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Speaking bodies I: How language happens: the recent science of language Is non-language necessary to language? Could there be 'meaning' without a physical world? How can language have evolved? What are the evolutionary precursors of language in animals? What changes in primate brains have allowed language to develop? What happens in bodies when we use language? Is language somehow an encapsulated function, or does it draw on the whole of the brain, the whole of the body? We know language is social, but how should we understand the embodiment of social interaction among speakers? This first session of the Speaking bodies minicourse will set out an integrated way of understanding language as part of human bodies, which in turn are parts of the physical earth.
Speaking bodies general introduction It's particularly important to remember that divisions into embryology, physiology, psychology, sociology, and therapy are not part of nature, and that, in what is important to us, there is really only one study - human neurobiology. Motto for Institute of Psychoanalysis 1952 We're linguistic beings. Many of us talk all day long, whether aloud or only in our heads. Written language is how we study and for many of us it's also our medium of art. Since how we think about language will unconsciously determine how we think of much of what we do by means of language, it would make sense to begin every study by asking how language works - what language is. That rarely happens, but the Speaking bodies mini-course will begin to bring this essential and obscured human function into focus. It will include questions like these: What is the relation of language to consciousness? How does language come to be built in relation to place? How can language mend illness or trauma? Is there an ethic of language? What is good language, or bad language? 1. An emphasis, orientation, framework Embodiment can mean a lot of things, but for this minicourse it means mainly two related things:
The purpose of this mini-course, like the purpose of my earlier workshops, is to demonstrate how these emphases work themselves out in relation to a particular topic or human capability, in this case language. The embodiment emphasis that will be demonstrated in this series of workshops is not commonly found in orthodox language studies. The scientific developments it is based on are quite recent, and the implications of these developments mostly have not yet been worked out in the many fields they will eventually influence. There are however less recent language theorists whose thinking is compatible with these ideas. You'll find some of them in the bibliography. Places where these ideas ARE already being worked out in
exciting ways include the Linguistics Department at the University of California
at Berkeley, and the Cognitive Science Department at the University of California
at San Diego. 2. What is at stake: wholism vs dualism Language is homotypical - developed forms of language are not found in any other sort of animal - and so the study of language has carried significant weight in our sense of what we mean by 'a mind', and what it means to be human. So what is at stake in the question of how to think about language is a much larger question of how to think of knowledge and of the human relation to nature. Should we think of ourselves as part of nature, or as set against it in some essential way? Also at stake, in a sort of epistemological politics, are questions of what sort of knowing should be considered valid and important. In the old ways of thinking about language and mind, ways of knowing that were least obviously embodied have been given most prestige. It seems that if we can reformulate language as thoroughly embodied, more obviously embodied forms of knowing could become more valued. In our own intellectual lineage, for many centuries, humans have thought of the universe as created by an external maker or makers. When this creationist view of our origins first began to clash with scientific understandings of the natural world, scientists such as Descartes (1600s) evaded religious persecution by saying humans are made of two parts: a physical part and a non-physical part. In this view animal and human bodies - thought of as the physical parts - were thought of as machines that could be studied by scientific means, but the human mind, soul or reasoning faculty (animals were considered not to have these) would be non-physical parts separately created by the deity and somehow inserted into the physical body from outside it. More recently we have begun to be able to imagine a universe that creates itself, and within this vision we have begun to be able to imagine the 'higher' cognitive abilities of humans as evolved within increasingly complex and marvelous bodies fully embedded within a richly self-creating surrounding world. The fear that accompanies this new way of thinking has been a fear of discrediting human gifts, reducing them to something mechanical. This fear can be relieved by realizing that if we do not artificially separate soul or mind from body, we do not have to think of bodies as machines. We can instead think of them as physical organisms whose full resources we have not yet discovered. Instead of reducing cognition or soulfulness, science can help us more fully appreciate the nature and resources of physical bodies. A second advantage of an embodied understanding of mind
or soul is that it allows us more easily to understand ourselves as part
of the natural world, and this understanding could help us to love and preserve
