[HN Gopher] How the Brain Parses Language
___________________________________________________________________
How the Brain Parses Language
Author : mylifeandtimes
Score : 114 points
Date : 2025-12-08 12:46 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quantamagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quantamagazine.org)
| moralIsYouLie wrote:
| reads like a collection of HN comments by commenters who like to
| build "chapter 1" textbook agents using instant-noodle "training
| tools". "and what would be the time complexity?"
|
| I can't do this anymore.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| Ev Fedorenko is a highly recognized cognitive scientist that
| has been studying how humans parse language for years.
|
| Of course this doesn't mean one shouldn't question what she
| says (that would be an obvious authority fallacy), but I do
| think it's fair to say that if you want to question it, the
| argument should be more elaborate that "this sounds like she
| has no idea of the topic".
| Timwi wrote:
| I'm not the person you responded to, but I found the article
| unreadable because it kept going on about Ev's life instead
| of her research. I'm sure her research is valuable and
| insightful, but with this style of reporting it is both
| inaccessible to me, and it gives me the (probably flawed)
| impression that her research isn't the part of her life
| that's supposed to be important or impressive.
| jimbokun wrote:
| This is meant for a lay audience so you should probably
| just read her research papers.
|
| Also:
|
| > it gives me the (probably flawed) impression that her
| research isn't the part of her life that's supposed to be
| important or impressive.
|
| I don't see this at all in the article. There's just some
| human interest content to make her research more
| approachable.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| > It almost sounds like you're saying there's essentially an LLM
| inside everyone's brain. Is that what you're saying?
|
| >Pretty much. I think the language network is very similar in
| many ways to early LLMs, which learn the regularities of language
| and how words relate to each other. It's not so hard to imagine,
| right?
|
| Yet, completely glosses over the role of rhythm in parsing
| language. LLMs aren't rhythmic at all, are they? Maybe each token
| production is a cycle, though... hmm...
| GolDDranks wrote:
| I think it's obvious that she means that it's something _like_
| LLMs in some aspects. You are correct in that rhythm and
| intonation are very important in parsing language. (And also an
| important cue when learning how to parse language!) It's clear
| that the human language network is not like LLM in that sense.
| However, it _is_ a bit like an _early_ LLM (remember GPT2?) in
| the sense that it can produce and parse language, not that it
| makes much deeper sense in it.
| tgv wrote:
| However ... language production and perception are quite
| separated in our heads. There's basically no parallel to
| LLMs. Note that the article doesn't give any, and is
| extremely vague about the biological underpinnings of
| language.
| GolDDranks wrote:
| > language production and perception are quite separated in
| our heads
|
| Do you have any evidence for this?
|
| I am a former linguistics student (got my masters), and,
| after years of absenteeism in academia, interested in the
| current state of the affairs. So: "quite separated in our
| heads" Evidence for? against?
| tgv wrote:
| Afasia, and general measures of "normal" performance.
|
| There are various kinds of afasia, often linked to
| specific brain areas (Wernicke's and Broca's are well-
| known). And M/EEG and fMRI research suggests similar
| distinctions. It is difficult to reconcile with the idea
| that there is only one language system.
|
| And you will also have noticed that your skills in
| perception and production differ. You can read/listen
| better than write/speak. Timing, ambiguity and errors in
| perception and production differ.
|
| And more logically: the tasks are very different. In
| perception, you have to perceive the structure and
| meaning from a highly ambiguous, but ordered input of
| sound triggering auditory nerves, while during
| production, meaning is given (in non-linear order), and
| you have to find a way to fit it in a linear, grammatical
| order with matching words, which then have to be
| translated to muscle movements.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _It 's clear that the human language network is not like
| LLM in that sense._
|
| Is it though? If rhythm or tone changes meaning, then just
| add symbols for rhythm and tone to LLM input and train it.
| You'll get not just words out that differ based on those
| additional symbols wrapping words, but you'll also get the
| rhythm and tone symbols in the output.
| tcsenpai wrote:
| > But what if our neurobiological reality includes a system that
| behaves something like an LLM?
|
| It almost seems like we got inspiration from our brain to build
| neural networks!
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| It isn't clear though. Neural networks were inspired by the
| brain, but transformers? It is totally plausible but do we
| really think just in words?
