hello大家好。從你的的說話方式或者寫出來的文字之中就可以預測出你未來的精神狀態？甚至是精神錯亂？在這場精彩的演講中，神經科學家馬裡阿諾·西格曼，透過古希臘書籍及對內省來源的分析，他發現在我們的話語中可以反映出我們的內心世界，他還講解了他如何用文字地圖的演算法，預測精神分裂症的發展。
We have historical records that allow us to know how the ancient Greeks dressed, how they lived, how they fought, but how did they think?我們有歷史紀錄可循，可以讓我們知道古希臘人如何穿著、如何生活、如何打仗，但他們如何思考呢？One natural idea is that the deepest aspects of human thought our ability to imagine, to be conscious, to dream, have always been the same.有一個很自然的方法就是，去探索人類最深層的想法，比如我們的想像力、自覺力、夢想力，是否是一樣的。Another possibility is that the social transformations that have shaped our culture may have also changed the structural columns of human thought.另一種可能是，去探索造就我們文化的社會變革，這些變革也許就是，改變人類想法的主要因素。We may all have different opinions about this. Actually, it's a long-standing philosophical debate.對這一點，大家或許有不同的看法。實際上，這是一個存在已久的哲學辯論。But is this question even amenable to science?Here I'd like to propose that in the same way we can reconstruct how the ancient Greek cities looked just based on a few bricks, that the writings of a culture are the archaeological records, the fossils, of human thought.我的建議是，如同僅藉由一些磚頭，我們得以重建希臘古都的外貌，也可用同樣的方式，藉由一些文化作品、建築歷史、化石，來了解人類的想法。And in fact, doing some form of psychological analysis of some of the most ancient books of human culture,而實際上，因為做了一些人類古老文化書籍的心理分析，Julian Jaynes came up in the '70s with a very wild and radical hypothesis: that only 3,000 years ago, humans were what today we would call schizophrenics.裘利安·傑尼斯在70年代發表了一個相當大膽激進的假說：他說，3000年前的人類，是我們現在俗稱的「精神分裂症患者」。And he made this claim based on the fact that the first humans described in these books behaved consistently, in different traditions and in different places of the world,他會如此主張的原因是，在世界各地不同的傳統及地方，這些書籍裡面所描述的人類行為似乎不約而同地都會服從，as if they were hearing and obeying voices that they perceived as coming from the Gods, or from the muses what today we would call hallucinations.他們認為是從神祗那邊傳來的聲音。而如今，我們會稱之為幻聽或幻覺。And only then, as time went on, they began to recognize that they were the creators, the owners of these inner voices.隨著時間的洗禮，他們開始認知到，那些聲音是他們自己創造的，他們就是那些內在聲音的主人。And with this, they gained introspection: the ability to think about their own thoughts.有了這樣的認知，他們學會了自省：一種反思自己想法的能力。So Jaynes's theory is that consciousness, at least in the way we perceive it today,所以傑尼斯對「意識」的理論就是，至少現今我們覺察到「意識」、where we feel that we are the pilots of our own existence -- is a quite recent cultural development.感受到我們自己就是，人生導師的體悟是相當近代的文化發展。And this theory is quite spectacular,but it has an obvious problem which is that it's built on just a few and very specific examples.但它有一個很明顯的問題就是，它是建立在極少又特定的案例上。So the question is whether the theory that introspection built up in human history only about 3,000 years ago can be examined in a quantitative and objective manner.所以問題是，3000年來人類才建立起，自省能力的這個理論，是否可以經得起「量化」且「客觀」的考驗。And the problem of how to go about this is quite obvious.It's not like Plato woke up one day and then he wrote, "Hello, I'm Plato, and as of today, I have a fully introspective consciousness."但我的意思並非，比如，柏拉圖有一天突然醒來說，「哈囉！我是柏拉圖，我今天，擁有完整的自省意識了」 那樣的簡單而已。And this tells us actually what is the essence of the problem. We need to find the emergence of a concept that's never said.而這告訴我們，我們要找出，問題的本質為何。我們必須找到從來沒有被談論過的概念。The word introspection does not appear a single time in the books we want to analyze.So our way to solve this is to build the space of words.This is a huge space that contains all words in such a way that the distance between any two of them is indicative of how closely related they are.在這個大空間裡，包含了相當多的字，用這種方式可以量測出兩個字彼此之間的關聯性程度。So for instance, you want the words "dog" and "cat" to be very close together,舉個例子，你會想，「狗」、「貓」 應該是比較有關聯性的，but the words "grapefruit" and "logarithm" to be very far away.And this has to be true for any two words within the space.而在這個空間裡的任何兩個字，都必須是可以被量測出來的。And there are different ways that we can construct the space of words.One is just asking the experts, a bit like we do with dictionaries.Another possibility is following the simple assumption that when two words are related, they tend to appear in the same sentences, in the same paragraphs, in the same documents, more often than would be expected just by pure chance.另一個可行的方法是，當兩個字出現關聯性時，去追蹤它們的預設狀況，它們可能會出現在同一句、同一段落、或同一文件中，多於「偶然」地出現。And this simple hypothesis, this simple method, with some computational tricks that have to do with the fact that this is a very complex and high-dimensional space, turns out to be quite effective.