that world. 3. Basic principle: language is structural influence There is a small set of assumptions that is central to all three sessions of this mini-course. They are very simple obvious ideas and yet they are quite radical in their implications. If we understand them, we change our whole framework, our whole way of understanding. Here is a summary. I will repeat it every session. 1. We feel and perceive and imagine and think by means of our physical bodies. Every change in our cognitive state is accomplished (not 'accompanied') by means of a change in our physical structure, ie in the way materials making up our physical bodies are arranged. This is true both at the scale of the whole body, and at the smaller scale of the nervous system and the brain. 2. Language has physical, structural effect. Sometimes the effect is observable - we say something and our hearer blushes, or laughs, or does something. Sometimes the effect isn't visible, but it is always there: no one can understand speech without being physically changed by it. At the level of the brain we can think of it as a sort of bloodless brain surgery - when we speak or write we change the other person's wide network of neural activation, temporarily and sometimes permanently too. 3. Language works with both conscious and nonconscious structure. Conscious function is by means of a widely distributed network of activity in the nervous system, probably mostly the brain. Quite a bit of our nervous system isn't involved in consciousness, but those nonconscious parts can have influence and be influenced by language too. 4. Parts of the nervous system that could be, or have been, part of the conscious wide net can be made nonconscious. That is, certain kinds of feeling, memory, perception, and understanding can be cut off, segregated. This can happen as response to trauma, or just as a result of fairly normal decisions made in childhood or later. Whatever the reason, a network that has lost some of its parts is less able: less perceptive, less intelligent. 5. We speak (and write) from the structure we are at the moment of speaking or writing. This structure may be more or less integrated, more or less coherent, intelligent, relaxed, sensitive, balanced. 6. Self-talk is also structural effect. When we speak, think in words, and write we influence our own structure too. - In this session, Speaking bodies I, I'll talk first about how language has become possible through a long evolutionary trajectory, and then I'll talk in more detail about what is happening in the bodies/brains of people who are speaking to each other, to make us more able to imagine the embodiment of language as vividly as possible. In Speaking bodies II I'll give a very quick introduction to the ways an embodied approach is changing the study of language - linguistics - and what is at stake in this change. In Speaking bodies III I'll talk about the implications for our practice of language. If the ways we use language can change our own and other people's physical structure, what does that suggest about the relations of language to ethics, art, therapy and spirituality? Speaking bodies I. How language happens: the recent science of language
o There are at present somewhere between 5000 and 6000 languages from maybe 10 root protolanguages. Half of them can be considered endangered. o Hominids diverged from an ancestral species common to both apes and human beings around 6,000,000 years ago. o Language capabilities are thought to have appeared relatively recently, maybe 150,000 years ago, probably in Africa. We could call it 30,000 generations. o A protolanguage being called Nostratic is hypothesized to have existed 12-20,000 years ago; another, called Dene-Caucasian, is hypothesized to be the mother of Chinese and of the Na-Dene languages whose speakers were among the first migrants into what became the Americas. o There is evidence of a proto-Indo-European language 10,000 years ago. o Evidence has been found of the first systems of writing 6000 years ago in what is now the Middle East. o English has been a rapidly mutating language - from Old German in the 400s AD, Old English in the 700s, with contributions from the Vikings from 787 and French after 1066. Chaucer's language in the 1300s still sounds quite German. Dutch and Frisian are the languages closest to English. o In many languages most of the basic words are traceable to its ancestor, but in English 99% of words are not from OE - 62% of the words most used are, though. o The 15 stablest meanings across languages are: I/me,
two/pair, you, who/what, tongue, name, eye, heart, tooth, no/not, fingernail/toenail,
house, tear, water, dead. From these scholars have extrapolated to proto-Indo-European.
How have humans become capable of language? Ie how have humans become possible? Humans are bodies able to speak in virtue of an immensely long evolutionary history. Being able to speak and understand actually depends on the whole of the body, but here I'll just take you through the evolutionary history of nervous systems and ultimately of the human cerebral cortex. The best way to learn about a nervous system and especially a cortex is to imagine a landscape with paths criss-crossing in many directions. Like places in a landscape, the function and significance of any one location depends on its relation to all the other places around it. Here goes: the evolution of nervous systems from simplest to most complex in a couple of pages. The first, most basic principle of neural organization
is that there are paths from perception to action. a. Perceiving and acting in a single-celled organism
b. Perception-to-action chains in simple many-celled creatures
c. Branching networks in animals with spines and spinal cords
d. Reptiles have the beginning of a cortex but mostly don't use it
e. Early mammals have large smell brains with a bit of cerebral cortex developing on top
f. In animals that use their forepaws in more complicated ways, we see more complicated cortex
g. In Old World primates there are important new features
h. Humans have areas that associate association areas
i. Overview of evolution of the cortex
j. - Lateralization and manual precision
k. Other aspects of current neuroscience important to language study:
Two important changes in the way we think about language have resulted from functional imaging studies (PET and MRI) of brain activity during linguistic tasks. The first is the discovery that language is not the product of a confined language module but uses networks very widely spread through the whole of the left hemisphere and parts of the right (Damasio 1989). [how to imagine a wide net] The second is related to the first: it is that language also uses connections built for basic situational action and perception.
Damasio thinks of the whole of the language net as spreading through three zones centered around the Sylvian fissure (the large horizontal fold under the ear): - a language implementation zone that includes the traditionally recognized language areas; - a mediation zone, used non-linguistically as well as linguistically, adjacent to the implementation zone; - and what he calls a conceptual area spread throughout
primary sensory and motor cortex outside the implementation zone.
