To be honest…
When I set out to write this book, I completely underestimated how complex our ability to communicate, let alone tell stories, really is. After months of reading up on this subject, I’m even more baffled by it than before I started!
None the less, I’m a strong believer in Why, What, How. It’s only when we can understand the Why and the What of things, that we can really make use of the How. So I will attempt to share with you what I’ve come to understand of how we have developed, how we use and how we benefit from this miraculous ability of ours called language. The rest of this book will then be dedicated to helping you make the most of this super power.
From Sound to Language
Whenever we talk, all we’re really doing is exhaling, causing our larynx to vibrate in specific ways, in combination with different positions of the tongue, lips, mouth and pharynx. Different manipulations of these features result in different sounds, or phonemes.
Infants are too young to know that such a thing as language exists. But very early on they are able to distinguish between the different phonetic units that make up human speech. But by 9 months old, infants show more interest in the phonetic units of their parents’ spoken language than other languages. As this is the point where we humans start to learn language, this shows that our language ability is actually dependent on something more fundamental; a patterning instinct.
Our patterning instinct comes from the part of our brain called the Pre-Frontal Cortex (PFC for short), which is the part responsible for making us so different from other animals. It is the most connected part of our brain, taking sensory signals from the world around us received through our senses, and matching them with signals received from our internal organs about their regulation, allowing us to recognise the relationship between our bodies and the environment.
If I touch a hot stove, my eyes send my brain sensory signals about the shape of the stove, it’s location, it’s colour, and how that’s my hand that’s touching it. My ears will send my brain signals about vibrations in the air that arise as my eyes see my hand touching the hot stove. Nerve cells in my hand will send signals of pain to my brain. My PFC will then combine all of these signals into meaning that lets me understanding that the pain in my hand is arising as a result of it touching a hot stove.
All of this information is then encoded into our memories. Next time we see the hot stove, our memories of that incident are recalled, and combined with the data we are receiving from our senses, to help us decide that we shouldn’t touch that stove again.
Language, is basically a more complicated version of this same exact process.
I think something. Then I make noises by manipulating my larynx, tongue, lips, mouth and pharynx in particular ways. These cause vibrations to pass through the air. Not only that, but my mouth, face and body language all change and send even more signals your way. Your sensory receptors detect all of this incoming information, and pass it through to your PFC. And then magic happens!
Your PFC detects the different phonemes that I just created. Not only that, it also detects the language I’m speaking to you in and if it’s one you understand or not. Then if you do understand it, it detects the word order and sentence structure. It references this incoming data against knowledge stored in your memory about the meaning of words and certain phonetical and grammatical rules that you’re probably not even conscious of. It also references this against a whole bunch of contextual knowledge about who I am, your experiences, your cultural conditioning, our history, the environment we’re in, any shared knowledge we have and so on.
This creates a representation of images, vocalisations, sounds, feelings and so on in your mind, a lot of which you’re again probably not conscious of. But that’s what gives you the sense that you understand the meaning I’m trying to convey.
Even then, your brain still only guesses what I’m trying to say. And your guess might be wrong. So you basically repeat the same process I just repeated, whilst trying to respect the same phonetic, grammatical, conversational and contextual rules that I just respected, which by the way are mostly unconscious too.
Then, after you’ve finished making noises, you gauge my reaction based on the sensory signals that come your way from the noises I make and changes in my body language and facial expressions and so on. Your brain evaluates if the reaction I gave you is the one you expected or not.
Eventually by repeating this process, we end up communicating more in sync.
Big Data
To summarise the above in more simplistic terms, our ability to use language is basically the same as processing big data. Our brains are taking a large variety of signals from the external world, as well as our own internal worlds, and combining them to project experiences onto our minds.
The amazing thing about our language abilities is simply our ability to process so much data in a single moment.
Because we can do this, our brains can handle syntax, which is something no other species in history, not even our closest ancestors, have ever been able to do.
Syntax is the set of rules that govern a language. It’s what tells us that two different combinations of the same string of words have different meanings. And this is what makes our language abilities so special, and what has ultimately enabled us to create cultures that allow for cooperation on a massive scale.
References
Lent, Jeremy. The Patterning Instinct. Prometheus Books. Kindle Edition.
Frith, Chris. Making Up The Mind – How the Brain Creates Our Mental World. Blackwell Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Anil Seth: Your Brain Hallucinates Your Conscious Reality
Steven Pinker: Linguistics as a Window to Understanding the Brain
