Thoughts arising from my poking around in references 1, 2 and 3, in the course of this morning's rather warm Screwfix circuit. There had been a suggestion that Levi-Strauss was so busy looking for some important inner meaning that he did not see the outer meaning, sitting right in front of him. Matters which were last raised at reference 4 and to which I shall return.
Suppose I run an experiment in which I test a large number of people, using a statistically respectable population and a statistically respectable sampling procedure.
In the experiment, each subject is sat in a quiet room, by him or herself, and asked to recite a series of positive numbers - that is to say integers - to a computer, for a period of ten minutes. Provided they speak clearly, they can go as fast or as slow (within reason) as they like, use whatever numbers they like. Maybe a series of a small number of hundreds of numbers. Maybe a few persistent souls would just say the same number over and over again. Or perhaps some short sequence over and over again. Probably making a few mistakes. The ambitious might attempt something much more complicated.
I then analyse all these series using a battery of tests to be devised. My opening hypothesis is that there will be a tendency for the series to go up, for one number to be bigger than its predecessor. There will also be a tendency for one number to be the next number after its predecessor, that is to say 17 is often followed by 18. The line of least resistance for the brain.
In the event, I find that people, for these purposes, fall into seven robust categories. No doubt about it, these categories do exist. Maybe I go so far as to confirm this using some other populations, perhaps then finding that while the existence of these categories is robust enough, their distribution varies significantly from one population to another.
How do I then persuade someone to fund some fundamental research, my myself in the lead, from a comfortable chair, into the fundamentals underlying this fascinating phenomenon?
PS 1: I should add that counting silently to myself, counting the paces, is a device I sometimes use when walking up a hill which is proving a bit much. Sometimes deliberately, but more often it just happens of itself. One of the aforementioned categories might involve the conscious start point, with my belief being that more of this counting goes on more than I am consciously aware of.
I associate here to the counting of young children, which is apt to move forward in leaps and bounds once they start to get tired of it.
PS 2: some rather different thoughts from Bing are snapped above. Amazing the stuff that query engines, aka AI, can come up with. While under the 'images' tab there were lots of skulls.
PS 3: much later, during the second Screwfix circuit (yesterday's whitebeam above): once we have cracked this one, we can move onto to the much more complicated and very different two player version. That is to say each experiment involves two subjects, who take it in turns to say a number. Experimental protocols to be developed in due course.
References
Reference 1: The story of Asdiwal – Lévi-Strauss – 1960.
Reference 2: Lévi-Strauss – Leach E R – 1970, 1985.
Reference 3: The elementary structures of kinship – Lévi-Strauss – 1949, 1969.
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