How the brain strings words into sentences

15 Replies, 9950 Views

A great, well written article from Science Daily today, which I coincedentally stumbled upon after getting a bit irritated with text speak on various websites.

Science Daily Wrote:"If you have damage to the lower (neural) pathway, you have damage to the lexicon and semantics," Wilson said. "You forget the name of things, you forget the meaning of words. But surprisingly, you're extremely good at constructing sentences."

"With damage to the upper pathway, the opposite is true; patients name things quite well, they know the words, they can understand them, they can remember them, but when it comes to figuring out the meaning of a complex sentence, they are going to fail."

The study marks the first time it has been shown that upper and lower tracts play distinct functional roles in language processing, the authors write. Only the upper pathway plays a critical role in syntactic processing.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...171220.htm

I've a few thoughts from this. One: on the basis of this read, I'm in the former camp despite deliberation over sentence structure when writing. But there's a frightening hypothesis possible that, if one links in the "God Is In The Neurons" idea from Athene:

SubVersion Wrote:"Whatever you are doing at any time, you are physically modifying your brain to become better at it" he states, speaks for sensory elevation with the concentrated mind; because you are attempting to alter your hemispherical connections, consciousness increases your ardour to doing so..."

http://subvertcentral.blogspot.com/2011/...s-god.html

...There's possibility widespread that people are altering their genes across generations by simple subscription to a daily format of doing things. E.g: instead of writing in paragraphs, they do lists, and if they do too many lists, they'll struggle to remember anything from paragraphs. Vice versa ad infinitum.

But it's important what it says: that the upper pathway rules syntactic processing. There's a second thought viable - the more you modify yourself to short form, the greater the increase is collated in remembering long form passages. I couldn't beg to differ in hindsight.

Any thoughts on this subverts? Smile
What's your point, exactly??
_____________
- The Lazerdrome Memorial Page -

http://www.hardscore.com/articles/lazerdrome/
The "any thoughts" was referring to the article's, not my own, but to answer your question: ultimately I'm interested in parallel relationships between balance/imbalance - something which is fundamental to understanding neurology, and a touchstone to so much Science. With what Athene suggests - that we are on-the-fly manipulating our individual neurology, you could further that to surmise, like a mother playing classical music to it's child while in the womb, that genetics are adapted and differentiated from everyday pursuits.

Cause, effect, times trillions. Very simple in concept, but all the same I like to think of the outcomes Wave
I see some irony in your observations regarding paragraph creation here, your insights are not obvious! Nonetheless, I'm getting a 'are we as a human race evolving more stupid?'. Could be... I've not read your link yet so can't offer any opinion on that.

I saw something on tv lately regarding genes and the stuff around them that can be affected by lifestyle so I picked up on that connotation. (what was it, Stephen Hawking's Brave New World?)
_____________
- The Lazerdrome Memorial Page -

http://www.hardscore.com/articles/lazerdrome/
Hahaha

I'm no Hawking - this is very basic territory for scientists, but I'm not an academic, I don't have access to common media besides computers and a few books, and I'm very isolated.

Re: cause and effect - there's another workable idea from "stress". In the American book "Spark!: How Exercise Increases The Performance Of The Brain", I read a paragraph that informs the reader that stress isn't just a bad thing; much like syllables in a poem, it is an inherent characteristic of its format. The more people experience stress, the better their brain can work; which doesn't explain post traumatic stress disorder, but it does point out the old adage in neurology: "neurons that fire together, wire together". What does explain PTSD, is when too many of those neurons have little rest, but that's for another thread.

Anyone out there have any books they'd recommend on linguistics and Science combined? Cheers Grin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Language_Instinct
nice topic... yeah its interesting the way that works.

"Whatever you are doing at any time, you are physically modifying your brain to become better at it" he states, speaks for sensory elevation with the concentrated mind; because you are attempting to alter your hemispherical connections, consciousness increases your ardour to doing so..."

this is true, just about anything is possible if we try.

Is this touching on the modern day reductionism of our language and how we communicate? Surely, if complex concepts or feelings are reduced to simple phrases they lose their meaning and can be misunderstood, or, used against you in manipulation. It might sound dumb but its something I worry about. Well in America its fucking apparent everywhere. So much reduced to stupid simple cliches, and I wonder, how does that affect perception and communication?

on re-arranging our genetics through tasks over generations, I dont agree or disagree but I think some goes on. Maybe genetics are enhanced in some areas and not others. I think it's more accentuating the potential that's already there.
cheers Grin

(edit ... god damn........)
droid Wrote:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Language_Instinct

Got this for Xmas; looking forward to reading it.
HiddenSound Wrote:Is this touching on the modern day reductionism of our language and how we communicate?

As a consequence of discussion, yes - but the article was involved with covering procedures and discrimination of those procedures. This, for instance:

Science Daily article Wrote:"We would give the study participants a brief scenario and ask them to complete it with what comes naturally," Wilson said. "For example, if I said to you, 'A man was walking along the railway tracks. He didn't hear the train coming. What happened to the man?' Usually, you would say, 'He was hit by the train,' or something along those lines."

"But a patient with damage to the upper pathway might say something like 'train, man, hit.' We found that the lower pathway has a completely different function, which is in the meaning of single words."

Any reductionism has to be almost scientifically theorised in my view for it to retain consonance and merit, otherwise information becomes fodder for forgetfulness. Much of this practice is already integrated in our genes subconsciously however, so it's less of an issue in removing data we feel is disposable - to an extent.

Hiddensound Wrote:Surely, if complex concepts or feelings are reduced to simple phrases they lose their meaning and can be misunderstood, or, used against you in manipulation.

