I spent 2 hours debugging the script today: after concatenating two sound files into one, the autoseg script always freezes, while working just fine with original sound files. Initially I thought it was something with the sampling frequency or something that makes a concatenated file different from regular sound files. I couldn't figure this out for a while and almost thought about posting a thread on praat discussion group online. But then suddenly it hit me: it was the file name! I did not code for algorithms to take any action upon file names that are not compatible with the designated ones, so the script didn't know what to do when it encountered a file name that it doesn't know! It was resolved immediately.
This is totally a selective attention issue--when you focus on something and couldn't possibly think about the solution is on something else (which is much simpler and silly), you just don't see it no matter how silly the problem actually is. It is worth our attention that this important feature of human cognition is not only limited to game playing or psychology tricks, but also matters in real problem solving processes! All in all, it helps to look around and going through the process carefully even when you think other aspects of the problem couldn't possibly relevant. This is a good lesson.
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Research on brain plasticity showed how important experience is in modifying brain structure. For a moment I can't believe at all there is anything innate about our cognition. But wait! That's not the whole story. It occurred to me that the case of my turtle is interesting. My turtle has never learned how to capture and eat live fish. But, when I put small live fish in the same container where he was living, he not only showed incredible capacity to chase and capture a fish in his mouth, he also swallowed it without any chewing entirely, like he has done that many times. Some things must be innate. (another example: we're good at recognizing human faces. why are we bad at recognizing dog
is that when I came home to DC from China, my CD player (which used to work smoothly all the time) had trouble reading CDs and my cable box is broken. What happened here?
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