"Dump Shock" | Hacker News Reader

"Dump Shock"

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Its funny: I can just barely follow a conversation in three languages but if I'm writing or coding in Japanese/English and you come up to me and speak the other my brain freezes for 5 ~ 10 seconds for the context switch. I won't be able to remember even the general shape of what you said, let alone parse it, and whatever I was just typing typically turns out as gibberish. (Strangely dyslexic gibberish: I've typed things like "tip a gully terms shout gerbil fish" into emails before when accosted in Japanese.)

The exact same thing happens to me. (bilingual German/English) Switching languages mid-sentence is no problem, but switching language and medium just doesn't work.

I get the same thing when I really focus on Japanese (still learning, so gotta work pretty hard to catch what I can). English comes up, and my brain just gives up and says "screw it". I hear similar to what you type (though I think typing it is more funny, and I wish I did too). When reading a good book, though, it seems my language section just shuts down completely, and it takes a few moments to realize that someone just said words, though I have no hope of recalling them.

Linguistic "dump shocks" are funky. The term seems fitting. Though maybe "core dump" works better in some cases, as seemingly random things come out.

In college, I had the same professor for Spanish and German. (In the same room, too!) Every once in a while, I would accidentally mix up the vocabularies. My professor's mind locked up for a second before he switched gears, realized I was talking in the wrong language, and then switched back.

As someone who struggles with this at 25, this is fairly discouraging to hear...

I worked at IBM in the late '80s. A secretary that worked in my department could have her earphone in one ear typing 100+ words a minute while in her other ear on the phone speaking/listening Spanish with her girlfriend. I could walk up to her and ask a question while she was typing in English and conversing Spanish and she would smile and handle my interruption without missing a beat. Simply amazing.

My ability to context switch has degraded over the years. In my 20s it was effortless. Now I plan each day to avoid context switches.

During the 2002 SLC Olympics, I got a job as a driver/interpreter for Hungarians who were here because they'd won the trip in the lottery. I spent the whole day hanging out and jawing in Hungarian, and when I got home that night I forgot to make the switch to English. My wife (who doesn't know a lick of Hungarian) was too surprised to say anything for a full minute, before she interrupted to let me know I wasn't making any sense.

What happened to Coleridge wasn't "dump shock" (or DumpShock in the UglyWiki convention that makes every linked term look like something from a made-up language pronounced by Comic Book Guy). He had his mellow harshed.

Coleridge claimed that the poem was inspired by an opium-induced dream (implicit in the poem's subtitle A Vision in a Dream) but that the composition was interrupted by a person from Porlock

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubla_Khan

  Coleridge received the Person from Porlock
  And ever after called him a curse
  Then why did he hurry to let him in?
  He might have hid in the house.
  
  It was not right of Coleridge in fact it was wrong
  (But often we all do wrong)
  As the truth is I think, he was already stuck
  With Kubla Khan.
  
  He was weeping and crying, I am finished, finished
  I shall never write another word of it,
  When along comes the Person from Porlock
  And takes the blame for it.

http://www.artofeurope.com/smith/smi4.htm

Oh, and also: http://www.robertfulford.com/porlock.html

Illustration of the concept: http://hestia.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c5c9b53ef01156f5cd7129...

The one time I wish it wasn't referentially transparent...

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