在這個簡單的前提下，這個單純且帶有運算技巧的方法必須好用，而這個複雜且高維度的空間，事後證明，相當有效。And just to give you a flavor of how well this works, this is the result we get when we analyze this for some familiar words.向各位介紹一下它多有效，我們分析了一些經常用到的字。And you can see first that words automatically organize into semantic neighborhoods.首先你可以看到，這些詞彙會自動地歸納成語義相近的相鄰群組，So you get the fruits, the body parts, the computer parts, the scientific terms and so on.所以你可看到，水果跟身體部位，計算機與科學字彙等等。The algorithm also identifies that we organize concepts in a hierarchy.So for instance, you can see that the scientific terms break down into two subcategories of the astronomic and the physics terms.舉個例子，你可以看到，科學的字彙被拆解成兩個子類，分別是太空與物理的詞彙。And then there are very fine things.For instance, the word astronomy, which seems a bit bizarre where it is, is actually exactly where it should be, between what it is, an actual science, and between what it describes, the astronomical terms.舉個例子，「天文學」這個詞彙，它應該擺的位置與它現在的位置好像不太相符，它現在介於真實科學與天文學之間，偏向科學的位置，而它自己卻是一個天文學的字彙。And we could go on and on with this.Actually, if you stare at this for a while, and you just build random trajectories, you will see that it actually feels a bit like doing poetry.實際上，如果你盯著這些字一陣子，然後隨機搭配連結一下這些字，你會覺得好像自己在吟詩。And this is because, in a way, walking in this space is like walking in the mind.那是因為在某種程度上，在這些空間字彙裡漫遊就像是在腦海中吟詩一樣。And the last thing is that this algorithm also identifies what are our intuitions, of which words should lead in the neighborhood of introspection.最後，算法也能辨識出人類的直覺字彙，並歸納到內省的相鄰字彙中。So for instance, words such as "self," "guilt," "reason," "emotion," are very close to "introspection,"舉個例子，像是自我、內疚、理由、情緒與內省相關的字彙非常接近，but other words, such as "red," "football," "candle," "banana," are just very far away.但其它的字，像是紅色、足球、蠟燭、香蕉就差很遠了。And so once we've built the space, the question of the history of introspection,or of the history of any concept which before could seem abstract and somehow vague, becomes concrete, becomes amenable to quantitative science.有關於內省的歷史，有關與任何概念的歷史，以前被認為是抽象或是有點模糊的字彙，都可以變成扎紮實實可以被量化的科學。All that we have to do is take the books, we digitize them,and we take this stream of words as a trajectory and project them into the space,and then we ask whether this trajectory spends significant time circling closely to the concept of introspection.然後我們問計算機，這些字彙所行經的軌跡花了多少的時間才達到內省概念的字彙中。And with this, we could analyze the history of introspection in the ancient Greek tradition, for which we have the best available written record.有了這些數據，我們就可以分析古希臘傳統中有關於內省的歷史，因為有著最完整的文字記錄。So what we did is we took all the books, we just ordered them by time for each book we take the words and we project them to the space, and then we ask for each word how close it is to introspection, and we just average that.所以，我們先把這些書按照時間排列，然後把這些字投射到字彙空間裡面，然後我們問計算機這些字與內省有多少的相關性，再把它們平均起來。And then we ask whether, as time goes on and on, these books get closer, and closer and closer to the concept of introspection.然後，我們不斷地問計算機問題，這些書就會越來越接近內省的概念。And this is exactly what happens in the ancient Greek tradition.So you can see that for the oldest books in the Homeric tradition, there is a small increase with books getting closer to introspection.各位可以看到在荷馬時代最古老的書籍，與內省的相關性只有一點點。But about four centuries before Christ, this starts ramping up very rapidly to an almost five-fold increase of books getting closer, and closer and closer to the concept of introspection.但約在公元前400年左右，它快速成長了五倍，這些書與內省的概念越來越接近。And one of the nice things about this is that now we can ask whether this is also true in a different, independent tradition.最棒的是，我們可以問計算機在不同的、獨立的傳統文化中，是否也有一樣的現象。So we just ran this same analysis on the Judeo-Christian tradition, and we got virtually the same pattern.所以，我們用同樣的方法分析了傳統猶太基督教的書籍，也得到了類似的趨勢。Again, you see a small increase for the oldest books in the Old Testament, and then it increases much more rapidly in the new books of the New Testament.在最古老的舊約聖經中，你可以看到它緩慢地增加，之後在新約聖經中，它快速地增長。And then we get the peak of introspection in "The Confessions of Saint Augustine," about four centuries after Christ.大約公元400年，聖奧古斯丁的《懺悔錄》中，內省達到了最高峰。And this was very important, because Saint Augustine had been recognized by scholars,philologists, historians, as one of the founders of introspection.Actually, some believe him to be the father of modern psychology.So our algorithm, which has the virtue of being quantitative, of being objective, and of course of being extremely fast, it just runs in a fraction of a second can capture some of the most important conclusions of this long tradition of investigation.