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| > It is totally plausible but do we really think just in
| words?
|
| I find that proposition totally implausible. Some people
| certainly report only thinking in words & having a continuous
| inner monologue, but I'm not one of them. I think, then I
| describe my thoughts in words if I'm speaking or writing or
| thinking about speaking or writing.
| alfanick wrote:
| Anecdotal data, based on a sample of 1 (aka me). I'm originally
| Polish, but I would say my mother tongue is English. I also
| learned Latin as a kid/teen. Then learning any other languages is
| much easier, I also learned German and some Swiss German
| dialects. I can also do Spanish, Italian, French, Dutch, Czech,
| some Serbo-Croation. I think being Polish makes learning
| languages easy - as we have a lot of creations in Polish that do
| not translate easily to other languages. I think in my case it's
| the same part of brain that processes both human language and
| computer language. My brain can do another fun party trick: I
| never learned cyrillic, but I can read it just fine, my brain
| does like pattern matching and statistical analysis when reading
| cyrillic.
|
| I also learned to think in hmm "concepts", and then apply a
| language of my choice to express them. It's a fun skill to have
| :) Obviously works of Chomsky are great, especially exploring if
| language evolves mind or is the other way around, does mind
| evolve language? [let's skip his rather controversial political
| views lately].
| Tor3 wrote:
| I speak several languages too, though definitely not as many as
| you do. I'm also in the process of learning a completely new
| one, at an advanced age relative to when I last learned a new
| one (I was in my thirties then). To me, my brain most
| definitely doesn't process human language the way it handles
| computer language. It's about as different as it can get. The
| latter is "learning", the former is "burn patterns into the
| brain", and learning a language can take years, at least at
| this age. Computer languages? Those can be picked up in as
| little as a weekend, and getting proficient isn't a multi-year
| or decade long process. It feels totally different for me (I've
| been learning new computer languages at the same time as I've
| been trying to get up to speed with a new human language).
| mzs wrote:
| I completely understand! I'm also Polish American. I have to
| say it helps when mother's side of family is Gdansk+west and
| father's Lublin+east. My wife's family is all from Warsaw area
| and I had to translate for my father-in-law during a holiday to
| Wladyslawowo-Hel (probably helps my aunt's father's side is
| Kashubian too, mmm... dessert first).
|
| I was blown-away on holiday to Croatia. It was so unexpectedly
| relatively easily understandable after Czechia, Austria, and
| Slovenia. I was all, "What just happened!? Shouldn't this be
| something more like Italian?"
|
| It took only a month for me to be able to communicate in
| Ukrainian with my ESL students, you're totally right about
| Cyrillic. And I too think in concepts but switch my brain to
| express them externally via language, whatever that language
| may be at the moment. I am terrible at translating OTOH, so
| unnatural!
|
| But it has it's limits, I got to a point after German and
| Norwegian that I thought I harbored a super-power. Then I went
| to school in Hungary ;) I also had an ESL student from
| Lithuania, yep incomprehensible.
| liampulles wrote:
| What I'm curious about is what the language parts of the human
| brain look like for babies and toddlers. Humans obviously have a
| bunch of languages they can speak, and toddlers pick up the
| language that their guardians speak around their home, so there
| seems to be machinery there that is for the task of "online"
| learning.
| lapcat wrote:
| I think this quote may speak to the question:
|
| > The brain's general object-recognition machinery is at the
| same level of abstractness as the language network. It's not so
| different from some higher-level visual areas such as the
| inferotemporal cortex (opens a new tab) storing bits of object
| shapes, or the fusiform face area storing a basic face
| template.
|
| In other words, it sounds like the brain may start with the
| same basic methods of pattern matching for many different
| contexts, but then different areas of the brain specialize in
| looking for patterns in specific contexts such as vision or
| language.
|
| This seems to align with the research of Jenny Saffran, for
| example, who has studied how babies recognize language, arguing
| that this is largely statistical pattern matching.
| mullsork wrote:
| In the series Babies by Netflix some of her research on this
| topic is covered. Season 1 Episode 4 "First Words."
| Anon84 wrote:
| Me too! Babies and toddlers brains are like sponges. We started
| teaching my baby 3 languages since birth (essentially I always
| spoken with her in my native language, my wife in hers and gets
| English from living in the US). She's not even 4 yet an fully
| fluent in all three and seemlessly jumps back and forth between
| them. (To my surprise, she doesn't mix words from the different
| languages in the same sentence)
| phkahler wrote:
| >> To my surprise, she doesn't mix words from the different
| languages in the same sentence
|
| I knew two brothers that would mix words from different
| languages while speaking _to each other_ because they shared
| the same set of languages and presumably used the best words
| to express their thoughts.
