what's in a name? how about your next job? naming has always been something that we'vedone with our gut. but as we learn more about the scientific effects of names, maybe weneed a better science of naming. ever since ancient times, people have suspectedthere's something spooky about names. look
How To Address A Letter With Two Names, at all those folktales where the heroine candefeat the villain, simply by guessing his name - everything from rumpelstiltskin tobeetlejuice. and then there are the cultural taboos aboutspeaking certain names out loud, whether it's of a particular god, or an exalted publicfigure, or even a dead friend or family member.
but why do we ascribe so much power to names?i mean aren't names just words? wouldn't a rose by any other name smell as sweet? you might be surprised. take these two random shapes. now one of themis named "kiki" and one of them is named "bouba." but which one is which? now if you said themore spiky shape is kiki and the more rounded one is bouba - congratulations you're in the95% of people who feel the same way you do. but why is this such a strong trend? well, as it turns out names are not just theseblank neutral words we use for communication. for reasons we don't fully understand, certainletters and phonetic sounds seem to carry
a visual and even conceptual weight to them.in a world where more and more of our social interactions are in social networks, and wenever meet face to face, names might be really important. i can envision a future where people startto consult with name and username optimization experts, kind of the way businesses talk withbranding consultants. but of course we're not just talking aboutnaming human beings here. a small study found that two-thirds of roomba vacuum cleaner ownersare naming their roombas. this means we're creating an emotional attachment with thethings we own. this history of naming has long been a seesawbattle between the scientific need for unique
identifiers, and the more human need for somethingfamiliar that we can refer to in our day-to-day lives. lets think about stars for a second. these days we have powerful telescopes hookedup to computers, discovering stars at an exponential rate. we have databases filled with more thana billion stars, most of which have names that are just based on their sky coordinates. for example, sdssj05552+0724 just rolls off the tongue doesn't it? now we have given some stars some nicknames,including that one. you might know it better as "beetlejuice." and here's a little trivia,if you say its name three times it collapses
into a black hole! now if human beings ever settle distant starsystems, we're gonna have to come up with some brand new familiar names. hopefully we can avoid the same mistake thevikings made when they named their beautiful new settlement...iceland. i've got a question for all of you guys outthere. have you ever wanted to change your own name, and if so what name would you preferto have? let us know in the comments below. make sure you subscribe to our channel and"like" this video, and hey, you should definitely check these videos out here, we did a lotof work on them, and that one right there
in particular is awesome!
No comments:
Post a Comment