[thro1237]

Given that people who memorize sanskrit hymns typically come from a single caste (with limited intermarriage between castes), the control should just include the members of that caste (but who don't memorize hymns) - to account for genetic effects. And as another commenter pointed out, this doesn't prove anything about Sanksrit. To prove something like that, the authors should have compared brain sizes with people who memorize other non-sanskrit texts.

[DrBazza]

How about London Black Cab drivers who learn "The Knowledge"? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-16086233

"Earlier studies of the brain of the cabbie had already noted the increase in "grey matter" in the hippocampus, an area found at the base of the brain."

[murukesh_s]

Yea, exactly..

[f42z]

A substantial group that memorizes a foreign-language (to many) text are Muslim huffaz, who commit the entire Koran to memory. They'd make a good comparison group, given their large numbers, ethnic heterogeneity and worldwide distribution.

[ketralnis]

Or The Knowledge, where London cab drivers have to memorise the whole of London’s streets

[gumby]

It is well attested that licensed London taxicab drivers (those with “the knowledge”) do in fact end up with different brain structure.

I haven’t seen any studies of what they might give up in the process, though it does involve a lot of sitting.

Example: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/london-taxi-memor...

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Wow. I didn't know about that.

Kind of casts the whole dispute with Uber thing into a whole different light, doesn't it?

[gumby]

Does it? A machine can indeed do a better job (in the sense of requiring negligible training) of knowing all the streets and democratized “the knowledge” which previously was the purview of a small guild.

I am sorry for their sunk cost, but really minicabs+gps and now uber/Lyft et al are as good, or would be if taxis didn’t have a pick up monopoly.

[Pamar]

From previous articles on "the knowledge" I believe that no, a machine cannot really do "better" or not yet, at least.

IIRC at the exam you could get questions like "The passenger tells you that his cousin mentioned a building with a bas-relief of Holy Mary holding Jesus, it was right around the angle from his hotel, but he does not remember the hotel's name".

You are supposed to know the place and the best way to get there, based on just this (also, a good number of "knowledgeable" taxi drivers go for an official London Tour Guide exam soon after, with relatively little effort, considering they have already memorized thousands of places, monuments and architectural details).

[jdietrich]

The Knowledge has a very important secondary effect - it creates a huge sunk cost, vastly increasing the downside of losing your license. Getting a green badge takes three to four years of full-time study. You can lose it for relatively minor offences like short-changing a passenger or taking a tourist on the scenic route. Hackney cab drivers with a green badge have a far stronger incentive to do business honestly than a minicab or Uber driver.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> Does it? A machine can indeed do a better job (in the sense of requiring negligible training) of knowing all the streets and democratized “the knowledge” which previously was the purview of a small guild.

A theoretical machine could do a better job. In practice, we can't build anything that can reason about routes anywhere near as well as London cabbies do. And I'd say that even without knowing about The Knowledge.

Pamar's comment above has a very good example of the kind of thing "a machine" is still very, very far from achieving.

[jacobush]

It certainly CAN but a regular GPS just sucks compared to the Knowledge.

[afsina]

When I was young I had a chance to meet two very young huffaz (we say hafız) candidate. They were probably around 10 to 12 years old. What fascinating was, they did not know any Arabic and memorize almost more than a full page a day continuously. I remember them as very calm and nice kids. Also for the context, there are around 77.000 words in Koran.

[Ar-Curunir]

While it's traditionally the Brahmin caste that memorizes Vedic hymns, there's plenty of genetic diversity even within the caste, which is spread across 10s of millions of people in very different parts of India.

[thro1237]

May be, but there might be enough differences between castes as opposed to within a caste. The control should be as close to the experimental group as possible. Finding a control group from the same caste is inexpensive.

[subroutine]

This is precisely what I was thinking. Something interesting that I hadn't thought of before is that we now actually live in a time where genome sequencing has become cheap enough that low-N studies (like those in MRI/fMRI-based studies) can actually begin to participant-match based on genetic background. This might become the new gold standard!

[adrianN]

Sequencing might become cheap enough to do that, but our understanding of the functions of the different genes is so lacking that I don't think a lot of meaningful data can be extracted for most studies' subjects.

[subroutine]

I don't think we necessarily need to know the function of the genes in order to create a participant matching paradigm that is better than what is being employed currently. For example we can get a more precise snapshot of ancestry using sequencing than simply relying on self-reported 'race'. Also I don't think it needs to be a perfect match; simply stating that controls matched case participants within X percent ancestry would be a useful statistic to report in the methods.

[jdietrich]

We don't necessarily understand the functions of genes, but we're starting to establish strong correlations through genome-wide association studies.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/09/06/184853.1

[tmp1029384756]

since the book 'battle for sanskrit' by rajiv malhotra came out more hindus are now aware of efforts by various groups to denigrate sanskrit as an 'oppressive' language used to control the masses

this is funny because the British actually did that exactly with imposition of english education to create the obedient clerk class for their colony, and claimed it was in fact liberation

and then the germans claimed sanskrit was theirs and could not possibly be of indian local origin and nazi-fied the 'aryan' language

and of course no european scholar could countenance the possibility of hindu epics like the ramayana and mahabharata let alone the vedas could be older than the homeric epics of greek civilization and conveniently 'dated' all indian history to preserve their superiority

[newen]

That's probably people pissed off that they have to learn their mother tongue, english, and hindi to get around in india.