|
| Your daughter probably knows other people generally speak and
| understand one language at a time and just conforms because
| its most effective.
|
| I'm not sure if or at what age it might be good to start
| mixing languages with others who can.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| If you look at the rate of "new" word use after the first
| spoken word its very clear that word acquisition and
| categorizing occurs for a long period before that first word
| is ever spoken.
|
| Speaking to babies is incredibly important for linguistics
| but probably for all types of complex brain function, I don't
| think there is an upper bound on how many words we should
| expose children too.
| griffzhowl wrote:
| One part of the story I found fascinating is the overlap in
| infants' brains of the areas involved in tool use and
| hierarchical syntax. These diverge and specialize in adults.
| The homologous brain region in primates is involved in motor
| planning.
|
| It's an interesting hint at the deeper evolutionary origins of
| language in the ability to plan complex actions, providing a
| neural basis for the observation that language and action
| planning have this common structure of an overall goal that can
| be decomposed into a structure of subgoals, which we see
| formalized in computer programs too.
|
| This is an older reference (1991) where I first heard about it.
| there are more recent studies reinforcing various aspects of it
| but I didn't find one that was as comprehensive
|
| https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00071235
| lukeinator42 wrote:
| It's an interesting area of research, there is even some
| evidence that language experienced in utero affects speech
| perception: https://doi.org/10.1111/apa.12098.
| trebligdivad wrote:
| I'd like one stage further - what are the genetics of this
| area? How does a dedicated brain area like this get encoded -
| (Hopefully the Allen Institute might dig on this one?); but if
| we can find how the areas are encoded in the DNA we could
| presumably see how they evolved, but then perhaps also spot
| other areas?
| lapcat wrote:
| I wouldn't read too much into the LLM analogy. The interview is
| disappointingly short, filled with a bunch of unnecessarily tall
| photgraphs, and the interviewer, the one who brought up LLMs and
| ChatGPT and has a history of writing AI articles
| (https://www.quantamagazine.org/authors/john-pavlus/), almost
| seemed to have an agenda to contextualize the research in this
| way. In general, except in a hostile context such as politics,
| interviewees tend to be agreeable and cooperative with
| interviewers, which means that interviews can be steered in a
| predetermined way, probably for clickbait here.
|
| In any case, there's a key disanalogy:
|
| > Unlike a large language model, the human language network
| doesn't string words into plausible-sounding patterns with nobody
| home; instead, it acts as a translator between external
| perceptions (such as speech, writing and sign language) and
| representations of meaning encoded in other parts of the brain
| (including episodic memory and social cognition, which LLMs don't
| possess).
| adamzwasserman wrote:
| The disanalogy you quote might actually be the key insight.
| What if language operates at two levels, like Kahneman's System
| 1/2?
|
| Level 1: Nearly autonomic -- pattern-matched language that acts
| directly on the nervous system. Evidence: how insults land
| before you "process" them, how fluent speakers produce speech
| faster than conscious deliberation allows, and the entire body
| of work on hypnotic suggestion, which relies on language
| bypassing conscious evaluation entirely.
|
| Level 2: The conscious formulation you describe -- the
| translator between perception and meaning.
|
| LLMs might be decent models of Level 1 but have nothing
| corresponding to Level 2. Fedorenko's "glorified parser" could
| be the Level 1 system.
| lapcat wrote:
| > LLMs might be decent models of Level 1
|
| I don't think so. Fast speakers and hyponotized people are
| still clearly conscious and "at home" inside, vastly more
| "human" than any LLM. Deliberation and evaluation imply
| thinking _before_ you speak but do not imply that you can 't
| otherwise think _while_ you speak.
| qqxufo1 wrote:
| If the brain's language network is only for "packaging words" and
| not for actual logic or reasoning, why does writing or speaking
| our messy thoughts out loud suddenly make them feel more logical?
| Is language actually helping us think, or is it just a filter
| that forces our chaotic ideas into a structure we can finally
| understand?
