Profs and Pints Meetup-Metro DC

Profs and Pints DC presents: “How Our Brains Blind Us,” a look at our minds’ ability to skew what we see and why we miss what’s right in front of us, with Arryn Robbins, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Richmond and cognitive scientist who researches visual attention.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/brains-blind .]

We like to think of vision as a reliable window into the world, but much of what we “see” is actually constructed by the brain, and much of our visual experience is filtered out without us even noticing.

Learn how visual attention works—and how it can fail us—with Dr. Arryn Robbins, who studies the interaction between the visual stream and representations in memory and whose investigates ways to improve the performance of professional searchers like radiologists, search-and-rescue teams, and airport baggage screeners.

Drawing from current research in visual cognition, neuroscience, and applied perception, she’ll discuss how attention guides perception and how we tend to miss even obvious things when our focus is elsewhere.
You’ll learn how expertise can change what we see (for better or worse) and why birdwatchers and radiologists literally see the world differently.

Dr. Robbins will cite interactive examples and demonstrations that reveal just how much we take for granted in what we “see.” She’ll discuss studies and experiments that have deepened our understanding of how visual perception works and leave you entertained by what we’ve been able to learn from chicken sexers and an experiment involving an “invisible” gorilla.

Important for life in a polarized, digital age, you’ll learn how the same brain processes that filter our vision can make us vulnerable to AI-generated image deception, and how you can train your eye to detect fakes.

It’s a talk you won’t want to miss. ( Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: From “Vertumnus,” a 1591 portrait of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II by the Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

Profs and Pints Northern Virginia presents: “Ancient Sea Monsters,” an encounter with creatures that were dreaded by Greek and Roman sailors and still dwell in imaginations, with Georgia Irby, professor of Classical Studies at William and Mary.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/nv-sea-monsters .]

While we associate monsters with horror movies, to the people of ancient Greece and Rome they seemed very real—and often were thought to be lurking just offshore.

Join Professor Georgia Irby, a scholar of the history of Greek and Roman Science, for a fascinating and richly illustrated look at the imagined horrors that aroused dread in ancient Mediterranean sailors and continue to be feared lurking beneath the waves.

To set the stage, Dr. Irby will discuss how the watery setting is by its very physics and optics one of change and mystery. The sea changes color as light shifts, with its appearance affected by fluctuating winds and currents and light refraction distorting what we see beneath the waves. Lacking the tools that we take for granted in studying marine creatures, Greek and Roman thinkers had to go by what they could observe with their eyes.

Hearing tales of ship-wrecking whales, sailor-strangling octopods, and human-eating sharks prompted ancient Greek and Roman imaginations to create fanciful and frightening sea-beasts whose anatomy and nature were as mysterious as the cryptic environment in which they were believed to dwell. They told of Scylla and other marine foes battled by their fearless heroes. They typically thought of marine fauna as either endearing, as was the case with dolphins or seahorses, generally unpleasant, as was the case with noisome seals, or terrifying—a reaction to most other marine animals.

These imagined horrors help give the seafaring denizens of the Mediterranean an ambiguous attitude toward the sea—a bias that left its mark on later writers such as Jonathan Swift, Herman Melville, and Jules Verne. Professor Irby will pay her respects to Moby Dick, Nessie, and the dinosaurs before sending her audience out into the night to consider what might lurk beneath dark waves. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: A sea monster depicted on a Greek vase from about 530 B.C. (Stavros S. Niarchos Collection)

Profs and Pints DC presents: “How to Speak British,” a crash course on bantering, yammering, waffling and otherwise carrying on like someone across the pond, with Ben Yagoda, professor of English at the University of Delaware, author of Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English, and editor of the Not One-off Britishisms blog.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/dc-speak-british .]

The British love to complain the English language is being destroyed by words and phrases imported from America, from “French fries” to “cookies” to “Awesome, man.” But what about the influence going the other way?

Britishisms have been making their way into the American lexicon for more than 150 years, but the process has accelerated since the turn of the twenty-first century, with “cheeky,” “go missing,” “easy peasy,” “spot-on,” “kerfuffle,” and scores of other common British terms routinely popping up in print and conversations.

Join author and language commentator Ben Yagoda as he explains how it’s all taken place in a talk that will drawing from both traditional sources like the Oxford English Dictionary and new tools like Google Books Ngram Viewer and take into account influences such as the Spice Girls and Peppa Pig.

Yagoda will look at terms taken from British forces during the World Wars (think “cushy” and “boffins”), insults and curses (”wanker” comes to mind), sports terms, and words related to food and beverages. He’ll also explore the American adoption of British spellings, pronunciations, and grammar, as well as cases where Americans have misconstrued British expressions (changing “can’t be arsed” to “can’t be asked”).

He'll also discuss how Americans have adopted faux-British usages, like spelling “adviser” as “advisor” and pronouncing divisive as “divissive.”

Finally, he’ll offer you guidance on just how many Britishisms an American can safely adopt without coming off like an arse. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: The Spice Girls’ bus from the film Spice World. ( Photo by Razzladazzla / Wikimedia Commons.)

Profs and Pints DC presents: “Ancient Sea Monsters,” an encounter with creatures that were dreaded by Greek and Roman sailors and still dwell in imaginations, with Georgia Irby, professor of Classical Studies at William and Mary.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/dc-sea-monsters .]

While we associate monsters with horror movies, to the people of ancient Greece and Rome they seemed very real—and often were thought to be lurking just offshore.

Join Professor Georgia Irby, a scholar of the history of Greek and Roman Science, for a fascinating and richly illustrated look at the imagined horrors that aroused dread in ancient Mediterranean sailors and continue to be feared lurking beneath the waves.

To set the stage, Dr. Irby will discuss how the watery setting is by its very physics and optics one of change and mystery. The sea changes color as light shifts, with its appearance affected by fluctuating winds and currents and light refraction distorting what we see beneath the waves. Lacking the tools that we take for granted in studying marine creatures, Greek and Roman thinkers had to go by what they could observe with their eyes.

Hearing tales of ship-wrecking whales, sailor-strangling octopods, and human-eating sharks prompted ancient Greek and Roman imaginations to create fanciful and frightening sea-beasts whose anatomy and nature were as mysterious as the cryptic environment in which they were believed to dwell. They told of Scylla and other marine foes battled by their fearless heroes. They typically thought of marine fauna as either endearing, as was the case with dolphins or seahorses, generally unpleasant, as was the case with noisome seals, or terrifying—a reaction to most other marine animals.

These imagined horrors help give the seafaring denizens of the Mediterranean an ambiguous attitude toward the sea—a bias that left its mark on later writers such as Jonathan Swift, Herman Melville, and Jules Verne. Professor Irby will pay her respects to Moby Dick, Nessie, and the dinosaurs before sending her audience out into the night to consider what might lurk beneath dark waves. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: A sea monster depicted on a Greek vase from about 530 B.C. (Stavros S. Niarchos Collection)