10 Chemical Element Names

So a lot of very big things have happened this week. For one, the UK voted to leave the European Union for some reason. Secondly, the shelves on the HH bookcase were starting to sag a bit in the middle, so they were rotated. And thirdly, the four new chemical elements discovered at the start of the year were given their names.

NONREPRESENTATIONALISMS is thought to be the longest English word that can be spelled out using chemical symbols. pic.twitter.com/l5T1Fk1H35

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 16 November 2015

One of those stories is of much higher import than the others, of course, but don’t worry—those shelves will be fine. As for those chemical elements, well, the names chosen were nihonium, moscovium, tennessine and oganasson. Each has a story attached to it: the first three honour their places of discovery, Japan, Moscow and Tennessee respectively, while the last honours Russian-Armenian physicist Professor Yuri Oganessian.

Elsewhere on the periodic table, however, there are another 114 elementary etymologies to tell—although we only had enough time (and bandwidth) to talk about 10 in this week’s video…

Of course Yuri Oganessian and (SPOILER ALERT in case you haven’t watched the video) Vasili Samarsky-Bykhovets aren’t the only eponymous honourees on the periodic table. Elements like einsteinium, curium, bohrium and seaborgium honour some of the most famous names in science. 

Nor are nihonium, moscovium and their neighbours the only geographical namesakes: besides tennessine, America can offer berkelium and californium, as well as americium, while the UK has strontium, which takes its name via the mineral strontianite from the village of Strontian in the Scottish Highlands. And then there’s gallium, element number 31, which uniquely manages to honour both its place of discovery and—if the rumours are trumours—its discoverer.

The father of the periodic table, Dmitri Mendeleev (who has the element mendelevium named after him), predicted the existence of gallium in 1871, but it wasn’t until four years later the snappily-named French chemist Paul Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran obtained a sample of it from the mineral sphalerite. The metal de Boisbaudran discovered was bright silver and brittle, and melted just above room temperature. He called it gallium, from Gallia, the Latin name for the Roman territory of Gaul, corresponding to modern-day France. But it’s possible he had other ideas in mind.

One of de Boisbaudran’s many, many names, Lecoq, means “the rooster” in French, while the Latin word for “rooster” is gallus. Had de Boisbaudran wryly named gallium after himself? Some fellow scientists at the time accused him of such, but he insisted that the connection was purely coincidental. Even if it was, it’s certainly a very convenient one and makes de Boisbaudran an interesting footnote to the dozens of famous names honoured on the periodic table. 

The McGurk Effect

This week on the @HaggardHawks YouTube channel, we’ve something a little different for you. Instead of another of the Top 10 videos that we’ve been posting so far (normal service will be resumed on those on Thursday, incidentally) today we’ve a new video looking at one of the most bizarre linguistic phenomena discovered in recent decades. So, goggles and lab coats at the ready people, we’re getting experimental…

The McGurk Effect was discovered in 1976 by the British psychologist and linguist Harry McGurk. An expert in child language acquisition, McGurk reportedly discovered his “effect” entirely by accident when, during preparation of a separate language experiment, he happened to replay the audio of one phoneme (language sound) over video of another. And the result was—well, something very unusual indeed.

(FYI, if you haven’t watched the video yet, now would be a good time to do so. Otherwise, SPOILER ALERT!)

As explained in the video, as much as we might think of speech perception as being a purely auditory, sound-based process, the McGurk Effect neatly proves that there is in fact just as much (if not more) visual information being analysed—it’s just that it all happens so quickly and automatically, that we’re unaware of it happening. 

But if the information being provided by our eyes and our ears don’t match, then our brain doesn’t quite know what to do. So watching a video of someone saying far while hearing audio of them saying bar leads to some considerable confusion.

When this happens, in some cases the brain ignores the auditory information entirely and instead trusts the information being provided by the eyes without question—if that’s you, then watching the tape in the YouTube video, you’ll be convinced that the fourth word was far. 

In other cases, however, the brain mixes the two conflicting streams of information together, thereby convincing itself that what it’s seeing and hearing is, in fact, neither of the things that it’s actually seeing or hearing—and if that’s you, then like our guinea pig Anthony in the video, you probably thought the fourth worth on the tape was var rather than far. Likewise, in McGurk’s original experiment, he found that playing the sound ba-ba over a tape of someone saying ga-ga led to him interpreting it as da-da.

So what does all this prove? Well, the McGurk Effect demonstrates just how much visual information is utilised by our brains while we’re processing speech, and how quickly our brains are to ignore auditory information—which we might think of as the cornerstone of speech perception—in favour of visual information. This has all kinds of implications on how we acquire language in the first place, what kind of sensory hierarchy must be going on in our brains, and what our brains have to do when this process is disrupted by, for instance, blindness, deafness, or trauma to the language-processing part of the brain. And the more we understand about that, the better we’ll become at fixing it when it goes wrong.

For more information on the McGurk Effect, you can take a look at McGurk’s original 1976 paper, Hearing Lips and Seeing Voices, here—or take a look at another version of this experiment on YouTube, courtesy of the BBC’s Horizon.