A Burst of Speed

This is a guest post from linguist-in-chief and canine-wrangler Anne-Michelle Tessier, who has previously given us classics like Happy Hallowe’en from Howard, which I feel compelled to mention here because Howard, as the more anxious and type-A of the two dogs, is the one I identify most closely with, and he is not really mentioned in the post below. What are newsletters like this if not for figuring out what type of dog you identify with?

Bagel is a Dog of Very Little Brain, which means I do most of her thinking. She is happy to outsource the thinking to me, because she is happy about almost everything. This happiness is probably because she does so little thinking; this in turn doesn’t bear thinking about, so instead what I’m thinking about today is relative vs absolute perception of rates of change. My thoughts are on this topic revolve around three points: (1) I sometimes study human speech perception; (2) I sometimes run from zombies in the forest; (3) I’m sick of washing mud puddles out of Bagel’s bright white fur. These thoughts are all related.  

A thing about humans (probably all mammals, at least) is that our perceptual experiences at any given moment are calibrated by how different they are from the perceptual experiences that came right before. You maybe find this intuitive—like when you stare at a red light, and then everything else looks more green for a while?… And certainly this is true in our (subconscious) experience of speech sounds. If you’ve just heard a slightly loud noise (say, a vowel), then another quieter noise (say, a consonant) can sound even more quiet and vice versa; if you’ve just heard a high-pitched noise, then a low one will sound even lower; and so on.

This amplification of perceptual contrast has all sorts of ramifications for the sound patterns of human languages. But also it means that when you’re running slowly, and you speed up even a little, you can feel like you’re flying—cause you’re going so much faster than before!

I am these days a very consistent, very middle-to-back of the pack runner. Starting during the pandemic, my runs often involve an audio app called ‘Zombies, Run!’ I’m not going to try to explain much about the app here because I honestly love it so much that the topic turns me into a parody of Comic Book Guy, but for present purposes what’s crucial is the Zombies Chase feature, whereby every so often over the course of your GPS-tracked run, you’ll hear a low zombie moan in your ear, over top of which a pleasantly AI voice will announce “Zombie detected”. And you then have to speed up! If you speed up enough for long enough, you’ll evade the zombie! And importantly: you need to speed up in proportion to how fast you were running before. You see? Sometimes I’ve been out on a more than usually tired run, and worried a zombie chase was upcoming, so I’ve slowed down so that when it was time to speed up I’d survive… Because it’s all relative. Often in the Zombies, Run! Storyline, one of the main comms operators coming through on my headphones will end a transmission with an encouraging note about “putting on a burst of speed”, and so I do.

Often I run alone, with no one to dictate my direction or pace; sometimes I run with both dogs, with a lot of conflicting input about both. On the best days, the three of us get into a groove, skimming the sidewalk or the trail, climbing some gentle hills, not tumbling down any ravines and trotting along in sync like we were all born for it. And on almost every day when she’s with me on a run, Bagel wants to roll in a puddle. Often that puddle is muddy; often if Bagel rolls in it a bath will be necessary; often I tire of baths. But! I have recently realized that if we slow down a little bit beforehand, and then right when the puddles are within striking distance I put on a burst of speed, Bagel understands that the game is afoot, and happily starts to sprint beside with me until we win whatever prize it is that I (the one who does the thinking) have decided we should win. And so we do! The dogs get to romp, I get a little extra exercise, the zombies are evaded, and nobody has to get time-consumingly lathered, drenched or dried when we get home.

Because Bagel is so sweet of soul and fluffy of mind, she never stops to ask why we were sprinting and why we stopped, and I suspect she will never notice that my whims of sprinting coincide with the juiciest mudholes. For all I know, she does not compare her current speed relative to her previous ones—they are all just moments of joy and she is glad to have them all. (For a dog of very little brain, she may actually be rather wise.)

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