| netfortius wrote:
| Every time I read something like this reminds me of Maturana (of
| autopoiesis fame), who was among the first scientists from where
| I started gaining an interest in these areas. Relevant to his
| view, in the area of language, is the following:
|
| "We human beings are living systems that exist in language. This
| means that although we exist as human beings in language and
| although our cognitive domains (domains of adequate actions) as
| such take place in the domain of languaging, our languaging takes
| place through our operation as living systems. Accordingly, in
| what follows I shall consider what takes place in language[,] as
| language arises as a biological phenomenon from the operation of
| living systems in recurrent interactions with conservation of
| organization and adaptation through their co-ontogenic structural
| drift, and thus show language as a consequence of the same
| mechanism that explains the phenomena of cognition:"
| adamzwasserman wrote:
| There's an interesting falsifiable prediction lurking here. If
| the language network is essentially a parser/decoder that
| exploits statistical regularities in language structure, then
| languages with richer morphological marking (more redundant
| grammatical signals) should be "easier" to parse -- the structure
| is more explicitly marked in the signal itself.
|
| French has obligatory subject-verb agreement, gender marking on
| articles/adjectives, and rich verbal morphology. English has
| largely shed these. If you trained identical neural networks on
| French vs English corpora, holding everything else constant, you
| might expect French models to hit certain capability thresholds
| earlier -- not because of anything about the network, but because
| the language itself carries more redundant structural information
| per token.
|
| This would support Fedorenko's view that the language network is
| revealing structure already present in language, rather than
| constructing it. The "LLM in your head" isn't doing the thinking
| -- it's a lookup/decode system optimized for whatever linguistic
| code you learned.
|
| (Disclosure: I'm running this exact experiment. Preregistration:
| https://osf.io/sj48b)
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| Dyslexia seems to be more of an issue in English than other
| languages right?
|
| But also, maybe the difficulty of parsing recruits
| other/executive function and is beneficial in other ways?
|
| The per phoneme density/efficiency of English is supposed to be
| quite high as an emergent trade language.
|
| Perhapse speaking a certain language would promote slower more
| intentional parsing, humility through syntax uncertainty, maybe
| not, all I know is that from a global network resilience
| perspective it's good that dumb memes have difficulty
| propagating across cultures/languages.
| adamzwasserman wrote:
| The dyslexia point is interesting; yes, English orthography
| causes more reading disorders than languages with more
| regular spelling-to-sound mappings (Italian, Finnish, etc.).
| That's consistent with the parser having to work harder when
| the signal is noisier.
|
| Your intuition about "slower more intentional parsing"
| connects to something I'm exploring: we may parse language at
| two levels simultaneously; a fast, nearly autonomic level
| (think: how insults land before you consciously process them)
| and a slower deliberate level. Whether those levels interact
| differently across languages is an open question.
| tgv wrote:
| First: dyslexia has little to do with parsing, which is
| generally understood to relate to structure/relations
| between words.
|
| Second: multiple levels of language processing have been
| identified, although it's not at all clear how well
| separated they are. The higher levels (semantics,
| pragmatics) are by necessity lagging behind the lower
| (phonetics, syntax). The higher levels also seem more
| "deliberate."
| Grosvenor wrote:
| And we have those French/English text corpora in the form of
| Canadian law. All laws in Canada at the federal level are
| written in English and French.
|
| This was used to build the first modern language translation
| systems, testing them going from English->french->english. And
| in reverse.
|
| You could do similar here , understanding that your language is
| quite stilted legalese.
|
| Edit: there might be other countries with similar rules in
| place that you could source test data from as well.
| adamzwasserman wrote:
| Incredibly, I had not thought to use that data set.
|
| Now I will. Thanks.
| seszett wrote:
| Belgian federal law is also written in Dutch, French and
| German, by the way.
|
| But no English so you might not be interested.
| tgv wrote:
| There are more differences between English and French than you
| just described, and they can affect your measurement. Even the
| corpora you use _cannot_ be the same. There isn 't "ceteris
| paribus" (holding everything else constant). The outcome of the
| experiment doesn't say anything about the hypothesis.
|
| You're also going to use an artificial neural network to make
| claims about the human brain? That distance is too large to
| bridge with a few assumptions.
|
| BTW, nobody believes our language faculties are doing the
| thinking. There are however, obviously, connections to thought:
| not only the concepts/meaning, but possibly sharing neural
| structures, such as the feedback mechanism that allows us to
| monitor ourselves.
|
| I have a slightly better proposal: if you want to see the
| effect of gender, genderize English or neutralize French, and
| compare both versions of the same language. Careful with
| tokenization, though.
