From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Mon May 26 2003 - 15:34:53 MDT
On Mon, May 26, 2003 at 03:02:43PM -0400, gts wrote:
>
> Consider that the spoken word is an abstract scribble on the listener's
> eardrums made by manipulating soundwaves with the mouth, much like the
> written word is an abstract scribble on the reader's retinas made by
> manipulating lightwaves with the fingers.
>
> After mastering the first skill, the second skill would have come naturally
> and without thousands or millions of years of evolution.
There is some interesting research done by Karl Magnus Petersson and
Martin Ingvar of the Karolinska Hospital. They did a fMRI scan of the
brains of Portugese women from two neighboring villages, one where women
learned to read, one where they didn't, when the women heard and
memorized nonsense words. It turns out that learning to read and write
changes the cortical representations of language noticeably, and
improves the performance on the task a lot since the words are now
decomposed into phonemes rather than seen as concepts.
The brain definitely has a built in framework for language, enabling us
to learn it very quickly. But the rest of the brain is a very flexible
learning matrix where areas can apparently be trained to do almost any
task. It is notable that congenitally blind people appear to use the
parts of the occipital lobe normally used for vision for interpreting
Braille writing, a linguistic-somatosensory task. When we learn to read
and write we create new representations in additional areas (more
posterior from the auditory language areas) and link them with the old
language system, changing it somewhat in the process.
So I would say that we already had the potential for reading and writing
*before language*, it was just that they would have been utterly
pointless tasks without any linguistic content. With language writing
became a potential thing to learn, but the actual implementation of
writing systems would take far longer.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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