Today, I had an unexpected day off—term, it turns out doesn't start till Thursday, and Julian is still on his winter vacation. For a long time, he's wanted to do the Mentos-in-Coke experiment, which was easy to grant and to facilitate. But I didn't want to mess up the garden, so we took the dog and headed off to the beach at Ashiyayama. It's a beautiful Spring day and the first of the many sakura are out. So everything worked well: not only did the experiment yield the desired result, but we got stunning shots of the blossoms, a near empty beach, and pizza on a terrace afterwards.
"An incredible trick" The starting point for this piece is an observation that Simon Kirby made a long time ago in the introduction to a BBC Horizon programme Why do we talk? , a documentary that I have used for nearly 20 years in my language acquisition classes at Konan. It is a scene-setting observation, one which seems self-evident and innocuous, and to which I paid next to no attention until a few months ago. I can walk up to someone I don’t know, and I can make a sequence of noises…that I’ve never made before…by pushing air through my mouth. I will take a thought in my head…and make it go into their head . That’s an incredible trick. It would be incredible, if that was what happens. Yet a moment's reflection - or perhaps twenty-plus years of rumination, I'm not sure which - tells me that this is completely wrong. We do not take our thoughts and cause them to go into other's heads. That would be amazing. Instead, whatever is involved in verbal communication i
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