Language implementation areas are language perception and production areas - (usually) left hemisphere areas active during perception and construction of words. [relation of primary sensory and language areas] - The section of the implementation zone closer to the back of the head includes areas for perceiving language: we see written, spoken, or signed words as well as hearing them. This includes perceiving our own language. So perceptual foci in the language net would be auditory, visual and somatosensory for spoken language, and visual and somatosensory for signed and written language. - Linguistic construction can similarly include oral, written, and signed words. Like other muscular action, speech articulation, auditory or signed, is instituted from motor cortex. Premotor and prefrontal (pre-pre-motor) cortex are important to the complex scheduling needed for sentence production. The forward section of the language implementation area thus includes large amounts of frontal cortex, as well as the enlarged mouth, throat and hand areas of motor cortex. So areas in the implementation network include: - auditory, visual and somatic primary sensory areas, - sensory association areas, - motor cortex and motor association areas, - as well as Wernicke's and Broca's areas, the two centers that earlier were thought to be the only language centers of the left hemisphere. The network character of language function is changing the way we understand these two areas: both are now being seen as associative centers that set up 'word meaning' subnetworks both in response to language, and in the process of producing language. Wernicke's area, near both auditory and visual cortex, is a large region of association cortex active in linguistic function no matter what sensory modality is used. Wernicke's was formerly thought to be a module for language comprehension. Broca's area is near motor control areas and was formerly thought to be a module for language production. Both areas are now known to be active in both production and comprehension. They are connected by a large bundle of fibers. [left lang areas side view] [left language areas cross-section]
Damasio's language mediation zone surrounds the language implementation areas described above. Injury to these areas results in subtler damage to language than injury in implementation zones. Damasio's conceptual zone includes non-linguistic perception/action areas whose activity either is triggered by language, or else organizes language production. Mediation cortex includes two-way switches between language perception/production networks and conceptual networks. - Like language implementation cortex, language mediation cortex is normally left hemisphere cortex, - but conceptual or 'meaning' networks turned on
by language forms via structures in mediation cortex are found in both
hemispheres.
The Damasios have found that response to the name of a thing is similar to response to a thing or to a picture of a thing. A name or picture of a hammer, like the hammer itself, would set up cortical structure relevant to: - "the typical action of the tool in space, - its typical relationship to the hand and to other objects, - the typical somatosensory and motor patterns associated with the handling of the tool, - the possible sound characteristics associated with the tool's operation, and so on" (1994). Evocation of some part of the potentially large number of relevant responses would "constitute the conceptual evocation for a given tool". What Damasio means by a conceptual zone, then, is
areas of sensory or motor cortex in which object- or event-relevant structure
can be evoked, via mediation cortex, by different means and for
different purposes. He thinks of it as conceptual because it is not exclusively
linguistic but is common to many kinds of response.
Hearing or reading language can be thought of as like a kind of externally-cued dreaming, because when we hear or see speech, as when we dream, we can be about many things other than the things we're able to perceive in the world surrounding us. Convergence nodes in mediation regions are little networks of neurons from which widespread patterns of this sort of non-immediate 'meaning' can easily be reconstructed. Activation can also happen in the opposite direction, from 'meaning' to language production. Convergence zones form near and between association areas important to aspects of perception and action. There are many convergence nodes in the left hemisphere. PET studies find that different categories of names set up activity in different parts of the cortex. For instance the brain distributes activity differently in response to nouns and verbs.
The more recently evolved lower object vision and memory stream seems to be relevant particularly to nouns. PET and fMRI imaging studies find multiple small areas in this stream responding selectively when people are shown pictures of objects, or when they read or hear their names. Among nouns, there is relative segregation for common nouns and proper names, and among concrete nouns there are different areas for animate and inanimate things. - Producing concrete nouns also activates areas of this stream, with different sorts of object activating different areas. - Names of features of objects activate nodes close to regions responsive during perception of those features. Generating color words, for instance, activates areas just a few centimeters away from regions active during color perception. [feature, object and verb areas] Object identity networks in the left hemisphere involve less cortex than on the right, as if object memory during language use may have access to a more rapid, sketchier sort of sensory memory on the left.
Damasio describes response to verbs, or response in the process of generating verbs, as evoking the way something acts and moves. Generating verbs activates interconnected areas at both sensory and motor ends of the upper (older) through-stream. Response is found just a few centimeters from regions that are active when we observe moving objects. In frontal areas near Broca's area there is also activity near regions that are active when we perceive action or imagine acting.
At any given moment, the comprehensive wide network active in the cortex will include both conscious and nonconscious parts, and both linguistic and nonlinguistic parts.
Language plays the instrument we already are. It is created by the structure we are at the moment of creation. The locus of effect of language (or any representation)
is the body of the user. - In Speaking bodies II I will talk about the implications of this approach for the study of language as such, and in Speaking bodies III, about implications for the practice of language.
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