/beginning-with/X. A useful website turned up by Bing.

Reference 3: Systematic Dictionary of the Mammals of the World – Maurice Burton – 1962. With my copy of this excellent book coming from somewhere on Dalhousie Street in Ottawa. See reference 4.

Reference 4: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/dalhousie.html.

Reference 5: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/on-counting-variations.html. A post about a rather different sort of counting.

Reference 6: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/buddha-rules.html.

Reference 7: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/beaney.html. There is a stuffed duck billed platypus at the Beaney Museum in Canterbury; the only one that I know of.

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