In the chain of evolution when did language develop? There was no language before humans came on the scene, which means that creatures were perceiving for billions of years before there was language. Why would anyone think that language had a direct connection to perception?
Language is a means for communication. Concepts must be translated to language before language can be engaged.
Critical thinking is certainly an essential element as well. Combined with "internal observation" -- meditation -- one can be in a position to learn how the mind works very much like critical thinking + sensory observation helps us to understand the empirical world.
Critical thinking by itself, though, especially to evaluate thinking...I sense a subtle conflict of interest here, like a bank suspected of ill-conceived lending practices saying it will set up a committee to investigate what it's doing. There's no outside, detached witness, like what meditation can provide, especially over time as the skill develops. Plus, critical thinking can evaluate only what it can see with the spotlight of untrained attention.
Listen I don't mean to be pushing it. I mention meditation only because you have a deep and earnest interest in the subject matter ("thinking"), and I figured, maybe, you would find attention-training an asset.
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Last edited by Mindship on Feb 25th, 2009 at 09:01 PM
The theory is that early primates had a place in their brain, the homologue of Broca's area, which was used for very fine finger movement. This area developed as these primates were able to communicate basic intentions through hand signals.
It gets confusing as you morph from fine finger movement to throat articulations and audio symbols, but the premise is that this happened before the evolution into humans, and this is evidenced by the fact that chimps still have this area but it has not been changed into a vocal center.
As Sym just pointed out, it depends now on what you define as "human" and what you define as "language", and there wont be a clear line of distinction for either, but clearly somewhere between the co-ancestor between humans and chimps and now what we consider language was developed.
1) human perception is different from any other animal. Each organism perceives that which their sensory organs enable them to, and their percepts then are dependent on the basic biology of those sensory organs. Thus, all organisms, even of the same species, are going to have a unique perception of reality. Would you say that a human who has no language ability (such as severely autistic individuals, or severe specific language impairment) have the same perception of the world that you do?
2) organisms perceived the world for billions of years without the primate cone in the retina for perceiving a specific wavelength of light. Are you then going to also argue that specific shades of red are not part of human perception simply because organisms were perceiving for billions of years without them?
3) all animals are just as evolved as humans. Humans didn't "gain" language, its use became a survival/reproductive benefit for proto-humans. Much like how evolution has altered the perception of blind subterranean mammals to encompass their environment and what was necessary for survival, it has done the same for humans.
4) ALL parts of the brain work together to create perception. Your posture while reading this will determine, to some extent, your perception of the material.
well, for one, there is an entire field of study devoted to the perception of language.
for another, to understand language, it must be perceived, as in, the physical stimuli must get into the brain some how.
more specifically though, would be the direct neuronal connections between primary sensory cortices, such as A1 and V1, and language centers, specifically those located at the rear of the brain near or in the parietal cortex.
Here, I'll make it absurdly apparent:
look at the following words. Attempt to say the colour they are written in, but not the word itself.
RED
BROWN
BLUE
YELLOW
GREEN
notice how difficult this is.
indeed?
__________________ He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Last edited by inimalist on Feb 25th, 2009 at 09:13 PM
__________________ He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Last edited by inimalist on Feb 25th, 2009 at 09:24 PM
I remember having watched, on TV, a high-jumper performing an obvious mental imagery of his up-coming jump just before he actually performed his physical feat. I could watch his gaze going through the running to the bar and lifting himself up and over the bar. It was obvious that he was doing a practice jump in his mind just before he actually performed the jump.
What do these practices, plus the recent empirical evidence regarding neural cognitive science, tell us about the nature of conceptualization and knowledge?
One can analyze the nature of our psyche from the phenomenological and from the neurobiological aspect. SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) has, in the last several decades, developed theories about both of these aspects of human activity.
“A central tenet of an embodied cognitive theory of concepts is that concrete concepts (that is, concepts for concrete objects, events, and actions) are processed using sensorimotor areas of the brain…The guiding idea here is that thinking using a concrete concept involve activating many of the same sensorimotor neural clusters that would be activated in actually perceiving something, manipulating an object, or moving one’s body.”
Such ideas as one finds in the above quote seem to me to be obvious if one considers Darwin’s theory of natural selection. If natural selection is a true theory then there must be continuity throughout the chain of being. Thus humans, like their non-human ancestors, must be expected to use these sensorimotor neural networks for concrete experience.
We generally speak about knowledge from a phenomenological perspective; recent developments in neuroscience, however limited, suggest some of the neural bases for conceptualization.
“Concepts are neural activation patterns that can either be “turned on” by some actual perceptual or motoric event in our bodies, or else activated when we merely think about something, without actually perceiving it or performing a specific action.”
