Where our minds go when words let us down
The drive to express ourselves can be joined with the sense that we cannot quite express ourselves fully, that language is inherently the limiting factor. Why should that be?
Via a complex circuitry, the brain delivers motivation to the body as a motor command to execute its will. One view is the brain is busy making predictions about the world such as what we will see when we turn the corner. If we are surprised by not seeing what we expected, then we are motivated to turn around and meet our expectations in some other direction or explore further. A failure to match the world with our expectation delivers a surprise and motivates the motor system. Speech is a motor system and attaching words to explain the world is a way to align pre-verbal perception or experience with an expected state.
Our closest living relatives—the old-world monkeys—route trillions of electrical messages through their gray and white matter and manage to fill their large brains with neural activity, while remaining devoid of words. Their grunts, barks, screams, and hoots and accompanying range of facial expressions convey messages including nuance, even some rudimentary elements of language. It’s difficult to know what they may be experiencing. Do their perceptions raise conflicts, questions, doubts, and anxieties that require communication tools beyond their capacity? Whatever the mental states of non-human primates, at some point words usurped a wordless consciousness.
Reduced to their elementary waveforms, words are complex vibrations generated by rapid movements of mouth parts, shaped according to learned patterns to convey meaning. The synchronization of vocalization muscles with millisecond timing and the neural firing patterns in the brain that generate the muscle movements are the physical embodiment of an abstraction called meaning.
The emitted sounds represent a thought or a feeling that motivated them. How can a vocalization in the form of a complex sound package, let’s say a signifier, which can be precisely described as a set of waveforms, serve as a representation of a thought? [Continue reading…]