| adamzwasserman wrote:
| The confound concern is fair: no cross-linguistic comparison
| is perfectly controlled. The bet is that the effect size (if
| any) will be large enough to be informative despite the
| noise. But you're right that it's not ceteris paribus in a
| strict sense.
|
| Your proposal is interesting though. Synthetic manipulation
| of morphology within a single language. Have you seen this
| done? The challenge I'd anticipate is that "genderized
| English" wouldn't have natural text to train on, so you'd
| need to generate it somehow, which introduces its own
| artifacts. But comparing French vs artificially gender-
| neutralized French might be feasible with existing parallel
| corpora. Worth thinking about as a follow-up.
|
| On the neural network - brain distance: agreed it's a leap.
| The claim isn't that transformers are brains, but that if
| both are extracting structure from language, they might
| reveal something about what structure is there to extract.
| Fedorenko's own comparison to "early LLMs" suggests she
| thinks the analogy has some merit.
| retrac wrote:
| That presumes that languages with little morphology do not have
| equivalent structures at work elsewhere doing the same kind of
| heavy lifting.
|
| One classic finding in linguistics is that languages with lots
| of morphology tend to have freer word order. Latin has lots of
| morphology and you can move the verb or subject anywhere in the
| sentence and it's still grammatical. In a language like English
| syntax and word order and word choice take on the same role as
| morphology.
|
| Inflected languages may indeed have more information encoded in
| each token. But the relative position of the tokens to each
| other also encodes information. And inflected languages appear
| to do this less.
|
| Languages with richer morphology may also have smaller
| vocabularies. To be fair, this is a contested conjecture too.
| (It depends a lot on how you define a morpheme.) But the theory
| is that languages like Ojibwe or Sansrkit with rich
| derivational morphologies and grammatical inflections simply
| don't need a dozen words for different types of snow, or to
| describe thinking. A single morpheme with an almost infinite
| number of inflected forms can carry all the shades of meaning,
| where different morphemes might be used to make the same
| distinctions, in a less inflected language.
| pessimizer wrote:
| You saved me from posting this. Strict word order makes a lot
| of things easier that have to be done through morphology in
| the vulgar Latins.
|
| > Languages with richer morphology may also have smaller
| vocabularies. To be fair, this is a contested conjecture too.
|
| I agree with the criticism of this to an extent. A lot of has
| seemed to me like it relies on thinking of English as a sort
| of _normal, baseline_ language when it is actually very odd.
| It has so many vowels, and it also isn 't open so has all of
| these little weird distinguishing consonant clusters at the
| end of syllables. And when you compare it to a language
| conjugated with a bunch of suffixes, those suffixes gradually
| both make the words very long, and add a bunch of sounds that
| can't be duplicated very often at the end of roots without
| causing confusion.
|
| All of that together means that there's a lot more bandwidth
| for more words. English, even though it has a lot more words
| than other languages, doesn't have more _precise_ words. Most
| of them are vague duplications, including duplicating most of
| Norman French just to have _special, fancy_ versions of words
| that already existed. The strong emphasis on position in the
| grammar and the vast number of vowels also allows it to
| easily borrow words from other languages without a compelling
| reason.
|
| I think all of that is enough to explain why English is such
| an outlier on vocabulary size, and I think you see similar in
| other languages that share a subset of these features.
| adamzwasserman wrote:
| These are good points that sharpen the hypothesis. The word
| order question is interesting -- positional encoding vs
| morphological encoding might have different computational
| properties for a parser.
|
| One difference I'm betting on: morphological agreement is
| redundant (same information marked multiple times), while
| word order encodes information once. Redundancy aids error
| correction and may lower pattern extraction thresholds. But
| I'm genuinely uncertain whether that outweighs the structural
| information carried by strict word order.
|
| Do you have intuitions on which would be "easier" for a
| statistical learner? Or pointers to relevant literature? The
| vocabulary size / morpheme count tradeoff is also something I
| hadn't fully considered as a confound.
| griffzhowl wrote:
| One disanalogy between human language use and LLMs is that
| language evolved to fit the human brain, which was already
| structured by millions of years of primate social life. This is
| more or less the reverse situation to a neural network trained on
| a large text corpus.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Yes, but animal/human brains (cortex) appear to have evolved to
| be prediction machines, originally mostly predicting evolving
| sensory inputs (how external objects behave), and predicting
| real-world responses to the animal's actions.