所以，我們算法的優點不僅可以量化，而且客觀，當然速度也相當快，幾秒就可以跑完，並捕捉到若使用傳統方法必須費長時間調查才能抓到的一些重點。And this is in a way one of the beauties of science,which is that now this idea can be translated and generalized to a whole lot of different domains.它可以可以解讀、歸納這想法，然後廣泛應用在許多不同的領域上。So in the same way that we asked about the past of human consciousness,maybe the most challenging question we can pose to ourselves is whether this can tell us something about the future of our own consciousness.或許是最具挑戰性的問題，是不是也可以告訴我們自我意識的未來趨向呢？To put it more precisely, whether the words we say today can tell us something of where our minds will be in a few days,更精確地說，我們現在說的話，是否可以告訴我們接下來的幾天、in a few months or a few years from now.And in the same way many of us are now wearing sensors that detect our heart rate, our respiration, our genes, on the hopes that this may help us prevent diseases,同樣的方式，我們現在很多人都使用穿戴式偵測器，可以偵測我們的心跳、呼吸、基因，讓我們可以預防疾病的發生，we can ask whether monitoring and analyzing the words we speak, we tweet, we email, we write, can tell us ahead of time whether something may go wrong with our minds.我們是否已可以藉由偵測分析我們所說的話、推的文、郵寄的信、寫的文字，來提前告訴我們，我們的心智可能要發生問題了？And with Guillermo Cecchi, who has been my brother in this adventure, we took on this task.And we did so by analyzing the recorded speech of 34 young people who were at a high risk of developing schizophrenia.我們紀錄分析了34位年輕人的談話。他們過去曾經是罹患精神分裂症的高風險族群。And so what we did is, we measured speech at day one,and then we asked whether the properties of the speech could predict, within a window of almost three years, the future development of psychosis.然後問計算機，從他們的話中是否可以預測出，未來三年內，他們會不會精神錯亂。But despite our hopes, we got failure after failure.There was just not enough information in semantics to predict the future organization of the mind.It was good enough to distinguish between a group of schizophrenics and a control group,a bit like we had done for the ancient texts, but not to predict the future onset of psychosis.因為這有點像我們之前做古文字的分析，但沒辦法預測未來精神錯亂的發病。But then we realized that maybe the most important thing was not so much what they were saying, but how they were saying it.
但是後來我們意識到，也許最重要的不是他們在說什麼，而是他們怎麼說。
More specifically, it was nothing which semantic neighborhoods the words were, but how far and fast they jumped from one semantic neighborhood to the other one.
進一步來說，單詞在哪個語義鄰裡不重要，重要的是它們從一個語義鄰域跳到另一語義鄰域時，跳得有多遠多塊。
And so we came up with this which we term semantic coherence, which essentially measures the persistence of speech within one semantic topic within one semantic category.
因此，我們提出了這一度量，我們稱之為語義連貫性，它從本質上衡量一種語義類別中一個語義主題內語音的持續性。
And it turned out to be that for this group of 34 people, the algorithm based on semantic coherence could predict, with 100 percent accuracy, who developed psychosis and who will not.結果顯示，剛剛的34位年輕人，透過這個語義連貫性算法，預測誰會精神錯亂的正確率達到百分之百。And this was something that could not be achieved not even close with all the other existing clinical measures.And I remember vividly, while I was working on this, I was sitting at my computer and I saw a bunch of tweets by Polo,在我做這項研究的時候，清楚地記得一件事，當時我坐在計算機前面，看到保羅傳了一堆信息給我，Polo had been my first student back in Buenos Aires, and at the time he was living in New York.他是之前我回到布宜諾斯艾利斯的第一個學生，當時他住在紐約。And there was something in this tweets, I could not tell exactly what because nothing was said explicitly,我發現訊息不太對勁，雖然我講不出個所以然來，因為他寫得不清不楚，but I got this strong hunch, this strong intuition, that something was going wrong.So I picked up the phone, and I called Polo, and in fact he was not feeling well.And this simple fact, that reading in between the lines, I could sense, through words, his feelings, was a simple, but very effective way to help.用這樣一個單純的辨認方式，從他的字裡行間，我可以隱約感受到他的感覺，並在第一時間有效地幫助他。What I tell you today is that we're getting close to understanding how we can convert this intuition that we all have, that we all share, into an algorithm.今天我要告訴各位的是，我們已經越來越能理解如何把我們共有的直覺轉換成算法。And in doing so, we may be seeing in the future a very different form of mental health,經由這樣做，未來我們也許可以看到一種全然不同的心理健康模式，based on objective, quantitative and automated analysis of the words we write, of the words we say.而且是基於一種客觀、量化的方式來自動分析出我們所寫的字、我們所說的話。本文轉自：TED英語演說聲明：除特別註明原創授權轉載文章外，其他文章均為轉載，版權歸原作者或平臺
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