Have you ever performed this mental imaging of an athletic performance just before attempting to do it?
If you have learned to type have you ever, like me, asked your self where on the key board is “y” and discovered you had to depend upon your fingers for that information?
If all concrete concepts result from sensorimotor aided experience does this mean that all concepts, either concrete or subjective, are grounded in sensorimotor aided experience?
Quotes from “The Meaning of the Body” by Mark Johnson
‘Red’ is a concept and ‘red’ is also a word. What is the difference between the concept and the word? The concept is a neural network and the word is structuring that concept into an audible form for the purpose of transmission of the concept to another human. The concept is a fundamental element in the construction of thought. We think in images and not in linguistic form.
For those who are creationist I can understand why this following explanation is of little value.
Categories are “part of our experience”. “They are the structures that differentiate aspects of our experience into discernable kinds…the formation and use of categories is the stuff of experience.”
“What we call concepts are neural structures that allow us to mentally characterize our categories and reason about them.”
“The question of what we take to be real and the question of how we reason is inextricably linked. Our categories of things in the world determine what we take to be real: trees, rocks, animals, people, buildings, and so on. Our concepts determine how we reason about those categories. In order to function realistically in the world, our categories and our forms of reason must “work” very well together;”
In an attempt to enlighten the reader as to the nature of metaphor theory the author explains in some detail three kinds of concepts—color concepts, basic-level concepts, and spatial level concepts. In the book “Philosophy in the Flesh” the authors explain color perception in some detail in order to exemplify the meaning of ‘concept’. I will give a short rendition of color perception. For more detail of color perception one might examine: http://www.firelily.com/opinions/color.html
“Our experience of color is created by a combination of four factors: wavelengths of reflected light, lighting conditions, and two aspects of our bodies: (1) the three kinds of color cones in our retinas, which absorb light of long, medium, and short wavelengths, and (2) the complex neural circuitry connected to those cones.”
One physical property of the surface of the object matters for color: its reflectance (the percentage of high-, medium- and low-frequency light that the object reflects). The actual wavelength reflected by the object do not remain constant it depends upon ambient light, yet the color remains relatively constant. “Color, then, is not just the perception of wavelength; color constancy depends on the brain’s ability to compensate for variations in the light source.”
Visible light is electromagnetic radiation like radio waves within a certain frequency spectrum. When the electromagnetic radiation impinges on the cones in our retina we perceive color. Color perception is the result of four interacting factors: “lighting conditions, wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, color cones, and neural processing.”
Colors are not objective nor are they purely subjective. “Color is created jointly by our biology and the world, not by our culture.” Color results from the interaction of biology and the world. “We have the color concepts we do because the physical limitations constraining evolution gave evolutionary advantages to beings with a color system that enabled them to function well in crucial respects.”
A nation has an infrastructure consisting of roads, bridges, rail lines, etc. The brain has mental spaces containing experiences and in these mental spaces there are infrastructure containing categories, concepts, inferences, etc. This is my understanding of the material I have studied in “Philosophy in the Flesh”.
Quotes from “Philosophy in the Flesh” by Lakoff and Johnson
there is good reason to believe that all human experience and cognition is directly related to motor experience and action. As humans are an evolved organism, all of our mental faculties must have evolved in response to our environment. In this light, our cognition must be understood as serving various survival purposes, all ending with behaviour that produces reproductive advantage. Because the end result is necessarily action, all parts of our brain potentially are evolved to produce the necessary action in a scenario.
For instance, our ability to see colour is almost assuredly related to what colours represented to our ancestors in the environment they evolved in. Recent studies show an attentional bias toward pink, then red, items. Pink represents, in nature, highly vascularized skin, meaning sex organs and face/lips. Red often represents food or caution for foraging people. Thus, the perception of the colours pink and red is evolved specifically to create action that is beneficial to the immediate survival and reproduction of an organism.
__________________ He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
As someone who used to lift heavy weights back in the day, yeah, this mental rehearsal was invaluable for bringing both mind and body fully online for the task at hand.
But even better...
Years ago there was a study which sought to measure increases in strength. It compared three groups:
Group 1 trained by doing actual pushups.
Group 2 trained with visualization, imagining themselves doing pushups.
Group 3 did nothing mentally nor physically.
The aim was to see which group showed the highest gains in strength (as measured by an increase in the number of pushups). Not surprisingly, Group 1 showed the most strength gain; Group 3 showed no gain.
However, quite surprisingly, Group 2 -- the visualizers -- also showed a significant increase in pushup strength (though of course not as much as Group 1).