|
| Language seems to be taking advantage of this pre-existing
| predictive architecture, and would have again learnt by
| predicting sensory inputs (heard language), which as we have
| seen is enough to induce ability to generate it too.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > But what if our neurobiological reality includes a system that
| behaves something like an LLM?
|
| With every technological breakthrough we always posit that the
| brain has to work like the newly discovered thing. At various
| times brains were hydraulic, mechanical, electrical, like a
| computer, like a network. Now, of course, the brain has to be
| like an LLM.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Yes, but at least now we're comparing artificial to real neural
| networks, so the way it works at least has a chance of being
| similar.
|
| I do think that a transformer, a somewhat generic
| hierarchical/parallel predictive architecture, learning from
| prediction failure, has to be at least somewhat similar to how
| we learn language, as opposed to a specialized Chompyskan
| "language organ".
|
| The main difference is perhaps that the LLM is only predicting
| based on the preceding sequence, while our brain is driving
| language generation by a combination of sequence prediction and
| the thoughts being expressed. You can think of the thoughts
| being a bias to the language generation process, a bit like
| language being a bias to a diffusion based image generator.
|
| What would be cool would be if we could to some "mechanistic
| interpretability" work on the brain's language generation
| circuits, and perhaps discover something similar to induction
| heads.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > Yes, but at least now we're comparing artificial to real
| neural networks, so the way it works at least has a chance of
| being similar.
|
| Indeed, and I wasn't even saying it's wrong, it may be pretty
| close.
|
| > What would be cool would be if we could to some
| "mechanistic interpretability" work on the brain's language
| generation circuits, and perhaps discover something similar
| to induction heads.
|
| Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. And maybe the more we find out
| about the brain, it could lead to some new insights about how
| to improve AI. So we'd sort of converge from both sides.
| aeve890 wrote:
| >Yes, but at least now we're comparing artificial to real
| neural networks
|
| Given that the only similarity between the two of is just the
| "network" structure I'd say that point is pretty weak. The
| name "artificial neural network" it's just an historical
| artifact and an abstraction totally disconnected from the
| real thing.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Sure, but ANNs are at least connectionist, learning
| connections/strengths and representations, etc - close
| enough at that level of abstraction that I think ANNs can
| suggest how the brain may be learning certain things.
| paddleon wrote:
| > comparing artificial to real neural networks
|
| I had a sad day in college when I thought I'd build my own
| ANN using C++.
|
| First thing I did was create a "Neuron" class, to mimic the
| idea of a human neuron.
|
| Second thing I did was realize that ANNs are actually just
| Weiner filters with a sigmoid on top. The base unit is not a
| "neuron".
| jimbokun wrote:
| All of those analogies were useful in some ways, and LLMs are
| too.
|
| There's also a progression in your sequence. There were
| rudimentary mechanical calculating devices, then electrical
| devices begat electrical computers, and LLMs are a particular
| program running on a computer. So in a way the analogies are
| becoming more refined as we develop systems more and more
| capable of mimicking human capabilities.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| I've had the experience of having migraines with aphasia- this is
| essentially a migraine aura that affects the part of the brain
| that processes language. I can confirm that while this was
| happening, i was aware of my surroundings and able to have
| thoughts, but I was unable to speak and unable to understand
| spoken or written language. It all just looked and sounded like
| gibberish. I thought about whether I should go to a hospital,
| what was going on, wondered whether my loved ones were concerned,
| and so on, but was unable to communicate any of those thoughts to
| other people. It was a bizarre experience.
| taeric wrote:
| This feels too reductive to me. In particular, it makes a hard
| distinction between the thinking and the language. I fully accept
| that they are distinct, but how distinct? It is hard not to think
| that some thinking styles influence how something is heard?
|
| Not just in full language, mind, but consider the last time you
| heard a song in a major key? Do you even know what that means?
| Because many of us do not.
|
| Same goes for listening to people discuss things like sports. I'm
| inclined to think many people effectively run a simulation in
| their mind of a game as they listen to it broadcast. This almost
| certainly isn't inherent to the language, it is part of the
| learning of it, though. Think looking over lists of the moves in
| a chess game. Then go from that to laying out the pieces as they
| are after that list. Or calling what the next move can be.
|
| Can this be a completely separate set of "circuitry" in our
| brains that first parses the language and then builds the
| simulation? I suppose. Seems more likely there is something that
| is active between the two that can effectively get merged in
| advanced practitioners.
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