In some ways, sure. Musically you can trace a line between how coined phrases like "drumfunk" lost and built from their initial intent due to chronological narratives around the world approaching language -and the word - differently. The give and take dissimilar with editing text, writing text and thinking text always comes up with erroneous lengths and junctures subjectively, but for any chronology - from Neanderthal man to present - it's required that concepts or feelings are discussed, assessed, discarded or elaborated towards the future thoroughly, for life to yield any productive advancement. Hence the flow of new media, and the recycling of older cornerstones.

Hiddensound Wrote:It might sound dumb but its something I worry about.

Don't worry, I do too.

Hiddensound Wrote:Well in America its fucking apparent everywhere. So much reduced to stupid simple cliches, and I wonder, how does that affect perception and communication?

Well for one it compounds thoughts to asides and could-be's, lessening the strength and focus of neurons, I could believe, that wire together in the brain to perform actions. An easy example of this is when you hit on something relevant and it could only have been so due to how someone processed it, and the more conditioned you are in a certain field, the less likely you are to really appreciate why and how a subject, phrase or whatever is meaningful. You get lost in a morass, but then that's just one side of it - mood and motivation account for a lot of what experiences we see as worthwhile as well, should it need to be said.

Hiddensound Wrote:on re-arranging our genetics through tasks over generations, I dont agree or disagree but I think some goes on. Maybe genetics are enhanced in some areas and not others. I think it's more accentuating the potential that's already there.
cheers Grin

(edit ... god damn........)

Whaddya mean god damn? :P
nice, thats interesting

"Any reductionism has to be almost scientifically theorised in my view for it to retain consonance and merit, otherwise information becomes fodder for forgetfulness. "

Yeah I agree.

the goddamn is about me rambling way off topic into lofty idealized self-realization and other stuff Smile its embarassing when I read back a wall of words.

This reminds me of why school is so lame. People take in all this stuff, some too complex or useless in life, and who remembers it? Who cares? Humans have not evolved to absorb that much information, even freaks. The basic fundamentals of what you might use and want to learn about things like math are easy, but the courses are long and dumb and mind draining.

check out this article ....

When an adult took standardized tests forced on kids

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answ..._blog.html

a portion -

"I won’t beat around the bush,” he wrote in an email. “The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a “D”, and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction.

He continued, “It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate.

“I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities.

“I have a wide circle of friends in various professions. Since taking the test, I’ve detailed its contents as best I can to many of them, particularly the math section, which does more than its share of shoving students in our system out of school and on to the street. Not a single one of them said that the math I described was necessary in their profession.

“It might be argued that I’ve been out of school too long, that if I’d actually been in the 10th grade prior to taking the test, the material would have been fresh. But doesn’t that miss the point? A test that can determine a student’s future life chances should surely relate in some practical way to the requirements of life. I can’t see how that could possibly be true of the test I took.”

Here’s the clincher in what he wrote:

“If I’d been required to take those two tests when I was a 10th grader, my life would almost certainly have been very different. I’d have been told I wasn’t ‘college material,’ would probably have believed it, and looked for work appropriate for the level of ability that the test said I had. "


Grin my point being school and life should be simpler but its not. Its too complex. Its fucking stupid.
HiddenSound Wrote:nice, thats interesting

This reminds me of why school is so lame. People take in all this stuff, some too complex or useless in life, and who remembers it? Who cares? Humans have not evolved to absorb that much information, even freaks.

For me it's really important there's an emotional drive there to absorb the information in the first place. I have little interest in trying to outdo others intellectually, for instance - I only operate on what I feel, and sometimes that's a foolhardy approach, but meanwhile there's humanity.

HiddenSound Wrote:The basic fundamentals of what you might use and want to learn about things like math are easy, but the courses are long and dumb and mind draining.

And then to extend my above thought, they have to be appealing to some extrinsic function - a knowingness that things are to be fused, and what you can gain from that fusion. From my limited view that rarely happens, since most people get bogged down in endless revisions of themselves and their work.

HiddenSound Wrote:check out this article ....

Grin my point being school and life should be simpler but its not. Its too complex. Its fucking stupid.

I read that quote you made 6 weeks back, but I'll read the whole thing when I feel up to it.

Personally I feel we're in a schooling system with too much focus on globalised ethics - whereby to gain interest in things you need stimulation from various contexts - but the writing of education is too pre-ordained and simple itself to make a transcendent impact. More is less as a result.
That "The Language Instinct" book raises a very acute point: we often forget that the ability to do or enact, or at the least realise something, is an instinct acting upon instincts. Never thought about it quite the same before up until this month.
I'm barely past the preface of that book a year on; must read some of it again.
It's a good read.
Sentence structure structure s sentences.
String struc-ture strict when stricken with constricting linguism.

Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
Love RELEASE Longformacus - Shell Strings Muttley 1 2,677 7th July 2018, 19:01
Last Post: Muttley
  too much seriousness, favourite words djfada 77 30,442 31st July 2017, 20:41
Last Post: Statto
  Bitrate Music: In The Vault: Lab Creation - Sol Invictus (Amens and strings) Shiva 4 5,308 15th October 2016, 17:02
Last Post: Shiva
  MIX ESB - Six Strings Vol.3 [Math/Shoe Gaze/Too Pure Mix] esb 6 6,701 5th February 2016, 06:08
Last Post: esb
  MIX ESB - Six Strings Vol. 1 & 2 [Metal/Indie/Noise Mixes] esb 4 5,424 13th November 2015, 03:46
Last Post: esb