__________________
Shinier than a speeding bullet.
One of my profs last year mentioned that for the first even month of working out, the vast majority of change happens in the brain rather than in the muscles. It makes sense, just really cool imho
__________________ He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
I read somewhere...not sure where...so probably cracked.com...that there were tests made on people just strongly imagining that they work out, rather than actually working out, which then, apparently increased their strength...which is kinda awesome.
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Bardock42 is a whimpering pussy now who lost his flare to debate vigorously and just spouts senseless and thinly veiled puns here and there. You nazi pr*ck. Get your balls back from whoever you sold them to, you fat f*ck. What happened to the manly, chubby German big mouth we once knew, who'd flatten ignorance with a solid argument? Now it's like Andy Dick meets John Candy. You hybrid beefcake. Suck my c*ck
The skinny, as far as I was taught, is that instead of muscle increase, the pathways in the brain between the motor planning areas and the muscles themselves become leaner and stronger. Basically, you build neurological "short-cuts".
The visualization wont work the muscles, but it will increase the strength of these connections, making the movement more coordinated, and allowing for greater feats of strength
EDIT: then we get the really fun stuff where you compare 1st person visualizations vs 3rd person visualizations... its cool, but you are basically counting angels on a pinhead at that point... Though for some reason I'm remembering fMRI differences in perspective taking for visualization of action... god damn it, and I should be reading this stuff on memory anyways... stupid time wasting internets
__________________ He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
The conscious perception of colour is said to stem from threshold activation in the visual cortex. what are called "feature detectors" for colour are activated when information from the cones in the retina is passed along colour-opponent pathways (red v Green, blue v yellow, black v white). At a certain level of activation, the "feature detector" neurons send a signal to moderately higher neural areas, bringing attentional resources to the area of 2d retina (retinotopic) space that the detector responds to.
Single cell recordings of these detectors finds 2 things. 1) After activation, a feature detecting cell stays more active than normal for a few minutes. While it is not at threshold activation (you aren't attending to it) it is still firing. This continuous firing is called priming, and were you to show the colour that detector responds to in the area of retinotopic space it covers, it would reach threshold activation faster than it would from its normal level of activity. Priming, thus, produces faster allocation of attentional resources to the primed neurons and thus faster perception. 2) Before a task where a monkey knew it had to search for a specific target, single cell recordings showed that activation, prior to stimuli presentation, occurred first in the higher attentional areas, then modestly to some of the lowest levels of the visual cortex (I want to say V2, but like anyone here is going to check that ). Basically, when you know you have to look for something, your attentional regions can prime your basic low-level feature detectors (to a minimal degree), making the appearance of any features possessed by the target activate attention faster.
Based on tons of research (including my own[sic]!!!!!!!!! [just published bitches!]) it is known that, in a scenario where someone has to find a target on a visual array among distractors, either presenting them with a feature possessed by the target immediately before the search (type 1 priming above [so like, target is a red horizontal line, show the participant a red square]) or having them visualize the target prior to the search (type 2 priming above) will decrease the time it takes them to find the target on the screen. Based on the research above, this is said to be due to heightened activation of the primary visual feature detectors due to the priming, allowing them to reach threshold faster and attract attention to the location of the target.
now, WOO, here is the amazing kicker. Say the person is looking for a line on a 45 degree angle. We all know almost instantly what that looks like. So, if you tell someone to find the line on a 45 degree angle, they do fairly well. If, however, you tell them to find the "steep" line, they will do much better. This shows that language has a very strong mediating role in the way our brain not only perceives the world, but communicates with itself.
If imagery was the primary communicative language of the brain, then the image of a 45 degree line should provide the most exact and impressive priming, however, the verbal category "steep" outclasses it.
blah, and please reply. I'm not putting this together from some book I'm reading, at it sort of addresses exactly what you seem to want to talk about...
__________________ He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
__________________ He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
Ha, yeah, that's where reading more than one post back pays off, doesn't it?
__________________
Bardock42 is a whimpering pussy now who lost his flare to debate vigorously and just spouts senseless and thinly veiled puns here and there. You nazi pr*ck. Get your balls back from whoever you sold them to, you fat f*ck. What happened to the manly, chubby German big mouth we once knew, who'd flatten ignorance with a solid argument? Now it's like Andy Dick meets John Candy. You hybrid beefcake. Suck my c*ck
KMC Community Forums
Feb 25th, 2009 08:40 PM
). Basically, when you know you have to look for something, your attentional regions can prime your basic low-level feature detectors (to a minimal degree), making the appearance of any features possessed by the target activate attention faster.
